Care is Nature
Now I have a ponderosa pine tattooed on my inner upper arm, a forever reminder of the importance of trees, and the healing and wisdom they offer us – if only we choose to look closely enough.
Every Friday between now and the beginning of February, I’ll be sharing an excerpt from my third book, CARE: The radical art of taking time. This is in part to celebrate her release in the UK and North America, and in part to say thank you for being part of this wonderful corner of the internet throughout 2022.
When I first started planning Care I knew there would be an entire chapter devoted to nature. Her role in my own redefinition of care has been huge, and learning about the many ways she cares for us, just as we care for her, was a highlight.
Enjoy! And please feel free to share with anyone you think might like it.
Brooke xx
PS. Ben and I are offline over January, so I won’t be on hand to respond to comments until we get back. Take care and I’ll see you soon.
I grew up in a household that valued time outside.
My family went camping, we would have picnics and eat outside on warm summer nights, alternating our time between the outdoor table and the pool. On any occasion when I complained of being bored, I was sent outside to find something interesting to do – and can I tell you, it was very annoying that I would always find it.
In spite of growing up with a solid foundation in the outdoors, as I got older and became a full-time-employed adult, the hours I spent outside diminished quickly. I spent my workdays waking before sunrise, driving to the train station, sitting on a train for an hour before transferring to a bus for another twenty minutes. I'd then walk across a soccer field to my office, where I'd sit at my desk, staring at a screen or talking on the phone, comfortable in the climate-controlled environment of steel and concrete and glass. I would get to the end of my workday and do the reverse commute home, where I'd eat dinner, watch TV, go to bed and do it all again the next day.
I'd have maybe thirty minutes outside each workday, with the rest of my time spent indoors, the air sweetly conditioned and my desk fluorescently lit. Often I was outside a little more on weekends, but I’d approximate that I spent less than 10 per cent of my life outdoors, and probably only 1 per cent intentionally so.
I'd like to tell you that this changed as I matured, but that would be a lie. Even as I moved out of my parents' house, got married, bought a home of my own and became a parent myself, I spent the vast majority of my time indoors, leaving the house to go for a quick walk around the block, to get into my car, to hang the laundry or to check the mail.
I'd convinced myself that, as a business owner, as a parent, as the partner of someone who left the house before the sun came up and came home after our daughter was in bed, I simply didn't have time to spend outside.
It was the most disconnected I've ever been from nature and it's no surprise that this is also the period of my life where I developed crippling anxiety and severe postnatal depression.
I'm not going to suggest that I would have avoided mental illness had I spent more time outdoors, but I will say that I wish I had listened to my intuition, which was telling me that I needed to get out into nature, to get my hands in the soil, to grow something, to reconnect with the natural world.
I knew this because I constantly had a stack of gardening books on my bedside table and a notepad filled with half-finished sketches of the veggie plot I dreamt of creating in our backyard. I knew all about what to plant, where to plant it and why to rotate crops. I was primed to get outside and get digging. Instead of just doing it, though, I turned to the blue-lit oblivion offered by my phone and developed a quite frankly ridiculous addiction to a game called Hay Day: an agriculture-simulation game that lets you, “get back to nature and experience the simple life of working the land”. The irony is not lost on me, dear reader.
I mean, if I woke up with my head stapled to a tree and a note telling me to “Go for a bushwalk now,” tied around my neck, it couldn't have been any clearer that I needed to get outside.
The only problem was that I wasn't paying attention to signs. I was too busy with pretend crop rotation (unnecessarily so, can I add, as it made no difference to the composition of the virtual soil or the outcome of the game), hovering over my phone, waiting to harvest my apples.
One night as I watched my soybean crop inch towards readiness. when I should have been asleep, the utter absurdity of the situation finally hit me. I was obviously craving the experience of growing something, getting my hands in the dirt and reconnecting to the natural world, but had instead chosen this digital stand-in. The big question was: why?
