For centuries, we’ve had an intuitive sense that connecting with “nature” is good for our wellbeing. But what’s the hard evidence? What exactly is “nature” anyway? Should we be wary of it being prescribed as a catch-all cure for complex problems? And what impact does nature writing itself actually have? Science writer Lucy Jones talks to Alice Bloch about her prize-winning book ‘Losing Eden’, which surveys the mass of research – from the work of Carl Jung to cutting-edge neurology, medical and social science – on why our minds need the wild.
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Hosts: Alice Bloch and Samira Shackle
Exec Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Danosongs
Image: Gemma Brunton (photo), Ed Dingli (artwork)
Transcript:
Alice Bloch:
Hi there. Welcome to With Reason, the podcast from New Humanist magazine. I'm Alice Bloch,
Samira Shackle:
and I'm Samira Shackle,
AB:
and With Reason is where we meet people working in fields like culture, science and philosophy. People who draw on evidence and rigorous thinking to challenge dogma and lazy ideas and to offer something new. It's the place to think about reason and unreason, criticism and debate.
SS:
In this series, we're talking to people like the physicist Carlo Rovelli about the nature of reality, behavioural and data scientist Pragya Agarwal about motherhood and choice. And last week I had a fascinating conversation with anatomist Alice Roberts all about our shared prehistory. But today, we're with science writer, Lucy Jones. Alice, I'm gonna listen in and catch up with you afterwards for a bit of a chat. So I'll leave it to you to tell us more about Lucy.
AB:
Okay, so Lucy may well be a science writer, but you'll probably find her work more in the nature section of your local bookshop. That's the section that’s increasingly packed out with books vying for your attention on rewilding and recovery, escapism, the science behind the way in which plants and trees communicate with each other. That is something I'm keen to ask Lucy about when we speak about the impact of all of that stuff. And her book Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild is about the connection between mental health and the rest of nature that surrounds us, or doesn't actually, as I’ts rapidly dying and disappearing. The book is packed with ideas that seemed relevant even before COVID-19. But that actually couldn’t have been more salient now that our mental health crisis has been really exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. And also obviously, because the UK is hosting the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow this year.
But though Losing Eden does grapple with policy and evidence, it's also a really personal work, not in the kind of “man gets in a bivvy bag, man heads off to the wilderness, on his own without his family, etc, etc,” kind of vein, instead Lucy is writing from experience, in part, of addiction and recovery. So I started by asking her all about that.
Lucy Jones:
I found myself at the age of about 27, having addiction issues with alcohol and drugs, which were linked to anxiety and depression. And I knew that psychotherapy and medication was helping and could help me and support groups as well in my recovery, but I still needed something to kind of try and lift my mood in the day, get me out of bed and soothe some of the pretty painful and difficult emotions that were coming up. As I entered sobriety, I knew that running could release endorphins, you know, lots of us know that. So I tried to go running and to the nearest natural area to my house in northeast London, which was Walthamstow Marshes. And I found that instead of running, I would kind of slow down and stop, looking at things and watching the Coots and visiting the Heron, and listening out for a water vole and, and it became kind of an addiction, similar to the substances that I'd grown to rely on. And this was about 10 years ago.
And it was kind of before the nature and health discourse was really crescendoing. And although I had some vague notion that spending time in nature maybe could make you feel good in some way, I was really blown away by how powerful it was, for me personally, alongside psychiatry and psychotherapy, and so on. And it became something I came to rely on. And I was interested in, when I went to this space, and I came back and it was the only thing that seemed to kind of calm my nerves and give me some respite from critical thinking and so on, from my critical thoughts, and I wanted to know what was happening. So what was happening to my brain chemistry, my nervous system, how and why was spending time in nature making me feel better? So that was the perspective I began with, the kind of genesis was a curiosity about, why does spending time in nature help our minds?
