What Does Nature Do For You? by Tash Somers

• You do not have to look hard to find science based evidence that nature is good for us. If you do look, you will find ample evidence of the physical and mental benefits with greener landscapes promoting prosocial behaviors. As human animals this is no real surprise, we evolved in it and are hardwired to make sense of it.

  However for generations humans have increasingly replaced wild landscapes for human made environments, with less time spent away from it in greatly controlled clinical indoor environments or pristine gardens we have become deeply embedded in it, the natural world we evolved in has become overlooked.

  The very nature of these man-made divisive behaviours also separates us intellectually. We begin to assume that the natural world around us is not for us to understand or take concern about, unless it is our hobby or our job.

  Never has our reliance on our natural spaces been so important. COVID-19 has led to us being governed on how we now interact as a species and that is largely outside, amongst all of the other species…perhaps nature is trying to tell us something? Forcing a reconnection that has been eroded almost completely away.

  Not many of us do not want to meet in a concrete car park or by a busy polluted road and we do not need to read an academic paper to make that decision. We want to be somewhere beautiful, somewhere alive with birds, trees, flowers and water, we want to surround ourselves in life. But how much do we connect with it or consciously ask ourselves why?

  Next time you step out into a park, woodland or to your own back garden, take a moment to listen, look, smell and feel the nature that is present. There is no need to know what species something is to benefit from it, wait for your own visceral response and lightly take note.

  Do this again and again and ask yourself,  ‘What does this bring to me?’