An understanding of the importance of nature connection for human health and wellbeing is growing as the science plays catch up telling us why and how time spent in nature influences our mental, physical emotional and spiritual wellbeing. As the global research effort to find nature-based solutions to many modern day human growing pains accelerates, so has the number of enthusiastic providers of services. Relationship counsellors, mental health therapist, landscape planners, psychologists, forest therapists, occupational therapist, mental health counsellors, general practitioners….and the list goes on. Is nature just a canvas on which to roll out traditional health and wellbeing practices, or is the attainment of health and wellbeing benefits in nature more nuanced? I believe so.

As an ecologist who has a forty-year relationship studying, living in and understanding nature, my perspective of the human-nature relationship comes from a different place to many other practitioners.

Ecology is a deep and humbling discipline of understanding relationships from the microscopic to the landscape scale that has more exceptions than rules. While Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis is a sounding board for our human-nature relationship, I believe that there are many nuances in how this applies to a species that has been largely disconnected from nature for centuries.

Nature can provide simultaneous multi-sensory experiences for humans like no other man-made technology can, and we now know just how beneficial these are for our health and wellbeing. Just like our move toward precision medicine (applying treatments based on individual genetic, physical or mental characteristics) our ‘prescription’ of nature-based interventions should also be based on individual make-up taking into consideration factors such as likes/dislikes, phobias, fears and norms. This means that there needs to be a matching process of environmental settings and activities with individual predispositions and needs. This can best be achieved through an understanding of the natural stimuli that different ecosystems can provide through time and space as ecosystems are in constant motion. This should be matched with some individual profiling so that experiences are not triggering negative emotions.  

It is so important that we approach human re-connection with nature in the right way so that this time our relationship is forever and not pushed aside with the same devastating consequences.  

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