Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure

Everybody Needs Beauty

by the same author

Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction

Self Heal

The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought

Contents

Introduction

Water

Mountains

Forest

Garden

Park

Farm

Virtual Nature

Lost Places

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

An Ancient Ritual

I set out at 7 a.m. Midsummer has just passed, so the sun rose hours ago and is blazing high in the sky above me as I wheel my bike out onto the road. I usually love the hot weather. Like many people living with a wet, changeable island climate, I rush outside at the first hint of sun. But we’re currently in the middle of a long, lingering heatwave, the northern hemisphere’s joint hottest summer on record. For six weeks daytime temperatures will soar above 30°C. Flowers in window boxes are withering. Clothes stick to the skin. The lawns of Castle Park, Bristol’s favourite drinking spot, are rubbed to dust.

As I speed down the city’s network of cycle paths, like arteries running from east to west, I try to ignore the wilted plants, smoke fumes, and rush-hour traffic crowding the streets for another day’s work. Office blocks and shopping centres whizz by, followed by flyovers and industrial estates. Finally I reach the city limits. The fields may be sun-bleached – more victims of the heatwave – but still, I’m grateful. I’m leaving the concrete and tarmac, putting the smell of petrol and hot tar behind me.

From the city limits, it will take me another hour to reach my destination. According to the map on my phone, the route will take me past farms, fields, along the banks of a river, before it follows snaking train tracks deep into north Somerset. I’m already soaked in sweat, but I can’t turn back now. Escaping the city, I’m taking the first step in a ritual that’s at once staggeringly ancient, and absolutely modern. I’m going to nature in search of health.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with me, not at the moment. But recently, I’ve noticed an interest in nature cures emerging everywhere. Schools are taking their classrooms outdoors. Hospitals are being retrofitted with gardens and green spaces for patients to relax and unwind. Mental health charities advise us to get our ‘daily dose of Vitamin N’, to find ways to switch off in forests and nature reserves. Natural consultants sell wild excursions to businesses, promising that their workforce will become more productive, creative and resilient. In the tiny Scottish archipelago of Shetland, it is now possible to walk into a doctor’s surgery with symptoms of depression, anxiety or stress, and walk out with a ‘natural prescription’, including advice on how to connect with the living world on Shetland’s windswept shores.

As sudden as this fashion seems, the idea that nature might be healing is nothing new. Tales of people who find comfort, restoration and meaning in natural settings have been with us for a very long time. We can credit the Romantic poets for inventing gentle, healing Nature – a place of innocence that teaches us to be good, and where we can get in touch with our own best selves. But look further back, and our deepest cultural memories, the oldest myths and legends of Western cultures, tell us nature may be curative to mind and soul. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their bucolic poetry, tales of the farm and forest that enticed citizens outside the city walls, promising a purer, more sensuous and thrilling kind of life. The long shadow of their rural paradise, Arcadia, hangs over literature and art. It’s not just another Eden. The pastoral is a golden place where people, animals, plants, and earth, air and water – the elemental forces of ancient medicine – all coexist in happy sympathy.

Like so many others, nature has been tempting me away from cities, offices and the comfort of my home for the best part of my life. I never used to think about these journeys as a quest for health, or even a medical cure. My early influences were literary, not scientific. I grew up reading books about nature: cheering on the Animals of Farthing Wood, adventuring with the Famous Five, then moving on to the desolate moors of the Brontës and the ecstatic woods and mountains of Shelley and Wordsworth. Stories taught me to crave wild, free places. I learned to see my moods mirrored in nature, and trained myself to be responsive to the subtle emotional influences of plants, animals and weather. Literary landscapes became part of my own psychological landscape, giving shape and name to the messy, complicated emotions of growing up. But growing up in the suburbs, within earshot of the M25, forests and mountains weren’t part of my daily reality. I hunted for ‘wild’ places among the mosaic of intensively ploughed fields that make up London’s precarious green belt as testing grounds for the emotions I’d read about in books. Could these grand feelings be for me too? Sometimes, the slivers of nature I was able to grasp at made me feel better. Sometimes, they gave me a place to be angry, lost and confused.

