To mark this year’s World Mental Health Day, Ranger Tony gives us his personal perspective of the need to make a connection with nature, not just for our own wellbeing but for the planet too.
With many of us having a less direct experience of nature, then, asks Tony, will demand to protect it also decline?
A real experience
Imagine going into a restaurant for some delicious food and being offered the menu and the recipes of ingredients of the dishes on that menu and that was all. None of us would find it remotely satisfying. That’s because we want to experience the food on the menu, we want to have a sensory encounter, not just look at the ingredients in a recipe.
The same is true for us of nature and being outdoors. If all we did was look at beautiful images of the natural world in books or on a screen, we would eventually feel a sense of dissatisfaction, even though research has shown that just looking at a painting or photograph of a beautiful landscape or simply listening to recorded sounds of bird song has a positive effect on the person’s mental state and well-being.
We would, in due course, hanker after a real experience of nature and the outdoors.
That is because nature is not something we can know about remotely, it’s an experience, it’s a multi-sensory experience. It’s an experience because we are an integral part of the environment and completely bound up in it. We are most definitely not separate from our environment, no matter how much we may believe that.
A natural disposition to nature?
Human beings have an instinctive biological predisposition and attraction to nature. But as Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, writes: ‘The momentum of our evolutionary past still attracts most of us towards nature, and yet we’ve largely designed our lives, cities and systems to isolate ourselves from it’.
As a nation we have become an increasingly urbanised society with over 80% of people in the UK dwelling in towns and cities. This means it’s much harder for us to forge and maintain a connection to nature.
It’s a sad indictment on society that children today only spent 9% of the time outdoors with adults fairing only slightly better at around 20%. Fewer children ever play in natural environments, around 10%, compared to 40% of children of a generation or two ago.
In his book What Nature Does for Britain, Tony Juniper writes: ‘This dramatic and ongoing reduction in our collective direct experience of nature can be expected to have major implications in public health trends, reduced quality of life and lower life expectancy, and also in society’s attitude towards the conservation of nature. Should more and more of us have less direct experience of nature, then demand to protect it will very likely also decline’.
We need to reverse this trend and reverse it as quickly as possible. We need to make that connection with nature again, not just for the wellbeing of ourselves but for the planet too.
A remedy for busy and cluttered lives
I believe our lives have become overly busy and extremely cluttered with all manner of things from the material – most of us have so many material things we don’t know what to do with them – to things we think we need to do, to a mind full of busy, often negative thoughts. Nowadays we have so many things to think about that many people are drowning in a tsunami of thought: a definition of poor mental health.
The knock-on effects of our imbalances are stark. According to research by The Centre for Mental Health, the total coast of mental ill health in 2022 was £300 billion, in terms of economic costs, human costs and health and care costs.
However, there are simple remedies for improving the health and wellbeing of the population. Reconnection is the key and there are many ways in which we can do this. A study by the Mental Health Foundation found that ‘activities that involve the senses can help to develop our connection with the natural world, as can activities where we feel emotions such as compassion, perceive beauty or find meaning in nature.’
The real value of watching birds
Birdwatching is a classic example of an activity that uses the senses to connect us with nature. Granted, we may need some equipment such as a pair of binoculars, but they are not an absolute necessity, they just allow for a more magnified view.
The real value of watching birds is the connection to the senses, it’s being outdoors in nature, feeling our environment and being present in it, just being fully immersed in the moment. In addition to being conscious of things, such as the birds, our thoughts or emotions, we are also conscious of being conscious – there’s an undercurrent of awareness. It’s there in all of us but we are mostly completely unaware of it, and it allows us to connect with our vast inner space, or stillness to put it another way, and our own sense of being.
Watching birds is no mean feat, it can be very difficult. To simply observe a bird there must be a high degree of alertness, this requires a level of quietness inside which means transcending thought. Not an easy task but one that just needs practice. Thought will eventually subside as the focussed attention you give to birdwatching, or whatever activity we engage in, rises and a sense of presence emerges.
This is the power of nature to heal driven by our instinctive biological predisposition and attraction to it.
So, whatever activity attracts you to spend time in nature, go with it, for it is a deep yearning in you that needs satisfying and one that can only, ultimately, reconnect you with yourself.
‘Sattva’
As an interesting aside, the word ‘satisfaction’ derives from the Sanskrit word, ‘Sattva’ which has many meanings but remarkably the qualities of goodness, purity, positivity, truth, serenity, balance and peacefulness are among them. Just a thought. That sense of satisfaction is important.
Our relationship with nature
The Mental Health Foundation report into how connecting with nature benefits our mental health, found that 70% of UK adults found that being close to nature improved their mood, and that 49% said it helped them cope with stress. The report showed that research evidence consistently shows that nature has a beneficial impact on our mental health and concluded that: ‘The relationship we develop with nature is emerging as an important protective factor for our mental health’.
There is also another dimension to being out in nature and connecting to it through our senses. As Tony Juniper points out, it’s also a vital part of us valuing and protecting nature.
Direct experience of nature is, again, the key here. Without access to nature, be it wild countryside or urban parks and gardens, it is very hard to convince ourselves of its value. And if nature is not valued, it will ultimately be abused.
Empathy and understanding are required for any change to take place, for once we understand that caring for nature is caring for people and this, proverbially, is akin to loving thy neighbour as thy self (and what could be more noble), then we can thrive as a species in our natural environment.
