Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
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Mother Earth. Names for the Earth include Mother Nature, Terra, Changing Woman, Ala, Nerthus, and others. These names symbolize a belief in attachment as a child to a mother. It is a dependence that grows to interdependence for health and well-being much in the same way child development specialists talk about healthy human maturation today. Lynn Margulis (1998), a molecular biologist and scientist who shifted thinking in biological science to understanding cooperation and symbiosis as crucial drivers in evolution, was a 20th century Western scientist who confirmed this attachment to the earth theory (Margulis and Sagan, 2007).
Evidence of nature worship or integration is found in Greek culture with evidence in the time period of 750–146 BCE of worshipping the earth goddess Gaia. The worshipping of an earth goddess is an important indicator of these humans’ tie to nature and the health they derived from being attuned to the Earth’s rhythms. It symbolizes that, as a species, humans knew either by intuition or cognition that we are connected to the ‘whole’ and that our attachment to nature was lifegiving and therefore necessary for health and well-being. In fact as people sat in temples to honor Gaia, they apparently spoke of genius loci or the spirit of place, which relates to the sense of place or being place-based that environmental educators and others believe so important now in terms of helping people connect to the Earth, discussed more in Chapter 8. Even Aristotle weighed in, saying that our minds are linked with nature and that we have intuitive knowledge of the flows, cycles, systems, and creatures of the natural world (Swan, 1992), though he believed the Earth and universe were fixed in time—not evolving.
Understanding the Spiritual Health Connection with Nature
Nature and spirituality interface both in practices and in symbolism. Spiritual health, described in Chapter 1, can be enhanced through nature and spiritual practices and religions reference nature in their teachings. Many people are aware of the ancient polytheist religions including Norse (Northern Europe) and Celtic traditions, commonly called Pagan, that were nature-centered, honoring the Earth’s rhythms and nature connections. Druidism—recorded by early Greek and Romans—was a pagan religion that revered oak trees and used mistletoe growing in Velonia oaks to cure infertility. According to spiritual texts, approximately 2000 years ago a number of spiritual teachers recognized the interrelatedness between spiritual, physical, mental, and behavioral health and nature. These actual and symbolic incorporations of nature into spiritual life illustrate ancient practices that demonstrate some of the current findings about the importance of nature for spiritual well-being (Burton-Christie, 1999; Lodewyk et al., 2009; McCormick and Gerlitz, 2009; Reese and Myers, 2012). How this connection is talked about varies according to the spiritual belief or religion; however, in most cases nature is used to enhance spirituality or the sense of something larger than oneself. In Christianity this connection is exemplified by Jesus’ suggestion to ‘contemplate the flower and learn how to live’ (Tolle, 2005, p. 2). Contemplation, supposedly originating with contemplation of a flower, is the origin of Zen in the 14th century. As the tenth child, Hildegard of Bingen’s parents dedicated her to the church at birth and she became a 12th century mystic and healer who used nature, art, and music. Her visionary writings and theology included natural history and the medicinal uses of plants, animals, trees, and stones (Flanagan, 1989). Some of her recorded visions speak to the psychological connection between humans and the natural world very similarly to the bases for ecopsychology (see Chapter 6).
The use of a white bird, the dove, as a symbol of peace or the Holy Spirit illustrates another use of nature. Jesus spent 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness as a pathway to purification and transformation. Buddha used time in nature as a bridge between the physical and spirit domains and he gained his enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree. In some Eastern religions, the lotus flower is considered a window to the spirit and the beauty of the flower is symbolic of the beauty of a person’s essence. The turkey vulture (Latin name Cathartes aura, the golden purifier) has had a strong relationship with humans for over 10,000 years. Tibetan people buried their dead in an air burial. The deceased person was set out (sometimes cut into smaller pieces) and the vultures ate the carrion, symbolically taking the soul from Earth. Today in India the Parsis people, descendants from Persians, carry their dead to a large stone amphitheater at the top of a hill and set the corpses out for vultures. This group of people believes that the dead are released from their spirit and purified (McDonald, 1993; Siegel, 2012). There is a distinct health benefit to this practice because many of the dead are often diseased and possibly contagious. The vultures are able to digest the contaminated bodies because of enzymes in their gut that purify the diseased flesh, in a manner of speaking. Humans may have used vultures to locate fresh kills that may be edible. One might draw a symbolic relationship to angels who have large wings, and in the Christian religion carry the spirit to heaven; vultures have the largest wing span of any living bird. Other cultures including Greeks and Zawi Chemi believed in the healing power of the vulture spiritually and physically.
The practice of Taoism is dated as having originated sometime between the 6th and the 4th century BCE. Taoists understood that the natural environment was important to health and well-being and therefore intertwined time in nature with encouraging their populations to cultivate optimism, passivity, and inner calm. These health benefits from being in nature have been confirmed by modern research. Followers were (and are) encouraged act in harmony with nature because illness was thought to be a result of being out of harmony with nature. Taoist tradition embraces nature as equivalent to the Western religious concept of ‘heaven’. As acceptance of and acknowledgement of the necessity and interconnectedness of all, and a description of systems thinking, Lao-tze wrote: ‘The real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There’s nothing that is not real and nothing that is insufficient. Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange—in Tao they all move as one and the same’. Taoism today continues to encourage followers to act in harmony with nature, viewing life as a series of transformations.
While the current general writings of Christian religion and Confucianism can be interpreted as an indictment of nature as evil, Taoism and Buddhism continue to espouse that we are nature and have interdependency with nature from a survival and health perspective as well as a natural aspect of the order of life (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, 1992). The Dalai Lama, current leader of Tibetan Buddhism, is quick to point out that Buddhist teaching tells us that care of the environment is pragmatically self-care and that we should avoid drastic changes to the environment in order to preserve our lives. From a practice aspect he advises us that humans are gentle and that we identify with gentler mammals such as deer. He says that we have a non-violent inner core and can and should be non-violent towards each other and nature (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, 1992).
Trees, spirituality, mythology, and metaphor
Folklore and mytho-poetic stories continue to influence moral and ethical regard for nature (Hulmes, 2009). However, as science and the church divided, nature was more or less ‘forgotten’ by the Christian church. There were attempts to incorporate some nature-related customs into this religion, such as churches in the 12th century built incorporating animals and nature symbols into their architecture (Kellert et al., 2008; Barnett, 2009; HRH The Prince of Wales, 2010) and eggs associated with the Christian festival of Easter. The use of eggs may, to some extent, be an adaptation of ancient pagan practices of such folks as Druids, related to equinox and spring rites. The egg symbolizes fertility and rebirth. In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix burns its nest to be reborn later from the egg that is left; Hindu scriptures relate that the world developed from an egg.
Altman (1994) writes about a number of groups for whom trees are prominent in their creation stories. He says that Fiji islanders believe they descended from trees and other sacred plants; ancient Greeks saw humanity coming from ash trees; Scandinavian legend has the first woman coming from an elm tree and the first man from an ash. Christmas trees may have originated with German tradition in the 16th century where evergreens were used to symbolize life and rebirth at the time of the winter solstice, although