The recent explosion of interest in nature cures suggests that science is catching up with the old stories – or finally finding evidence to prove things that have long felt natural and commonsense. But it’s more complicated than that. For a start, what does it mean ‘to go to nature’? Where is it – at the end of the garden, beyond the tarmac fringes of the city, at the end of a road, the summit of a mountain, or muddy footpaths slipping between housing estates, road and fields? These questions matter, because more people – around 55 per cent of the world’s population – live in cities, and this is only expected to rise. The old definition of ‘nature’ as a world separate from humanity may not mean much in a world of microplastics, urban sprawl and climate change.

Can the nature cure survive the loss of a pure, untouched green world? Maybe the idea of that luminous wilderness is just too hard to let go of, so we pretend to be more intimate with nature than ever, even as it is engulfed by crisis. Or maybe the return of the nature cure is a sign that a new, exciting form of environmentalism is emerging. The conservation movement has been accused, sometimes fairly, of prioritising nature over people: putting wildlife before transport links, or protecting charismatic species like elephants and lions, but not the communities who live dangerously close to them. But it shouldn’t be a matter of choosing one over the other. The ‘human vs. nature’ conflict is a false dichotomy, and we urgently need to move beyond it. What if the nature cure could help? What if it could bring us closer to caring for that other world of oceans and vegetation, atmosphere and ice, wildlife and microorganisms with which we’re bound together, with whose health and fate our own is absolutely entangled?

This entanglement takes us far from the shiny, self-help approach of the wellness movement, which has quickly exploited the revival of the nature cure. The companies that sell us beauty products, holidays and clothes know how susceptible we are to the charms of healing nature, and how much we’re craving it. The glossy magazines and Instagram influencers who promise to make us happy with shopping and meditation are now selling rural retreats and wild excursions: phrases that evoke pristine wilderness, golden countryside, and soothing, lapping oceans.

The truth is that no one can buy happiness or sell a connection to nature, and the promises of wellness culture do more harm than good. While we’re busy measuring ourselves against a stranger’s dubious path to enlightenment, the things that give us value and meaning in our own lives can start to look tawdry, and somehow not good enough. Playing into our anxieties, ‘wellness’ can become just another stick to beat ourselves with, a way to weaponise wellbeing by blaming people for not being as healthy or happy as they should.

Something does happen when we ‘go to nature’, though, something that can’t be bought or sold. Perhaps you are foraging in a forest, or lounging beside a loch. Perhaps you are walking to work along a leafy cycle path, or taking a shortcut through a peri-urban edgeland, where the seeds of decaying weeds are scattering across the concrete. You might notice your heart rate calm, your mind begin to wander, or the headache that’s been pounding in your temples slowly ease off. When we talk about what nature does to us, we’re probably thinking of this moment. This is when we relax, unwind, breathe deeply, and switch off. It’s whimsical and historically dubious to use modern science to make sense of the beliefs of the past, but the ancient nature cure must surely have been inspired by similar feelings. The senses come to life again and the ratcheting adrenaline that has kept us on the edge of panic begins to disperse in the blood.

The simple question is – why? One of the first scientists to ask it was the American field biologist E. O. Wilson. From the 1950s, Wilson travelled the world to study plant and insect life. He was meant to be collecting data, but during these voyages the kernel of his ‘biophilia hypothesis’ was formed. Humanity’s love for nature is innate, Wilson claimed, a product of millennia of evolution in which we lived in intimate relation with natural elements, creatures and habitats. Our instincts, physique and senses are perfectly attuned to perceiving natural threats, and to finding safety, refuge and life-giving nutrients in living environments. More than that, nature is the bedrock of our fantasies, threaded through our languages, its elements and animals recurring in our faiths and fables. ‘Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction,’ Wilson wrote. Biophilia is, put simply, our love for life. Not only our own life, but the vibrant, vital flourishing of organisms, species and wild places, with which, according to Wilson, we feel an innate ‘urge to affiliate’.