AB:
And you spoke there about the nature and health discourse and how that's kind of crescendoed. We do use that word “nature”, but also a phrase that you use is “the rest of nature”. And I know the writer Richard Mabey, for example, has been and was recently again, critical of the way in which we kind of speak of “nature” as if it's distinct from us. And I wonder where this idea of our supposed separation from nature, the idea that we're somehow superior to it or distinct from it, came from?
L J:
So nature has so many different meanings as a word. The original etymology of the word is from the Latin for “birth”. And then another kind of original meaning is nature as the essence or something that is essential to something. In a way, it's kind of one of the most problematic words, because we use it kind of unthinkingly to describe the outdoor world or the living world. But it's very hard to pin down or kind of really define what we mean when we say nature.
And I think the kind of cementing of nature as meaning what we use it to mean today, you know, green space, rivers, woodlands, seas, etc, we can chart back to the post-industrial times and the influence of the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, where we saw kind of a reaction against industrialization, and people going into nature in a different way. The idea of wilderness became not something to be afraid of, or to abhor, but something that we, we need it in our kind of urbanising worlds. And I think we've got to the point now, where when we think of nature, it's often something kind of chocolate boxy or twee or something out there – so influenced are we still by the Romantics, and so on. And we forget that we're nature and we forget that it’s also the cold that you might be able to hear in my voice, the viruses.
AB:
Yeah. Even pandemics you could say,
L J:
Exactly. And when you become aware of it, you kind of see it everywhere, the sense of human exceptionalism and supremacy. This morning I saw a sign that said, “wildflower trial area”, you know, just wow. Parcelling things out, nature, into these tiny margins.
AB:
Yeah, yeah, it's become rather sad, hasn’t it? Yeah, I was thinking about this idea about how, in a way, if we see ourselves as separate from nature, that means that it can be kind of packaged up and commodified and sold back to us really in some fashion. I was thinking, before talking to you, about an exercise class I went to the other day, where there was birdsong outside the window, and one of the women attending said, “oh, wow, there's so many birds, that sounds like one of those CDs of bird song”. Which kind of just strikes me as rather sad. But yeah, both of those examples, I guess, are indicative of how far and how separate we’ve become.
In writing Losing Eden you kind of set out to look at hard evidence and peer reviewed studies showing how engaging with the rest of nature can improve our well-being. So you looked at everything from you know, research on the positive effects of being exposed to bacteria in soil, right up to kind of big studies, I think, a 2008 study in The Lancet, concluding that greener neighbourhoods could mitigate the negative effects of income deprivation on health. And so I'm wondering, you know, amongst all of these pieces of evidence that you cite, is there a particular piece of research that really speaks loudest of all to you, and the one that you really feel should be on the desks of policymakers right now to say “hey, there's this connection between being exposed to the rest of nature and our well-being and mental health and we need to act on this.”
L J:
I definitely thought that there would be kind of one silver bullet piece of evidence, something which was incredibly compelling to stand above all the other studies, but what really kind of blew my mind was the volume of studies that there are and the fact there is this kind of enormous evidence base of high quality, as you say, robust peer reviewed science. So it's kind of that vastness of the evidence base, but I think if I had to choose one area, I think, I would say the stress recovery evidence.
So in our modern world, stress is very much on the increase. Stress-related disease and illness is increasing. Stress is very well, it's a word to describe a lot of our modern problems. The word was only coined in the 1920s, I think, by Walter Cannon. And the evidence shows that when we go into a natural space, the effect on our nervous systems – our parasympathetic nervous system is more likely to be activated in a natural area, which is the side of the nervous system associated with “rest and digest” and feelings of calm and contentment. And when our bodies are in that state, we can invest towards our immune system. I feel kind of calmer and more relaxed, compared to the opposite: the sympathetic nervous system, which is when we're feeling kind of high levels of cortisol, adrenalized, fight or flight, a state that I'm sure many of us are quite familiar with. And that's more likely to be raised in urban environments.
And when we move into a natural space, when we spend time in forests, or woods or, or by water, we recover from stress quickly and more completely. So I think I became very convinced that this was a central pathway and mechanism, which meant that by kind of taking that away from people or not allowing adequate access to the natural world, it's actually a public health disgrace.
