Finding Nature

Connecting with nature should be part of every child’s life as it has the potential to aid nature’s revival while benefiting the child. However, to embed nature connection within our social norms, there is a need to understand the benefits a connection with nature can bring. In order to supply evidence to support greater integration of nature into children’s lives, we were commissioned by the RSPB, through funding from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, to look at the links between connection with nature, education, well-being and pro-nature behaviours.

The Impact of Children’s Connection to Nature

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The first Nature Connections conference last year was a great success and Nature Connections 2016, a second Interdisciplinary Conference on Getting Connected to Nature, will take place at the University of Derby, Wednesday 15 June 2016.

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January is a time when diets and fitness come to the fore, with 10,000 steps a day being a popular target. Such calls have wormed their way into my mind and while walking through the woods in the rain the other day I thought about steps in nature – if people are working towards 10,000 steps each day, there’s good reason to make several thousand of them in nature.

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This closing post of 2015 looks at a couple of research papers published in the last month or so. One related to pro-social benefits of nature and the other on the familiar theme of wellbeing, although more evidence related to a favourite angle of mine – nature’s beauty.

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I was at a talk on compassion by Professor Paul Gilbert OBE last week where he said something along the lines of, ‘Our brains are a mess’. This aside was based on the evolution of the brain, back through time from reflective human, to behavioural mammals, to visceral reptiles simply responding to threats and opportunities. This evolution is the basis for some human ailments, to feel good we need emotional balance – happiness and contentment comes through balancing threat, desire and affiliation. For example, when our threat response is overactive, our positive affect is reduced and we can become anxious or depressed.

Finding Balance Through Nature

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