Wilson gave a name and a psycho-evolutionary story to nature appreciation, then, from the 1990s, other scientists stepped in to work out the mechanics. Compiling data from blood samples, heart-rate monitors and patients’ accounts, scientific studies are now lining up to try to prove that green and blue places, from parks to woods and coastlines, can soothe stress, restore attention, lower blood pressure and improve mood.

These findings are persuasive, and they’ve urged me to be a bit more honest about my own relationship with nature, particularly when I was younger. I wasn’t just playing out every teenage stereotype as I stormed across what passed as moors in Metroland and pictured myself as a doomed Gothic heroine. I was experiencing what I now recognise as depression, though I didn’t have the language to name or understand it then. My devotion to forest walking grew in a dance with my difficult moods, heightened by trauma and experiences of small-town prejudice. It’s only with hindsight that I can fully appreciate how vital and sustaining the quiet, non-judgemental spaces of field and forest were.

I still experience regular bouts of insomnia, self-critical thinking and anxiety, and for these I depend heavily on natural environments to manage stress and keep me sane. Certain routes are guaranteed to calm me down and draw my thoughts out of their agitated little mazes. I’ve become intimately acquainted with the paths winding out towards the river from my house on the edges of Bristol, and the tracks that lead away from my university office into quiet green fields where my phone signal and the all-pervasive 4G can’t penetrate.

I’m impressed with what science tells us about the nature cure, and instinctively identify with many of its findings. But I’m also sceptical about some of the bold claims made by researchers. There’s a danger in assuming any one treatment will work for everyone, and that we all experience sickness and healing in the same way. When we get excited about the way light, colour or natural scent affects mood, we’re guilty of treating people as little more than plants that need to be gardened: a drop of magnesium, eight hours of sun and two inches of water a week, and we will flourish as told. Surely our culture, our beliefs, the stories we share, as well as our personal traumas or desires, shape the way we feel and the kinds of connections we yearn for? And what about people with long-term, chronic or difficult to treat conditions, who may spend years experimenting with the right mix of medicines and treatment to help alleviate symptoms, achieve remission, or simply find a way of living with pain? Nature cures are often sold as an alternative medicine, or promoted as something that will help you taper off your medications. There are plenty of good reasons to be critical of the for-profit pharmaceutical industry, but at the same time, many medicines save lives. The language of the ‘cure’ can be alienating to those people who may never be ‘cured’ or want to end their prescriptions. Is there such a thing as a nature cure that isn’t ableist, but is instead accessible to anyone who desires beauty and a connection with nature?

I set out hoping to explore these questions today. But right now, I’m lost. I’ve left the cycle path and must navigate the latticework of country lanes that will lead me to my destination. It’s fiddly work, and twice already I’ve gone in the wrong direction and had to trace a path back down shadowy, hedge-lined roads. I’m getting more and more disorientated, and I don’t want to be late. Eventually I turn the volume of my phone on full, switch on the satnav function, and secure the handset in my top pocket. I set off again, craning my ear down to my chest to hear the robotic voice bark out the directions. Finally the hedgerows fall away either side of me, and the country lane I’ve been following ends abruptly at a car park, with a view of woodland and fields beyond. I pull my phone from my pocket to check my location one more time. A look at the blinking blue dot on my map confirms it: I have reached my destination.

An hour later, I’m sitting in a clearing in the forest with twenty or so strangers. The woman leading the group has long grey hair, twisted into a plait. She’s dressed in loose, neutral cotton, just right for the heat, and everything about her exudes calm and a sense of belonging.

We go around in a circle to introduce ourselves and tell everyone why we’re here. When this awkward exercise is over, the group leader tells us to lie back and close our eyes. The people around me collapse onto the grass like fallen petals. It takes me a moment to realise I’m supposed to do the same. The leader catches my eye and smiles, and down I go. I came prepared to take notes, to observe and be critical. But already my bag is resting under my head, my notebook and phone abandoned.

A couple of moments pass, and then she starts speaking in an exaggeratedly soothing voice.

‘Listen. What can you hear?’

Flies buzz around my ears. I can hear a very light wind agitating the leaves. Somewhere, a mile or so down the hill we climbed to get here, a lorry rattles by.

