A blog by Dr Carly Butler

The Green Minds project is one of our favourite examples of how ambitious and creative thinking can deliver nature connection initiatives at scale. It illustrates how local governments can take a systems approach to help connect communities with nature for people and planet. We were delighted to see the launch of the Green Minds creative commissions series report and film. The creative commissions invited artists and creatives to draw on the five pathways to nature connectedness in designing art and creative activities to be co-produced with communities: senses, beauty, emotion, meaning and compassion.

The Nature Connectedness Research Group provided those interested in tendering a commission with an overview of the science of nature connection, and how the pathways can be activated through arts and creative practice. The five projects commissioned involved multiple art forms and workshops aimed at helping connect people with nature in urban contexts, including storytelling, movement, regenerative growing, digital technology, a forest school, and crafts.

Green Minds Creative Commissions

Art and creative activity are powerful tools for inspiring, promoting, and embodying connections with nature. The pathways to nature connectedness are inherent in both the creation of, and engagement with, artworks designed to bring nature and humans together (see for example, the works involved in the Oak Project – Studio Morison’s Silence: Alone in a World of Wounds, Charlotte Smithson’s Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow, and the Tune into Nature Music Prize).

Deep sensory engagement with nature often inspires the production of images, writing, movement that represent and celebrate the wonders of the more-than-human world. Arts can prompt the attention of the audience and participants and producers, inviting a turning towards the sensory richness of nature, a call to look, listen, and feel.An appreciation of nature’s beauty is promoted by this attention and engagement, whether through attention to detail or the presentation and contemplation of nature in places and spaces. Arts and creative practices go hand-in-hand with affective experience, offering a channel for recognising and nurturing nature’s effect on our emotions. An image, movement, sensation or play with words can have a powerful impact on how we feel – both in and towards nature – and arts can be used to heighten the nature-emotion experience. The meaning pathways to nature connectedness helps connect our thoughts, memories, values, and cultures with nature. Storytelling is one example of a practice for raising awareness of what nature means to us – and how our nature-based experiences, appreciation of nature’s beauty, and affective responses to the more-than-human world become a part of who we are. The production, experience, and impact of arts and creative practice can have compassion for nature at their core – embodying and encouraging a sense of care for the rest of the natural world.

The Green Minds creative commissions offer sensory, aesthetic, emotional and meaning-rich experiences for Plymouth communities, designed and delivered around an ethos of care for nature, and nurturing the human-nature relationship. The commissions offered people a sense of play, discovery, reflection, joy, care and wonder in relation to the more-than-human world. It is the kind of arts-nature-people-place intersection that we need much more of to help reconnect people with nature, and support closer relationships with nature in urban contexts.