Finding Nature

As the blackbird’s sing their final songs of summer, I thought I’d share some words that emerged as I sat listening to their song; an imagined journey to a time when blackbird’s sing no more – it could form an epilogue to A Blackbird’s Year. Back to looking at recent nature connection research for the next post.

Resting beneath a birch tree, swifts above cut thoughts free to float with them in azure skies, rising to a place only present of mind. The dance of the wind shaped progress to a veteran oak, and from within a blackcap sang as a blackbird wired by. I circled its trunk one thousand times; with each circuit, a new angle of light described it, and by the end of the day that tree’s form was known. Continue reading →

This short blog recycles the opening of my guest blog for The Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild campaign, just so I can add a few more ideas for going wild in June, and beyond!

A prosperous future depends on nature. We need to spark new interactions with the natural world and bring nature into our everyday lives – that’s why campaigns such as 30 Days Wild matter, for our, and nature’s wellbeing.

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As part of my work to find ways to improve our connection to nature, I do research into understanding what individual differences make us connected. The results of three of these studies have just been published in the journal Ecopsychology.

As covered in earlier blog posts, the research into human-nature relationships offers a few perspectives on what a connection to nature is. It can be our relationship commitment, a belonging to a wider community. Or it’s about emotional affinity, seeing nature as a source of awe and beauty, rather than an object of observation. Finally, it can be seen in terms of an extended sense of self, an identity that includes nature – a cognitive belief about our place in the natural world.

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I’ve spent the last few days in London, taking a moment to notice nature in the city. Naturally, pigeons were about and they bought to mind The Pigeon Paradox by Dunn and colleagues. Their paper, in Conservation Biology, suggests that global conservation depends on urban nature. Continue reading →

Nature Connections 2015 in Derby last week provided much to enjoy and reflect on. It enabled me to add a few pieces to the jigsaw of understanding our connection to nature. One area was language and nature, or how we frame nature.

I started they day emphasising the power of writing about nature. ‘Nature writing’ is at the heart of my personal reconnection with nature. I believe that, together with the attention to nature it requires, writing provided the mechanism that led to my own reconnection with nature. From a cognitive integrationist perspective, writing is not just an output of thought, it also enables and shapes our thinking (Menary, 2007). Writing in nature brings the outside in and enables a realisation of unity. I explore this further in ‘A Blackbird’s Year: Mind in Nature‘ and 1000 Good Things in Nature.

My talk at Nature Connections was soon followed by Ralph Underhill, and then Nadine Andrews, both on ‘framing nature’. Both cite Lakoff who explains how frames define problems and hence constrain solutions, they set the context and provide a viewpoint – strong frames define our common sense.

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