AB:
And you talk about kind of going into natural spaces there, but then there's also the idea of kind of looking at them as being good for us also. And I think one thing you talk about is attention restoration theory.
L J:
Yeah, this is a really influential and quite intriguing theory that was developed by the Kaplan's Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, who are environmental psychologists from North America. And they develop this theory in the ‘80s, building on the work of William James, the psychologist who introduced this idea of directed attention, and that when we kind of focus and we concentrate on one thing for a long time, we get cognitive fatigue, which can lead to kind of stress and irritability. So they posited that when we spend time in natural spaces, or as you say, when we even watch nature on a screen, or look at our house plants, and so on, we can engage in something that they called effortless attention, which is kind of… imagine looking at a plant moving gently in the breeze or kind of rain falling on water, or so on, we're kind of paying attention, but it's not in a really tiring way, like crossing a busy road or, you know, listening to someone, or the stress of work or so on. So, attention restoration theory has a number of different kind of ingredients to it. One of which is “soft fascination”, which I think is just a really nice concept phrase. And the studies in this area suggest that even taking a micro break at work, taking kind of 10 minutes out on a lunch break. And one study looked at green roofs outside an office and people who looked out onto green roofs or just kind of took a break from their desks, reported feeling kind of less cognitively fatigue – and more productive, more relaxed afterwards.
AB:
It's interesting, that idea of productivity. That's something I wanted to ask about, because I guess I'm slightly wary of this line of thinking that says that exposure to the rest of nature can boost our productivity. I wonder really, whether there's much point in say, putting a tree outside of the window, for someone who works for an oil company. Or sort of a pot plant on the desk of someone who works in fast fashion, or at the Googleplex or whatever, right? I guess there's the risk that you know, nature can be kind of co-opted, actually, to kind of make us all better workers and feed into the growth agenda, etc, which actually might in the long run not have a very good outcome for the environment.
L J:
I agree with everything you've said. I barely mentioned productivity actually in the book, because I'm not really that interested in it. And I mean, exactly what you said is how I feel too. It's kind of the ultimate “nature and health” kind of area of study for the “capitalist scene” as Donna Haraway calls it, isn't it? So, you do see offices and corporations and companies plopping a tree in a corridor to kind of try and improve people's productivity or, kind of nodding to this idea that we expect people to work 14 hour days at their desks and we give them a plant and they'll be fine.
AB:
Give him a succulent.
L J:
Yeah, we have to be really wary of that.
AB:
Yeah, throw some “nature” at everything and everything will be okay. I think there's also an example in your book of I mean, it's a lovely example in lots of ways, but of people in solitary confinement in prisons in the US, and the experience of that, the suffering of that being mitigated by a project whereby I think they were shown videos of greenery and wildlife? Is that correct?
L J:
Yes. So it was Nalini Nadkarni, his work in Snake River Correctional Institution in Oregon. And yeah, she developed this blue room, she called it, where she projected nature documentaries, and part of the study group were invited to come and watch, listen to birdsong and watch them. And the other half of them were given their normal exercise which was kind of half an hour in a yard with no contact with nature.
The results were really interesting and they did show that the people who watched the nature documentaries reported higher levels of well-being and were more relaxed and there were less altercations. And even the staff as well reported kind of positive therapeutic benefits from it. But saying that, there are interesting studies about techno nature and how listening to birdsong even under anaesthetic can reduce the stress biomarker, cortisol for example, and, looking at nature through a screen can can be therapeutic. However, another thing I'm quite wary of: the end result is, it's never as good as the real thing.
AB:
Yeah, so it's better than nothing, but it's never as good as the real thing. And that example of prisons there was from the US but you've looked at examples from around the world, where we have different relationships with nature, and the effect of that on mental health. And I wonder whether in the UK …. actually, do we have a particularly troubled bond with the natural world? Or rather what would be the specific nature of our relationship to it here in the UK?
