Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
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to use initiation or rite-of-passage ceremonies, used for thousands of years, to aid in healthy development and maturation. A study about health promotion and illness prevention in Chinese elders revealed that the elders today continue to believe ‘conformity with nature’ is the key to health and wellness (Yeou-Lan, 1996). In Scandinavian history the importance of nature, popularized by Ibsen with the concept of friluftsliv, Naess with the concept of deep ecology, and others, continues to be strong. More recently, beginning in the mid-20th century many practitioners of outdoor and environmental education, worldwide, have understood the value of being outdoors and have educated people about the natural environment and environmental ethics. Even within dominant cultures, like the US where many people live most of their lives disassociated from nature, numerous folks still spend time outside learning wilderness living and traveling skills (see Jon Young and Wilderness Awareness school; for an historical account of women learning and traveling in the outdoors see Mitten and Woodruff, 2009).
The Resultant Perception of Disconnection from Nature in Western Cultures: Where Are We Today?
As we can see from the first part of this chapter, for over 95% of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth humans have lived in direct interrelationship with the rest of the natural world and probably understood that they depended on nature (Oelschlaeger, 1991; Glendinning, 1995; Suzuki, 2007; Young et al., 2008). Early people may have been guided by Flinders’ (2002/2003) values-of-belonging, perceiving that everything in nature is connected. This perception of connectedness aligns with the WorldView of many past and present indigenous populations who follow the seasons, time activities to the blooming of certain flowers and the rising and setting of the sun, and eat foods that are grown, caught, or hunted locally. In the sacred cycles stage there literally was on-the-ground evidence illustrating a WorldView where humans considered themselves integral with nature and sharing the same life essence.
However, for some humans during the agricultural stage as they defined accumulation of material goods, including food, and the physical symbolic representations of their spiritual beliefs as wealth, they significantly changed their view of nature as ‘other’. During this major shift in their paradigm humans also started engaging in warfare. Fortunately, there was enough space that many cultures continued to live close to the earth guided by the values-of-belonging, and there is evidence that not everyone reacts with a scarcity consciousness that leads to war (see Box 2.2).
Over time the paradigm of competition and dominance was used by many people in the Western world and was starkly manifested when the Judeo-Christian religions preached nature as other and as beneath humans and god. Like a runaway train, this WorldView of superiority of humanity over nature continued during the industrial and technological revolutions. Nature became a commodity and over-indulgences a theme. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century, people became the dominant force of change to the Earth’s systems. Meanwhile, under-consumption is a crisis for the billions of people around the world whose lives are oppressed by other peoples’ material consumption, which has another set of complex social, economic, and ecological impacts.
Swan (1992) suggests that the word dominant is inaccurate and believes that the disconnection from or superior feelings over nature is a result of fear. As humans lost the value-of-belonging (Flinders, 2002/2003) they experienced inner doubts and fears; they felt a lack of self-worth; they did not feel loveable and capable, which are the two ingredients necessary in order to sustain healthy relationships (Clarke, 1998). Roszak (1995) agrees that a deep despair underlies Western culture. Many humans seem lost, unaware of their indigenous roots, and unaware of being part of something larger. We are in a vicious cycle of consumerism as the foundation of our economics, and economics have degraded the global environment. As personal identity becomes further entangled with consumer behavior, it becomes harder to challenge existing patterns of consumption.
The impact of a sense of landlessness
According to Bowers (2006), the wonders inherent in nature are often usurped by modern temptations and economic greed, causing relationships with nature to become insignificant. The cosmology story of enchantment, in which the world is alive with forces, powers, and influences, used to come alive for many US children and others as they played or worked day after day in the outdoors, contributing positively to human development of creativity and values (Cobb, 1977). As the modern way of life in industrialized societies has removed many humans from the natural world, people have forgotten the enchantment or have never known it. Many humans, as individuals or societies, no longer have a personal relationship with the land in which they reside. This makes it easy to disregard humans’ place in the biotic community. Baker (2008), echoing Leopold, calls this almost complete detachment from nature landlessness. She describes landlessness as the constant absence of awareness, respect, and kinship with the land, advancing the loss of wild, untouched places as well as the overdevelopment of urban areas. Leopold (1966) said that landlessness is significant because when people do not love, value, or associate with nature, there is little desire to protect it and explained, ‘The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with the land among a people, many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness’ (1966, p. 210). Landlessness therefore perpetuates more landlessness. Landlessness also negatively impacts spiritual, mental, emotional, and social health and development.
Box 2.2. Women may react to stress with tend and befriend behavior
This perception of connectedness also manifests today as relic and relevant behavior around stress. Suzanne Braun Levine (2004) reported that women identified their biggest work challenge as plugging into a source of collective professional energy; they want to be a part of supportive collaborative networks, now described as a tend and befriend response. Sparked by noticing in her stressful work experience that women formed supportive groups, Shelly Taylor began exploring women and stress and labeled the behavior she found tend and befriend. The tend aspect involves nurturing activities that help protect self and others and the befriend aspect involves creating social networks to aid in tending. She and her colleagues hypothesized and later gained evidence for the idea that under stress women are devoted to their offspring (possibly matching the energy to the attachment that babies need for survival). This response, underpinned by the hormone oxytocin, by opioids, and by dopaminergic pathways, suggests that oxytocin may provide an impetus for affiliation. She suggested that females create, maintain, and use social groups, especially with other females, to manage stressful conditions (Taylor, 2006).
Landlessness is a loss of a culture’s sense of place. A sense of place is rooted in the concept that people used to, can, and do form emotional, spiritual, and meaningful bonds with natural areas, making the welfare of the land personally significant (Williams and Stewart, 1998). Developing a strong sense of place provides the foundation from which caring relationships with nature are built (Russell and Bell, 1996). As explained later in the book, the paradigm of place-based education is a means to help students develop a fascination and enchantment with nature and regain a personal connection to the land. A sense of place deepens the sense of community with the biotic world, including strengthening relationships among people and societies (Noddings, 2005). Sobel (2008) and others suggest that building this personal connection to the land helps students comprehensively explore the social, political, cultural, and natural components that define their community. With a sense of place it is hard for people to be passive, indifferent observers. The welfare of one’s community, including the natural elements, becomes personally significant and people usually then choose to actively integrate into their personal community (Haluza-Delay, 1999; Lane-Zucker, 2004; Gruenewald, 2008). Elaborated later in this book, spiritual, mental, emotional, and social health all improve with grounding in a sense of place.
Emerging consciousness
At the level of absolute truth, there is no reason to suffer. But at the relative level, we’re all in considerable pain. The cause of our discontent is our mistaken feeling of separateness. This isn’t based on anything tangible. It’s based on beliefs and concepts.