First, playing farmer on my phone was risk-free and easy. There were no caterpillars or snails that would munch on my seedlings, no extreme heat or frost to contend with. Secondly, I was assured a positive result from minimum effort (if result meant nothing more tangible than Hay Day currency and access to new crop types – blueberries, here I come). No matter how lacklustre my input, this digital version of nature would provide for me what I felt entitled to.
And therein lies the central issue of our disconnection with nature today. In Western culture, we see ourselves as the dominant intelligent force that has, in many ways, learnt to conquer nature. We want it to serve us and provide us with the things we need from it, as well as the things we want. At the same time, we want it to be controllable and manageable, or at least predictable. We feel entitled to that because we are quite obviously the governing force, with our machines and buildings and concrete and zoning laws. Take that, nature, you big pushover!
Even the way we speak about nature offers clues as to how we see her. We talk about “spending time in nature” as if it's separate from us – a somewhere and something else. A fenced-in parcel of land we visit on occasion, wrapped up inside our national parks or the boundary fences of designated wilderness.
Since the industrial revolution we’ve done a tremendous job of separating ourselves from the natural world and consistently worked to wrangle it into submission. The 1950s, with its explosion of gadgetry and convenience, brought about a steep decline in our time spent outdoors, and cemented the belief that all of our innovations have made us the biggest and most assertive influence on the planet.
We've since convinced ourselves, as tech has gotten more ubiquitous and all-encompassing, that our civilisation sets us apart, that buildings and transport and air conditioning and the internet mean that we're ranked above the natural world. As though the air we breathe isn't created by trees and the ocean. As though the fruits and vegetables we eat aren't grown on plants fed by the sun, rooted in the soil. As though the lakes and rivers and rainclouds don't provide us with water to drink.
If the natural world could, and did, disappear – oceans empty, animals gone, trees turned to dust and blown away – how long do you think we'd last? Estimates suggest there’d be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support human life for anywhere from 100 to 1200 years. But when you also remove water and food, the estimates dwindle dramatically. We'd survive weeks, maybe, months at best, if our reserves of stored food and water stretched that far.
Some people like to think we're independent of nature, but the truth is we can't survive without it.
The natural world, on the other hand, would be perfectly fine if humans disappeared tomorrow. There would be a messy reclamation of the previously held human spaces, as the towns and cities and highways reverted to nature, but over time the natural world would not only survive and heal, it would thrive without us.
As much as our human egos might insist otherwise, people depend on nature. We are nature. Our bodies are ecosystems in themselves and we are part of larger ecosystems. Nature is not here to simply serve us, to be cut down, used up, paved over and forgotten on our way to expanding civilisation or profitability.
For every hour the average Australian spends outdoors, we now spend more than seven inside on a screen, and according to research conducted by Planet Ark, one in three of us spends less than eighteen minutes a day outdoors. Since the 1990s, Australian backyards have been shrinking as homes get larger and blocks get smaller. The same research surveyed more than 1000 Australian parents and found that only one in five children climbs trees, while more than a third have never gone camping.
Areas of untouched wilderness are disappearing at an astonishing rate, with more than three-quarters of land in the world no longer considered wild. The situation is even worse for our oceans, where the only areas left untouched by industrial fishing, pollution and shipping are almost completely confined to the polar regions.
And yet, despite our growing disconnection from it, on some deep level many of us understand how important it is to spend time in nature. We will travel to the ocean to swim in the salt water, or walk to the end of a pier only to stare at the expanse stretching out before us, to draw the briny air into our lungs. We will find and ascend the highest hill or structure we can simply to scan the horizon for a silver ribbon of river or a blue smear of far-off mountains. We will seek out clean air or tall trees or waterfalls and stand close to them, breathing in the compounds and ions and chemicals they each provide. We might not understand how or why, but we know that it makes us feel better.
Nature has power over us and, in spite of the modern conveniences we've created in order to try to tame her, to manage and control and predict her, we are still drawn to her wildness.