So I mean, I was thinking when I was younger, there was a real dismissal of “tree huggers”. For example, you can’t sort of touch a tree without being teased for being a tree hugger. You know, compare that to Japan where you write about forest bathing and actually I noticed on the forestry England website they now have a little page on kind of how to do forest bathing. So things seem to be changing, but talk to me a bit about the cross cultural differences there.
L J:
it's such an interesting question. Yeah, I remember that growing up in the 90s it just wasn't very cool to be into nature, and like Swampy, who is actually like a legend. Yeah. And still going!
AB:
So this is the activist?
L J:
Yeah. But you know, he was seen as like a complete joke and then Prince Charles was like massively dissed for talking to his plants and yeah, it was, it's kind of corny. I think that is changing and I think we can see there's lots of interesting young people and kind of youth movements trying to engage younger people and kids more with nature. It's not seen as such an eccentric and cringe thing to do.
But what's underneath that? I mean the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. So we pride ourselves in being this from nature-loving nation, but actually our biodiversity levels are really shocking. And obviously we have this grotesque colonial history and our industrial footprint on the world is very significant. So I wonder if there is a kind of, (I'm just kind of talking off the top of my head right now) but a kind of denial of nature or maybe a guilt. Maybe there's a kind of sense of guilt in us that we have destroyed so much. I mean, I'm half Scottish, half English, but we've destroyed so many natural areas across the world, you know, for both humans and nonhumans, that maybe there is a sense of kind of bullish denialism and you can see that in the way we even today are not taking our legal obligations for nature recovery more seriously.
So we're talking, right now, in June. And councils across the country are mowing and cutting hedgerows and verges – but the wild flowers are at their most important for other animals and yet they're being kind of scalped across the country. We don't seem to to get it yet, compared with other countries that you mentioned, like Japan. Forest bathing has been prescribed in in Japan and South Korea.
AB:
We should say it's where you go out into the forest, ideally in the morning, if I'm not wrong, and kind of literally breathe it in.
L J:
Yes, for a couple of hours and use all the senses to kind of engage. People diss forest bathing and I think that might be because it can be packaged up as this kind of wellness cure, which is, you know, kind of problematic. But in Japan – based on the really excellent work of Dr. King Lee – it's been proven by doctors and they protect forest parks and forest areas for the health of people and citizens and so on. And like you say, you can see that starting to kind of come over here a little bit more. I saw, I think yesterday, that some walks have been named well-being walks in various woodlands. I feel slightly wary of it. I mean, I understand where it's coming from, but it's almost, it's the same kind of parcelling off or putting nature in the margins.
AB:
Absolutely. So go off and experience a bit of something called nature, and then finish that task and go home again, you're no longer in nature. Yeah, why?
L J:
Biodiversity continues to crash out.
AR:
So you mentioned earlier guilt, and our relationship to nature. And I think you met an eco-psychologist who spoke to you about how, actually, the thing that's partly causing our climate and environmental crisis, our overconsumption, has in a way become our response to that crisis. So we kind of consume, it creates a crisis, we feel really guilty, and we despair, and then we actually go off and consume more. And I think she compares that to the patterns actually found with addiction. I found that really fascinating. I wondered if you could talk around that a little bit for me.
L J:
Yeah. So this was Mary-Jane Rust, who has been writing about this relationship between the natural world and the psyche for quite a long time. And she's also a women's health therapist and a Jungian analyst and works with people with eating disorders. And yes, as you say, she likens it to addiction, it was one of the most illuminating conversations I think I had, because nature is very absent in psychoanalysis, very absent in Freud, and did an early year training to be a therapist, and you don't hear anything about the environment, our environment, and how that impacts on our minds.
And I agree with Mary-Jane Rust. And I think and I can see it in my own life, that consuming and buying things can cause this kind of pattern of guilt, but also a dopamine hit, and so on. And we're all in this system. And these structures, which are so hard to kind of break out of, and I suppose I think that guilt in this sense is it's very paralysing, and while we all have individual responsibilities to do what we can to tread lightly on the earth, there's only so much we can do. And we really need top down system change and kind of political will.
