Finding Nature

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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Last week I was at ‘Towards a Daily Dose of Nature’, part of the Nature & Wellbeing Summit in Bristol. One of the ideas presented on the day was comparing nature to a drug. This inspired me to produce a drug packet design for Nature, a useful exercise as it forced me to sum up the evidence of the health benefits. Looking at the benefits for health, and the numerous ‘side effects’ for wellbeing, I think it’d fly off the shelves. Of course, nature is out there, and it’s free – so why isn’t it part of our everyday healthcare?

Copyright Miles Richardson 2015

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari provides deep context for understanding our connection to nature. It tells the story of our journey from a deep embeddedness in the reality of nature to a possible future as a new, engineered human species.

I was keen to read the first two parts of the book, the cognitive and agricultural revolutions – the journey from an animal of no significance to the ‘fraud’ of an agricultural lifestyle. For two million years humans were marginal and weak creatures, living in constant fear of predators, where strong social ties were important to raise underdeveloped infants. Then came a cognitive revolution that saw a spectacular leap 100,000 years ago to the top of the food chain, outpacing the checks and balances of the ecosystem. Harari compares majestic predators such as lions, with a self-confidence derived from millions of years of dominion and evolution, to sapiens, underdogs full of anxiety and fear over maintaining our position – a situation at the root of many ecological catastrophes and historical calamities.

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A blog update has been overdue, I’ve been busy writing papers and preparing for Nature Connections 2015, amongst other things – so a few research papers to catch-up on.

Firstly, a meta-analysis by McMahan and Estes on the effect of contact with nature on positive emotions. A meta-analysis is important as it brings together results from multiple studies, 32 in this case, with 2356 people. Across all these studies exposure to nature was associated with increases in positive emotion, or affect. This was combined with a smaller decrease in negative emotion.

The studies combined within this analysis used real and laboratory based exposure to nature, which itself was either wild or managed. Importantly, exposure to real nature had a larger effect than laboratory simulations – a technological, virtual reality solution to nature’s decline is not the way I’d want to go! Interestingly, the type of nature did not matter – managed, urban natural spaces were as good as wilderness areas. Finally, the impact of nature was greater as the samples of people became older.

Finding nature in an urban park.

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