‘What can you smell?’

I can smell fresh grass, earth, and the scent of pine. There’s nothing else. The air is remarkably fresh. I lie quietly, drawing the breath deep into my lungs.

‘What can you taste?’

I open my eyes a millimetre and peer at her through my lashes. Is it a trick question? She is smiling at me placidly. I shut my eyes at once. But after a moment passes, my breathing goes back to neutral. I let the moments pass unobserved, without worrying about her gaze on me, or whatever elusive taste I’m supposed to be enjoying.

‘What do you feel?’ she asks. What do I feel? I don’t know. I press my hands down into the grass by my side. It’s long and tangled, more like a meadow than a forest floor. When I first sat down, I saw a long earthworm writhing through the grass, and I hope it’s not about to crawl on me now. It’s thrilling, though, to imagine all the frenzied life pulsating beneath us.

After she asks her last question, the group leader goes silent. We’re left alone with birdsong, the vivid scent of the forest, and, presumably, our thoughts. But I’m finding it hard to concentrate. The sun is like a bullseye in the sky above us and even with my eyes closed, the intensity of the light is dazzling. I can feel the skin on the right side of my face is burning, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We lie there for five long minutes, and then the group leader speaks to us softly. ‘You can get up now, as slowly as you like. We have time to talk about what you experienced, if you want.’

I’ve just taken part in my first mindfulness exercise, a guided meditation. I’m not sure it was successful, but it’s meant to help me focus on the here and now, and to reconnect with nature. That’s what this whole day is about – a one-day festival of nature and wellbeing held in a forest. More precisely, we’re meeting in an activity area usually devoted to nature cures, or what the therapists call ‘green care’. A simple outdoor kitchen, compost loo, tree-house meeting space and obligatory yurt are signs of human occupation. Other than that, all the outdoor therapies on offer here rely on the training of the counsellor, and the forest itself. What more could you need?

It’s a good question. Whether they’re quoting scientists or not, most of the people gathering in the wood believe in Wilson’s biophilia. We are natural animals. Green spaces please us instinctively, beyond all reason. ‘Nature is our home,’ one woman answered when we introduced ourselves, and everyone nodded sympathetically. It’s so self-evidently true that it trips off the tongue. Even our term for the study of natural systems – ecology, from the Greek oikos, meaning home – affirms humanity’s heritage as evolutionary homemakers.

Although everyone shares some common values, there’s not one typical ‘nature seeker’ here. One woman describes herself as a witch, and swears by natural magic. Another practices shamanic healing, inspired by her Caribbean heritage. Two sisters are here because they’ve just purchased a thin sliver of woodland outside Birmingham. They plan to use it as a retreat for vulnerable children and young offenders from the inner city. There are speakers from mental health charities who have come to tell us about the outdoor therapies they offer, and conservation groups who’ve realised they can encourage people to visit their nature reserves by promoting the benefits to our health. There are community organisers, a refugee-run allotment group, and anti-globalisation protesters fighting for social justice. There’s even a doctor from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the most austere, no-nonsense body of mental health professionals in the UK, who announces in his talk that we need a natural health service, as well as a national one.

Some people are here because they have a story of their own, like the military veteran who shares how outdoor therapies helped him manage PTSD. His hands shake as he demonstrates a technique that he found helpful for coping with dissociative episodes. Holding a leaf between his fingers, he traces its web of veins, holding it up to the light to see the delicate matrix of green and yellow revealed by the sun. It is an exercise in paying attention, in becoming conscious of life beyond our own that carries on its processes of creation and destruction regardless, and in his most desperate states he found it both comforting and captivating.