AB:
And I mean, you mentioned that psychoanalysis hasn't had much to say about the environment. But you also talk about Carl Jung, and about how he took issue with Christianity as partly culpable for our severance from the natural world. I wasn't aware of that. So why, why was that? What does he have to say on this?
L J:
So Jung, said, wrote, that we've kind of forgotten that we're primates, and we've forgotten about animals. And he uses an image of a house and says that we live on the kind of top floor, the loft extension: the 19th century is kind of the second floor, the Mediaeval days are like the ground floor, and the kind of Earth underneath is the 99 per cent of our evolutionary history outside.
And although we kind of have forgotten that, it's still alive in our consciousness. And he, he lays the blame of us kind of forgetting that and estranging ourselves from nature at the feet of 2000 years of Christianity. And he doesn't really go into much detail. But I suppose my interpretation of him saying that would be, and having grown up in an evangelical conservative house, and family, that Christianity teaches that man is made in the image of God. So we're not animals, we are different, and therefore we're Supreme. And I think that the idea of Dominion in Genesis has been used to trash, to completely destroy the planet, hasn't it, instead of the stewardship angle. And he also wrote that the West is kind of in shock after the Second World War, and we're still in that kind of psychological shock state, which I thought was quite interesting because I think they're interesting links between our relationship with nature and denial of death. And there's lots of studies about that, actually, which suggests that when we're in nature we sometimes we might think about our mortality more, think about death more, which could be why it’s off putting in some ways some people.
AB:
But if I'm not wrong, there's also some research into how actually being in nature can make make us more humble. Maybe more generally aware of our own mortality. I guess it's like cliched, giving us a bit of perspective. It's something we spoke to Jo Marchant about in our previous series of With Reason about the science of awe.
And I think you mentioned this a bit when you talk about river swimming. So you're no longer of Christian faith, that was in youth, but you say that now, river swimming is kind of your “church”. And I was really fascinated by that. And I wonder whether that's your moment of feeling at one with things and kind of in proportion to the rest of nature?
L J:
Yeah, it definitely, it definitely is. If you've been brought up in a kind of really quite intense religious cult almost, it's quite hard to shake off that search for transcendence. And I suppose I find it in the rivers near my house, which are very cold, and they're beautiful. And there's water-mint, which smells lovely, and kingfishers. And there's something about being in the water and kind of having my hands in the mud and immersing myself in another element where I, the self, dissolves.
AB:
You're listening to With Reason from New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association. I'm Alice Bloch, and I'm talking to Lucy Jones today about nature and why our minds need the wild. If that's something you'd like to explore more, you can head to our archive where you can find us talking to the science writer, Jo Marchant about the science of awe, or Minna Salami about the arrogance of damaging euro patriarchal knowledge. And Michael Rosen, the poet and broadcaster, reflecting rather beautifully on writing and recovery.
And if you want to hear more from us at With Reason, press pause right now and click Subscribe on whatever app you're using. It's quick, it's free. And it helps us to make more episodes for you.
Back now to my conversation with Lucy. Okay, so far today, Lucy, we've talked about why exposure to the rest of nature matters for our mental health and well-being, we've talked about Carl Jung and his perspective on our severance from the natural world. But let's move on a bit to what can be done. And I guess what the individual's responsibility may be here. So you write not only about your experience of addiction and recovery, but you also write from the position of being a mother, and you express concern about the depleted world that future generations might face. But you also say, actually, that you wanted to have another child. So your daughter could kind of have someone to weather it all with. Some would say, you know, if you care about the future of the planet, you shouldn't have children at all. I wonder what your perspective is on this. And I should say, you know, something I grappled with also, I had a baby last year, he's nearly one. And that’s something I think about often too, I think all parents or parents must. But I wonder what your view on it is, especially as someone who's gone out there and written about this in the public domain. Has anything been said to you?
