HOW TO CONNECT WITH NATURE

At no time in the long history of our species have humans been more distant from nature than we are today. We spend much of our time indoors. When we are outdoors it is most often in urbanized, artificial spaces. For many of our waking hours, we direct our attention to the flickering screens of our phones and other electronic devices.

Our unprecedented alienation from nature is recognized as a major cause of a burgeoning mental-health crisis among the young and growing spiritual desolation for nearly everyone. Without emotional connection to the natural world and intellectual understanding of its importance for our existence, we lack the passion and motivation to confront the intertwined earth-scale crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and habitat destruction.

Alienation from nature is not a recent development brought upon us by technology. Those of us raised in the Western cultural tradition have inherited a worldview in which human society and nature are in binary opposition, each foreign to the other. With this worldview undergirding our society, culture, and economy, we have moved inexorably away from nature, either dominating and exploiting it or protecting it behind fences, but never allowing ourselves true, reciprocal relationship with the natural world.

I firmly believe that it is both possible and necessary to heal our alienation from nature. Nurturing meaningful connection with nature is a prerequisite for healing our spirits and psyches and remaking our society.

Indigenous and pre-industrial cultures all over the world offer us Westerners guidance toward achieving a healthier relationship with the natural world—a way out of the trap in which we have ensnared ourselves. Following their example, we can see ourselves as part of nature, kin with other life forms. We can recognize that our special gifts—language, opposable thumbs, the ability to plan for the future—place on us a serious responsibility to act as stewards of the world around us. As stewards operating with ethical restraint and judiciousness, we can form reciprocal relationships with other organisms and use nature’s productivity to satisfy our needs without harming the integrity of ecosystems. In this way, the natural world can be our world, and it can be wild at the same time.

Ideas and inspiration for how you can begin to create deep, multi-faceted relationships with nature. There are five key elements that I practice in my own life and recommend to you:

Use your hands to gather leaves, roots, stems, seeds, and fruit from nature and thereby re-establish direct physical relationship with plants. In the process of harvest, adhere to an ethical code of integrity, reciprocity, and responsibility.