Interest in nature and wellbeing unites people with many different ideas about sickness and health, and they are all on display in the forest today. Some people are interested in improving general wellbeing: helping people feel happier, more grounded and empowered in their day-to-day lives. Others work with people suffering from the most serious mental illnesses. Wellbeing is not exactly the same thing as mental health, and even the meaning of ‘wellbeing’, and how we might achieve it, is not set in stone. While objective measures of wellbeing tend to influence most research in this area (taking into account equality, access to education, and healthcare), theories of what wellbeing means existentially fall into two broad categories. The ‘hedonic’ concerns our personal sense of happiness and life satisfaction. The ‘eudaimonic’ focuses on how well an individual functions socially (for example, having the skills and resources necessary to live a purposeful, autonomous and flourishing ‘good life’). The American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ also influences holistic, philosophical and person-centred accounts. In research spanning the 1940s to the 1970s, Maslow distinguished between our basic needs for sustenance and survival, our psychological needs for belonging and esteem, and our highest needs for self-actualisation and transcendence. A desire to connect with nature often falls into this last category, even though our basic survival obviously depends on the natural environment. But to experience ‘transcendence’ means to become the most creative, altruistic and wise version of ourselves possible, both in our behaviour towards others, and ‘to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos’.

The ‘nature cure’ practitioners I meet in the forest tend to work with a blended understanding of wellbeing, and talk about it as something that is personal, social, spiritual and political, all at once. Many also define themselves as ‘ecotherapists’, drawing from ideas developed by the American pastoral counsellor Howard Clinebell in the mid-nineties. Ecotherapy, as its name suggests, urges people to become more respectful to and aware of nature as a path to holistic psychological recovery, and as a kind of hands-on, socially engaged environmentalism. It was vital to do this, Clinebell observed, because mainstream psychiatry failed to ‘understand the complex interrelationships of personal health and sickness with the wholeness and brokenness of the biosphere, and all the people-serving institutions that impact our personal wellbeing day to day’. Looking at patients and their problems in sterile isolation meant clinicians focused ‘only on maintaining personal health while ignoring the social causes of much illness in today’s world’. But the health of nature and society couldn’t be separated from the health of the individual. Therapeutic approaches that severed the person from the biosphere and society, and looked at them as simply a medical problem to be fixed, were being shown up as increasingly inadequate.

This way of thinking about health takes us beyond the simple ‘nature cure’, gesturing towards something more radical and intersectional – a real search for ecological recovery, for people, society and nature. Perhaps the revival of interest in natural healing, and the wider questions it raises, are a sign that we are waking up to the urgent need for such holistic thinking now. We are living through a crisis of mental health, social injustice and environmental devastation which are all terrible on their own, and inextricably entwined. Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, and suicide the second leading cause of death among all 15- to 29-year-olds globally, according to the World Health Organisation. The major determinants of mental illness are trauma and inequality, meaning rising cases of ill health have to be seen in their social aspects, and connected to the psychological violence of poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry and marginalisation. Economic oppression is also at the root of so much global suffering and malaise. Most of the world lives under an economic system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a minority and denies the majority the means to live with health, dignity or a flourishing environment. Decades of warnings about climate change have gone unheeded, as economic growth and the demands of polluting industries have been put before the survival of people and the planet. Maybe the revival of the nature cure is another sign that people are pushing back against the narrative of business as usual, and confronting the crises at that intimate point of contact – where we meet the world, and where whatever happens to us might be a catalyst for change.

The people I meet in the forest are exploring these points of contact in the work they do every day. In workshops and over cups of tea, I listen in on conversations about health-service funding cuts and the social inequalities that make the people who seek their services unwell. Another big problem is finding safe, quiet places to run their projects. This reflects the fact that access to nature is desperately unequal in the UK. Spending a day in a forest is a pleasure not everyone can afford, and ‘retreating’ costs time, as well as money. In 2019, a report by Natural England found that 70 per cent of children from a white background spent time outside once a week, compared to 56 per cent of children from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds. A comparable report on nature engagement among adults showed that 25 per cent of BAME adults over the age of sixteen never visited a park or other natural site, or did so less than once a month, compared to 18 per cent of the white population. In terms of the places people visited, urban green space dominated among young people from an Asian or Black background: 75 per cent of Black kids who were surveyed had recently visited a city park, while only 20 per cent had been to the countryside and 5 per cent to the coast (compared to 40 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, for white children). These statistics, though rather blunt, reveal a lot about who