L J:
I'm very conscious of it. And I do think about it all the time. And it's a bit of a cop out answer, but I think the honest answer would be that I just couldn't quiet the biological longing that I had. I just couldn't. And I know that probably sounds, I don't know, I'm kind of embarrassed to say that. That is the truth. I think there's a lot of problems with the over-population argument. I mean, I'm sure I'm a hypocrite in many, many different ways. But we try and consume as little as possible and live a low carbon lifestyle. And I suppose, you know, none of us individually are going to be able to stop the climate crisis or the biodiversity crisis. But the one thing I can do now I do have children is to bring them up to love the world, you know, human and non-human, and to experience the wonder in all of our natural world. So they may care for it. But yeah, it's a really, really tough, really tough subject, something that I'm still grappling with. I think I'm probably in denial quite a lot about the future.
AB:
Yeah, it makes me think about that whole thing we spoke about earlier of, you know, kind of overconsumption leads to crisis leads to overconsumption. And I was wondering whether almost having children can be a response to that. It’s kind of, “Oh, God, the future is going to be awful, best to have children” – as a comfort, or to weather it? I don't know. As you say, it's not something that can be resolved now. But it's something people continue to write about.
But speaking of impact, and change, your work is full of loads of evidence-based claims about the link between nature and mental health. But I'm wondering actually what evidence we have of the impact of nature writing itself. So my local bookshop window is packed with books about, you know, rewilding your life. I think there's some book with the title “12 birds to save your life”. There's stuff about, you know, talking to trees, talking to each other, etc, etc. I think when I see these kind of really stacked up, I have to say that sometimes I'm a little bit sceptical about the net impact of these books because there's been a huge rush of them recently, it seems, in publishing. I wonder what your perspective on this is. Maybe it's an unfair question to ask someone who's written one of these books, but also whether we have any evidence of the impact of nature writing – for want of a better term. Whether it actually leads to activism and change, or whether these books become just something nice for the shelf to be spotted when you have people around for dinner?
L J:
Yeah, sure. It's a really interesting subject. I don't know of any evidence. I would be interested to know. I think my perspective is the one thing that really worries me about the kind of “nature cure” narrative is that people think that they will go for a walk in the woods, and that they will be cured. And obviously it doesn't work like that at all. Mental health is complex, and heck, nature is complex. And I think that could probably be really kind of alienating for a lot of people or upsetting.
I make it quite clear in Losing Eden that I've had periods of clinical depression, where I would go into my local cemetery, and I felt nothing. And did it make me feel better at all? I mean, eventually, you know, as I recovered from this postnatal depression, it helped, but, you know, it's not a cure, and I understand why in our kind of cultural worlds, we either tell stories about nature as this kind of saviour, or this kind of sacred, palliative, or there are natural disaster kind of films or, or sci fi, animal horror, this idea of nature as a destroyer,
AB:
Kind of man v nature.
L J:
Yeah. And I mean, of course, ambivalence towards nature is maybe not as interesting as those two extremes, but I'm sure there must be stories and narratives, which could bridge that gap and to be a little bit more interesting.
AB:
Well on that actually, one piece that I think maybe does point to this kind of more nuanced depiction that you're looking for, is this piece I was going to ask you about, actually from the New Humanist archive by Richard Smyth. It's from a couple of years ago, and it's called “In Search of the Nature Cure.” And that piece notes that we've pretty much kind of always believed in the healing power of our natural landscape in some way. But he wonders, as you did just there, whether kind of this healing power of nature has been overstated. And I think his concern is that whilst nature can provide the context for healing, you know, for a kind of therapy, it's not this instant cure, and it shouldn't always been be presented as such.
