Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

today is that we have fewer opportunities to reset the nervous system and to lower the level of cortisol, and thus there are many people in the industrialized world who suffer from chronic stress.

people who lived near parks and woodlands had lower levels of income-related health inequalities.

without introducing children to the interconnectedness of life, the gushy, gross wonder of the roiling, seething, slimy, dirty aliveness of nature, how will they love it, and how will they protect it?

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.

Wild swimmers often report improvements in depressive symptoms and an increase in the ‘animation and vigour’

‘The very thing that is causing our crisis – over-consumption – has become our palliative, to soothe away our anxieties about the damage we are doing to the world,’ she wrote. ‘Some people liken this to the vicious cycle of addiction.’

To make spaces truly equigenic, said Mitchell, we need to orient people to them,

How have we got into this mess? Well, that is another book. But in brief, it is our economic systems, our obsession with infinite growth and the way we perceive the world around us, with man at the top of the hierarchy and the world at his disposal. The short-termist nature of human thought limits us from seeing how our actions could lead to catast

Climate change will affect our mental health, then, through various pathways.26 It will directly expose populations at the front line to trauma, such as floods, vector-borne diseases and extreme heat, loss of homes, loss of life, loss of health, and loss of ways of life and cultures.