It's no surprise, really. The science behind spending time in nature is phenomenal. So much so that GPs in parts of the United Kingdom have begun prescribing time in nature as a complementary therapy to patients trying to reduce their risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as those looking to improve their mental health and overall wellbeing.
Unfortunately, like many other worthy wellness ideas that become mainstream, there's been an increase in the commercialisation of time in nature over the past few years, as entrepreneurs commodify what should be an accessible experience for everyone, wrap it up in expensive technical gear or market it towards the corporate sector.
We read books about the healing power of trees, listen to podcasts about rewilding, research the benefits of spending more time in natural places and then, so used to solutions this powerful costing us money, we look for a product that will deliver the benefits to us: retreats and coaching programs and head-office-mandated bonding sessions spent in canoes, or multiday hikes and epic, once-in-a-lifetime wilderness experiences that we pay big bucks for.
Suddenly we need a consultant to show us the most effective way to engage with nature so that we can then return to our climate-controlled workplaces, restored and rejuvenated and ready to kick corporate goals once more.
While there is undoubtedly a huge amount to be gained from forest bathing for a few hours, going off-grid camping for a weekend or hiking the Larapinta Trail for two weeks, I want to redefine what ‘spending time in nature’ can look like and hopefully open you up to a whole world of Small Care regardless of where you live, how much time you have and whether you've got the gear or not.
This brings me to ask two questions: what even is nature?
And what happens when we spend time immersed in it?
When asked to picture nature I used to imagine shimmering lakes and pristine grasslands and forests stretching as far as the eye could see. I'd imagine lions stalking across savannahs, koalas gazing down sleepily from high up in a gum tree and eagles soaring on thermals hundreds of metres above the ground.
In other words, I pictured experiences that are not everyday options for the vast majority of us. Perhaps experiences that are once or twice in a lifetime for most.
It wasn't until I read Florence Williams' book The Nature Fix and discovered Oscar Wilde's definition of nature as a “place where birds fly around uncooked” that I really loosened my grip on what nature could be and, as a result, found a definition that feels inclusive and accessible.
Yes, nature is waterfalls and grasslands and untouched wilderness, but it can also be your own backyard, a community garden, the school playground, the tiny park you walk through on your way home every night. It can be the trees planted up and down your street or a pot of flowers on your balcony. Nature is always present - it's the air in your lungs and the water in your glass and the pear sitting on your desk.
Trees: a love story
I've come a long way since my Hay Day period. After my epiphany I deleted the app and began what can only be described as my own personal Nature 101 course. What started as spending one minute in my garden every morning, inspecting the plants and flowers, noticing the seasonal comings and goings of birds and insects, the changing light and shadows, has gradually become an enduring love affair with the natural world – trees and forests in particular.
Now I have a ponderosa pine tattooed on my inner upper arm, a forever reminder of the importance of trees, and the healing and wisdom they offer us – if only we choose to look closely enough.
There are so many tree facts I've learnt over the years that fill me with unbelievable joy. For example, did you know that some species of trees can communicate through an underground network of soil fungi that connects individual trees to each other and allows them to share carbon, water and information about drought and other threats?
Did you know that they can pass chemical signals to each other, warning nearby trees of impending insect attack and compelling them to produce more insect-resistant chemicals as protection?
My favourite, however, is the magic of phytoncides. Certain types of trees and plants produce chemical compounds called phytoncides: the natural oils that are a vital part of the tree's defence system.
They emit these phytoncides in order to protect themselves from bacteria, insects and fungal attacks, and to alert surrounding trees to a potential threat. They can dial the production of these oils up or down as needed. In other words, phytoncides are one of the ways trees ‘talk to’ and look after each other. What's more, when you or I happen to walk past them or breathe in their oils, we also benefit from these potent chemical compounds.
Exposure to phytoncides has been found to significantly decrease our levels of stress hormones, as well as reduce feelings of anxiety, anger and fatigue. They can also lower blood pressure, while improving both the quality and number of hours we sleep.
