Finding Nature

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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I’m on a train to London writing this blog post, heading to the city to discuss our connection with nature, because nature matters. Coincidentally, while driving to the station Lucy McRobert from The Wildlife Trusts was on BBC Radio 4 Today programme talking about the new #EveryChildWild campaign, because nature matters.

Few people on the train are gazing out of the windows, for me that is one of the pleasures of a train journey. There’s a background of papers rustling, keyboards being tapped and a bit of screen time. The landscape leaving a foggy Derby station is modest, hardly a compelling view, but there’s nature to be found in the form of scrubby hedgerows and trees, their remaining leaves hanging forlornly.

This reflection on our nature, and the nature ‘out there’, is part of our connection to it. Those with a trait for open curiosity tend to have a more embedded place in nature – a greater connection to it. This brings me onto the topic of this post, what leads to a connection with nature, and why does nature connection matter?

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