And I think he quotes this poet Polly Atkin who lives with a life-affecting health condition. And you know, she says, well, Wordsworth wrote “let nature be your teacher”, not “let nature be your only recognised healthcare system”. And you have looked into eco-therapy, and I guess a cynic might say, the rise of eco-therapy and, you know, doctors prescribing just a nice old stroll in the park, you know, it could just be a way of kind of cutting costs for the NHS, which is no bad thing in itself, but I guess not so great. If the outcomes aren't ultimately great. I wonder what your thoughts are on this. And whether there's any evidence that this kind of thing is going on, I guess, almost “greenwashing” something, a different type of greenwashing.
L J:
Yeah, I'm very concerned about that. I haven't come across examples where a doctor has kind of just said, “go out for a walk”. But there is social prescribing increasing across the country and doctors are prescribing things like bird watching and so on.
AB:
How extensive is that as a as a trend? I'm interested in that.
L J:
I spoke to a practitioner in Bristol, he does woodland therapy. In Shetland, I think they do bird walks. They're kind of is few and far between, but I think it is increasing. But I saw no evidence to suggest that nature is being prescribed kind of in and of itself. I think it is worrying though that it also puts pressure on communities to fund these kind of health and wellness initiatives. And I worry that it would shift resources that are so needed from doctors and so on.
AB:
Also, if the environment around you has been degraded, due to kind of macro stuff that's going on, or interventions or lack of interventions, it must be kind of frustrating for you, as the individual to be told, hey, go out and enjoy this. When, actually, maybe, you know, all the trees on your street have just been cut down or something because there's local authority cuts, and the council's decided that cutting them down is cheaper than maintaining them.
L J:
Yeah, which may have the opposite effect, you actually feel really shit. But also, you know, there are a constellation of social factors that influence nature and wellbeing as you know, people from different backgrounds, people of colour face hostility in natural environments. And, you know, it's all very well saying to someone go for a walk in the woods, but if they don't have a background, or they've had opportunities to do that, or even want to do that, you know, it's not very helpful.
I mean, in the writing of Losing Eden, I was really conscious that I have so many friends who don't go to nature for their restoration, you know. There's so many different ways of feeling well, and so on. But one aspect that I found really interesting and compelling is this idea of background nature. So there's a lot of studies now, which suggests that background nature by which I mean, you know, trees, on your street, and so on, being able to walk through parks, higher levels of biodiversity, have measurable impacts on population and individual mental health. So even if you're someone who doesn't want to go and climb trees on the weekend, just walking through a park, actually, studies suggest that that does have important potential therapeutic benefits.
AB:
That's reassuring, so it doesn't have to be fell running or scaling a mountain or doing sort of a Caspar David Friedrich pose, you know, atop a peak, it can just be a few pollarded trees and a nice stroll in your local park, by your outdoor gym, or whatever. Well, that's the positive note to end on. So thank you very much, Lucy, for joining us. That was that was really interesting. Thanks.
L J:
Thank you.
AB:
We're returning to Samira shackle, the editor of New Humanist magazine, who's been listening in. Samira, what's your take on what we've heard from Lucy there? I'm wondering if it reminds you of other pieces recently for the magazine, or of emerging themes that you think we could or should hear more about in the future?
SS:
Yeah, listening to Lucy talk about the Romantic conception of nature did make me think of a piece we published a few years back in 2017, by the philosopher Jonathan Ree, about Alexander von Humboldt, who was the Prussian polymath who came up with our modern conception of nature. And it just made me think about how the way that we think about nature and its relationship to us and our relationship to the, you know, quote, unquote, “natural world” has, in some ways stayed the same as in some ways changed.
And I guess it's this kind of nebulous concept, and certainly a concept that we hear a lot about, because there are so many books about this idea of the “nature cure” and the healing properties of the natural world. I have to confess, I have a kind of scepticism about that, I think, which I know you touched on that in your, in your discussion with Lucy, the prevalence of a certain type of nature writing, which can overstate its healing properties as the be all and end all. I don't know, I guess part of my scepticism comes from the fact that I think there's a lot of psychobabble in this genre, it seems quite susceptible to this sort of presentation of nature as having these sort of inherent transcendental transformative properties, which I think I can find quite alienating. So I enjoyed listening to a more sort of evidenced focus take on some of those issues and thinking “Okay, actually, where is this useful? And where do we know about the impact this has?” Rather than the tendency towards kind of, you know, a kind of semi-religious way of talking about nature as if it's transformative and if you're not feeling transformed by a walk in the hills, then there’s something wrong with you.