Phytoncides support our parasympathetic nervous system and reduce the ‘fight or flight’ sensation we can experience when stressed or agitated – all of which is compelling – but even more important is the impact phytoncides have on our ‘natural killer’ cells. These cells are part of our immune system and kill tumour cells or cells that are infected with a virus. They're essential for a healthy immune system, and exposure to phytoncides has been shown to not only significantly increase the number of natural killer cells in the body, but also enhance the activity of several anti-cancer proteins. What's more, this effect can last for more than thirty days after exposure to phytoncides.
About 40 years ago, someone planted a huge stand of California redwoods on a vacant piece of land in our town. They've grown to be giants, at least 30 metres high, and once you walk under their canopy, the rest of the world disappears. The ground is spongy with fallen needles and the air is soft, filled with piney scent and muffled birdsong. There are wombat burrows dotted throughout and a handful of different tracks wind down the hill. I try to walk in these trees every day and every time I do, regardless of what stress or tension I'm carrying with me, ten minutes among the trees makes me feel better. Calmer, lighter and better equipped to face the rest of the day. It feels a lot like melting – into a place, and into a calmer version of myself. I've started calling it 'tree medicine'.
In his beautiful book Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness, Dr Qing Li further convinced me that this feeling of wellbeing wasn't just something fanciful. He shares incredible evidence of the healing power of time in the trees but, even more importantly, describes why forest bathing (known as shinrin-yoku in Japanese) is so vital to developing our connection with nature:
This is more than just a walk ... shinrin-yoku means taking in the forest through our senses. This is not exercise. It is simply being in nature, connecting with it through our sense of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. Indoors, we tend to use only two senses; our eyes and our ears. Outside is where we can smell the flowers. taste the fresh air, look at the changing colours of the trees, hear the birds singing and feel the breeze on our skin. And when we open up our senses, we begin to connect with the natural world.
It's when we tap into this deep connection with the natural world that we can see not only our place in it, and the role we have in caring for it, but also the ways in which the natural world cares right back.
Trees take the CO2, we exhale (not to mention the CO2, our civilisation produces) and turn it into the oxygen we need to breathe. They provide us with shelter and protection, they soothe our stresses, they offer habitat to animals and insects that are vital to our survival, they cool Earth, repair the soil and provide a place of refuge. The impact that fans out from time spent in the trees is phenomenal, and all they ask in return is that we don't cut them down, that we care for our shared home.
Imagine for a moment a world where nature is at the centre of everything. All of our homes have windows with views of trees or gardens. All of our neighbourhoods have accessible parklands and walking tracks. Office buildings are all fitted with vertical gardens and have ample sunlight, schools regularly teach classes outside, hospitals are built around central courtyard gardens with every patient able to see, if not directly experience, natural settings every day.
A world where taking a weekend off, unplugging, disconnecting from tech and spending time in the wild is normal and where doctors prescribe a weekly dose of forest bathing alongside daily blood-pressure medication and antidepressants.
If we lived with nature in this way, alongside nature, as part of nature, it would be impossible to view ourselves as separate from it, and we couldn't treat her like an afterthought or just a series of resources ready and waiting for us to dig up or cut down, with our eyes firmly on the dollar signs.
The bottom line we should all be interested in when it comes to nature is that time spent in nature equals improved wellbeing for us and improved wellbeing of the natural world. It's a genuine win-win.
Considering we live in a world that is mostly governed by a very different bottom line – the profit/loss, surplus/deficit kind of bottom line – I think we need to offer an equation that appeals to those who work in politics, the policymakers, the gatekeepers, the string-pullers, the fossil-fuel billionaires, the property developers, the bureaucrats stripping funding from our hospitals, our schools, our cultural institutions and giving the green light for more and more of our natural spaces to be demolished for the sake of 'progress'.
To these people I offer the following:
Spending time experiencing nature enhances academic performance in many ways, as shown in a 2019 review of hundreds of studies and published in Frontiers in Psychology.
