In sync with nature

In sync with nature

For many people contact with nature is no longer a by-product of everyday life. For the vast majority of human history, we relied upon the natural environment for food, water, and shelter in very direct and unambiguous ways, as all species do.  Today, although we are equally dependent upon the environment to sustain us, the majority of the world’s population now resides in towns and cities where they are largely sheltered from the natural processes and ecosystem services that make their existence possible. The consequences of this separation between “people” and “nature” are two-fold. Firstly, as each succeeding generation becomes increasingly disconnected from the natural world, the collective importance placed upon the environment by urban populations is likely to diminish. In turn, this may lead to reduced advocacy and funding for conservation and biodiversity protection, which has long-term global implications. Secondly, a lack of contact with the environment is thought to be a contributing factor to the increasingly poor health and wellbeing of urban inhabitants, which some scholars suggest is the result of a failure to fulfil our inherent biological need to spend time in nature
In order to develop policies and practices that see contact with nature become commonplace again, we must first understand the activities, environmental settings, and benefits that encourage people to seek out nature experiences. As exemplars of restorative, health-giving environments, we believe investigating perceptions of “favourite places” and the attributes people describe when explaining their connection to these settings will provide valuable information for urban planners seeking to optimize the health benefits of nature. In this paper we explore the attributes of outdoor environments that people place great personal importance on and consider the implications of these findings to modern societies.
The well-being benefits of contact with nature has long been a topic of interest to researchers across diverse disciplines, and there is now a broad evidence base supporting a positive relationship between human health and nature. The influence of the quality of natural environments on mental health, and the relative importance of individual environmental variables on psychological outcomes, are examples of areas that remain poorly explored. Despite concerns raised by researchers regarding the methodological limitations and lack of consistency in the results of some nature-health research, studies into human interactions with nature are generally supportive of the premise that natural environments have a more favourable effect on human psychological health than do urban or built environments, whether experienced indirectly or directly through visual, auditory, or olfactory (smell) contact. People living in urban areas with more green space are often found to have better mental health and perceived general health than people living in urban areas with less green space, even when controlling for a range of extraneous factors such as income and marital status. Studies suggest that visiting or viewing natural settings may improve concentration in children, reduce anxiety in hospital patients, and minimize perceived pain and discomfort.