Having a sense of connection to nature helps both the environment and individuals. In a new review, published in the Journal of Prevention & Intervention in the Community, researchers investigate how nature connectedness impacts the development of adolescents and young adults. Their results revealed a number of benefits, including pro-environmental and pro-social behavior, increased sustainability practices, and improvements to overall well-being.
The authors, a group of individuals from the University of Genova in Italy, describe the implications of their findings:
“Overall, this review highlights the importance of integrating nature-based experiences into educational and community programmes to enhance wellbeing, strengthen pro-environmental attitudes and foster social connections among young people. The evidence supports policies and initiatives that prioritize environmental education and direct engagement with nature as key strategies for cultivating healthier, more sustainable lifestyles. By empowering young people to actively contribute to sustainability, we can better equip the next generation to meet future environmental challenges.”
The idea that human flourishing is intimately tied to the natural world is gaining traction across disciplines, offering a powerful counterpoint to dominant psychiatric models that isolate mental health from social, political, and ecological conditions. Instead of locating suffering within the individual, an ecological framework recognizes that the health of people and the planet are inseparable.
This review supports that view. Adolescents who feel connected to nature were found to have higher levels of empathy, compassion, and care for others, traits linked to sustainable behaviors like reducing waste and ecological activism. Exposure to nature was also tied to better cognitive function, lower stress, and more frequent pro-social engagement.
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There is no link between nature and health (including what we call mental health) because nature IS health – they are not two things we relate. Physiological health is nature’s way, and all creatures in nature are healthy, so being natural is health, and being in nature is healing but it is not the essential thing. The essential thing is the freedom we see in all animals of nature until they run into humans, and that instinctual freedom in nature is a fundamental aspect of natural health. However, our drives, impulses, instincts and neurology have been conditioned, thwarted, co-opted, or destroyed by adaptation/adjustment to a blind social historical (including intellectual) process that has destroyed the health of human beings as well as the rest of nature. So if you start connecting all these dots you will see that prescibing time in nature isn’t meeting the whole problem at all, and the quality of nature is also important – and going for a walk in it is not true connection with nature. It would take us a good deal of time to rebuild our connection with nature an ideally we’d be sleeping in nature and working in nature. Society limits our freedom to do these things at least in the England or Wales – it’s better in America, but here we can’t even legally pitch a tent anywhere anymore except parts of one of the national parks in Exeter and that may have stopped now too because I think because I think it may have been overturned after all (too lazy to check). You can camp in Scotland more easily but generally in remote areas I feel which presents its own difficulties – and I feel this is an enormous crime, because when did we and how could we consent to not being able to sleep in our own natural environment like every other natural creature on Earth? The UK and the US is so enormously hostile to nature when you look at our actions and indifferent to nature when you look at our emotions. And we are nature! Conditioned and corrupted nature, but still nature, and we can become healthy nature again.
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Cities drive people nuts. Its all artificial. Your lizardbrain rejects it. Hit the park tomorrow, blessed be.
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“The idea that human flourishing is intimately tied to the natural world is gaining traction across disciplines, offering a powerful counterpoint to dominant psychiatric models that isolate mental health from social, political, and ecological conditions.”
Yes, let’s hope the DSM deluded some day gain insight into common sense. As one who dealt with a drug withdrawal induced super sensitivity mania, I will say, being in nature was helpful for me. And locking a manic person into a windowless environment is about the worst thing you can do.
So I definitely agree, “pro-environmental and sustainable behavior, aimed at preserving the environment, can be understood as benefiting both the environment and the individual.” Being in nature also helps when one finds oneself “manic.”
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What happens when we treat nature as essential to mental health? We put a lot of mental health practioners out of business.
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Health IS nature, and leaving the city for a life with nature heals to a depth greater then the physical and psychological, and no matter how socially conditioned you are, you begin to feel your oneness with nature which is the great home and womb of love, without which true peace, health and understanding of life is impossible. A true understanding of life comes with connection with nature, without which there is mere knowledge of without a true understanding of life. These two guys, one from Pretoria I think in South Africa who was working in the city and a woman from Sweden, speak of them leaving the city for the bush (they are now doing conservation work and living in the bush in Free State, South Africa), and a short 14 minute award winning documentary was made about them in which they describe their journey. I think it is actually a good research artifact, because you can see a universal pattern in such stories – you can see the widening of their whole sense of reality through their connection with nature which now becomes an essential part of their lives which they could not forgo without forgoing their own lives. This is the beginnings of natural religion if you ask me. Social conditioning will always limit and circumscribe it’s expression in proportion to it’s magnitute, but it is there and will always emerge with this connection with nature which is on a level mysterious to the Western mind hence because it is beyond all of our Western social conditioning. And this connection over time, given due space for self-awareness and self-understanding, will gradually wash away the social conditioning in a process which at first takes place unconsciously and then gradually emerges as a conscious spiritual or shamanic type process. Here’s the documentary but probably there are a million such stories online and many will be far more illustrative of the potential depth of this connection and it’s expression. For deeper understanding of the telos of natural health see real medicine women or shamans talking about reality whilst sitting in nature, in a forest or the likes. Make sure they are still in nature and through their mouths you’ll here the wisdom of the Eastern saints and seers and the highest Western mystics across time…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cm753kp0uo
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