Not only does time in nature boost students' performance in reading, writing, maths, science and social studies, but it also enhances their creativity, critical-thinking skills and problem-solving. Even just seeing trees and green spaces from school buildings can foster academic success. Nature-based learning is associated with reduced aggression, greater impulse control and less disruptive behaviour, and spending time in nature can also help children focus their attention and reduce the symptoms of ADHD.
Employees who are able to spend more time outside, or who work in offices with a view of trees or parkland, report higher levels of happiness, job satisfaction and overall wellbeing, while exposure to the greenery of indoor plants can increase productivity by more than 15 per cent, as found in a 2014 University of Exeter study.
Nature – even in small doses – also helps employees to be more creative in their work, which can positively impact their ability to innovate and solve problems. Happier and more satisfied staff equals less turnover, while healthier staff equals fewer sick days, both of which are good for profits.
Thousands of studies point to the beneficial health outcomes for patients exposed to nature, stretching back to Roger Ulrich's 1984 study that showed a natural view from a hospital window had a positive impact on those recovering from surgery.
It's also been discovered that patients who have access to green spaces, or even those whose room features a large photograph of a bright, green wilderness, show improved health outcomes throughout their hospital stay, with convalescence times reduced by more than a day. Not only do they recover more rapidly, but those patients who have some access to viewing or visiting a natural green space also have a reduction in pain and stress levels, which in turn helps to boost their immune system allowing their treatments to work more effectively.
Of course, the health implications aren't only physical either, as it's well documented that time spent walking in nature, listening to natural sounds or even viewing natural scenes can help reduce rumination and negative thought patterns, alleviate symptoms of anxiety and increase feelings of calm, clarity and contentment, as discovered by Gregory Bratman of Stanford University in a 2015 study.
There are myriad reasons why we can't or won't increase access to nature (the most common of which seems to be financial), but by shifting to a well-rounded, holistic view, one with the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities at its centre, I think the question really isn't “Can we afford to do this?” but rather “Can we afford not to?”
If you feel like you have a voice in one of the spheres of power and influence, I'd encourage you to talk to your boss or manager, or to drop some of these bottom lines into conversation and see where it leads. Perhaps you might want to talk to your housemates, family, colleagues or friends about the way nature has positively impacted your life.
Let's say, however. that calls for change fall on deaf ears. If these ideas still don't inspire change, we need to question the motives or the people in power. Perhaps their decisions are not, as they’d tell us, being driven by a desire to do right by the people, to deliver the best outcomes or services possible, to see students or patients leave their institutions better than when they arrived. Perhaps their motives are more self-serving than that.
In which case, a prescription of generosity-inducing, stress-busting, altruism-fuelling nature might just be the thing they need.
Let’s not wait for the gatekeepers and policymakers. You have the power to make changes – right now. In your share house or your home, in your workplace or classroom, in your studio or cubicle.
Take one of the suggestions from this chapter and apply it without waiting for permission. Bring an indoor plant to your desk. Hang a picture of a wild place in the kitchen. Schedule your next meeting in the park. Take your kids outside to eat dinner once a week. Meet your mates at a park instead of the pub. We are the ones we've been waiting for – and change? It starts with us.
10 ways to practise nature if you have…
Half a minute:
Get an indoor plant or two, or put one on your desk at work
Look for evidence of nature in unlikely places - a nest on a rooftop, plants growing in the cracks of a footpath, wildflowers growing next to the highway
Stop and smell the roses (literally).
Half an hour:
Go to the closest park, take off your shoes and feel the grass beneath your feet
Sit under a tree and read a book
Eat a meal outdoors
Lie on the grass and look for a four-leaf clover.
Half a day or more:
Pack a picnic and head to the beach
Jump on a train and explore a (new to you) national park
Learn about local plants and spend a few hours foraging for them.
If you’re enjoying these excerpts, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future posts. Or, if you’re already a subscriber, you might want to grab a copy of Care - available right here.