AB:
Yeah. And you certainly don't want to have that kind of individualising blame focused sort of ideas about getting out in nature – and not doing it as being something you should be ashamed of. That's definitely not the direction you want to go in.
I do think it's interesting though you picked up on this word “psychobabble” there and I totally agree there's certain works that maybe are a bit more sort of wishy-washy around ideas to do with the benefits of being out in the rest of nature and so on. But I would be slightly wary of using the term psychobabble myself – just I think it gets attached to say, as Lucy and I were talking about, say, the idea of “tree hugging”, which actually, you know, some argue does have real health benefits. It gets attached to things like that, where it doesn't get attached, not so much, to other things. So you know, actually the Guardian review of Lucy's book was very quick to say, and I quote, you know, “Lucy Jones’ ideas are not psychobabble, but rooted firmly in peer reviewed science”. It does seem there's this, this sort of nerdiness around talking about nature and ideas of the benefits of being out in nature, where people are very quick to say, you know, it's not psychobabble, or anything, it's real. And I think that says a lot about what we dismiss and what we value in our culture and you know, maybe actually what we should value and take seriously a little bit more. And maybe one day, there'll be a time when we're not sort of so ashamed to talk about it.
SS:
Yeah, listening to the conversation, I wondered whether we should be thinking and talking structurally rather than individually. So thinking about policies that have meant we are so divorced from our surroundings. And that has meant we have such dire biodiversity in this country, and so on, rather than thinking about the onus on the individual to seek out trees and hills and streams in order to help their own stress and depression. Obviously, those things aren't mutually exclusive. But I just wonder if that it would be more sort of useful and prescient.
AB:
Yeah, Lucy certainly talks about that. And she did also obviously, in the interview, as we heard, but also very much in her book, especially towards the end, she talks about biodiversity, she talks about things like urban planning, about making cities better in terms of nature and access to nature. And so she's very, very alert to that. But I think, yeah, we do need to remain critical about the idea of nature, I suppose as a bit of a kind of sticking plaster solution to various problems and things that actually need kind of much more large scale reforms.
SS:
Yeah, it makes me think of, you know, “self-care” is such an overused term at the moment, it makes me think of the recommendation that a candle and a face mask will help you recover from burnout because of your terrible working conditions. And obviously, that's a slightly misplaced, but obviously, you know, I mean, it's something that's come up in our other discussions that we've had in the podcast: this complicated idea of all the myriad impacts of the modern conditions of living, I guess, and the way in which technology and urban living and so on have sort of separated us from our natural rhythms. And that's something that in our episode with Jo Marchant, she talks about: the cosmos and our lost relationship with the skies and so on. So listeners might want to go back and listen to as well.
AB:
Certainly. I mean, you can't knock it can you. I mean, she talked with Niki, our deputy editor, about the joy of stargazing, and Niki was talking about getting a telescope and doing that in lockdown, and Jo was saying she'd been enjoying stargazing, I think with her neighbours. Anyway, that's one to listen to.
But as far as today's episode goes, that's it for today. We'll be back next week with more. And remember, you can find transcripts for every episode of With Reason at newhumanist.org.uk and you can find us on Twitter @NewHumanist. This podcast was presented by me, series producer Alice Bloch, with New Humanist editor Samira Shackle. Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles. Meet you back here soon. Bye.
Reading list:
Lucy Jones (2020) Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild
Richard Mabey (2005) The Nature Cure
Mary-Jayne Rust (2020) Towards an Ecopsychotherapy
Carl Jung, collected works.
Richard Smyth (2019), ‘In search of the "nature cure"’, New Humanist magazine.
