Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

ethnic minority groups are less likely to access high-quality natural areas compared with the rest of the population.42 This can potentially exacerbate health inequalities in children, as well as in adolescents and adults,

The human desire for things, comforts and luxuries has competed with nature to breaking point. Living to excess must be replaced with living responsibly and sustainably.

‘It is necessary to be outside for our brains to be stimulated from the flow of sound, light, shapes and colours that nature provides,’

‘The’ environment, rather than ‘our environment’, underlines the misconception that we live on some kind of separate planet, that we are somehow not alive because of the living world around us.

If an environment is equigenic, it may reduce the gap between the rich and the poor by weakening the link between socio-economic inequality and health inequality. Because of their many health benefits, natural environments are potentially equigenic.

It will disrupt our communities, identities and social environments in more subtle ways than we can yet imagine. This effect has been called ‘slow violence’.28 It is going to lead to mental health issues and a sense of distress and disorder.

Women, low-income groups and members of ethnic communities tend to report more instances of feeling unsafe in urban parks. Different groups report finding spaces threatening, amid fears of persecution and discrimination.

The severance of people from the natural world was, in Jung’s view, a disaster, and led to a loss of balance ‘on all levels’, cosmic and social isolation and psychic injury. He called it a loss of the ‘bush-soul’ and laid the responsibility at the feet of ‘more than a thousand years of Christian training’, which he saw as an attack on the natural j

‘nature-deficit disorder’ to refer to the impact of a lack of connection with nature on people’s health. ‘It describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses,’

tension and fatigue as well as improved mood.48 Cold-water swimming acts as a stressor on the body which activates the sympathetic nervous system and increases hormones such as noradrenaline.