Nature? What's all that about?

Every day, in some newspaper or another there’s an article raving on about how ‘spending time in nature’ is good for our health, wellbeing and mental stuff. The idea even got priced up; The monetary value of spending time in ‘nature’ is estimated to be £356 for every person in the UK, aged 16+.

‘Nature’ activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is nice. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure, reduces blood flow to the prefrontal cortex and instils a good mood. People living close to trees and green stuff are less likely to be obese, inactive, or use anti-depressants. Apparently we prefer to look at landscapes with a fractal D-value of around 1.3, not something that we regularly encounter in built up areas.

Now all of this sounds great, and probably is. Get out into ‘nature’ for a bit and see your health improve. What could be better than that? It’s free, or relatively cheap and can be fun for people of all ages. So they say.

Now, don’t get me wrong, if it’s as good as all that then ‘nature’ therapy should be encouraged. But what about the 42% of the global population that live and work out in here? As far as I’m concerned this joyous celebration of ‘nature’ doesn’t match up to my experiences as a market gardener. Stress, upsets, crises, getting stung, bitten and injured are my day to day life. In 2024, for the first time in 7 years, I got slugs, the year before it was an invasion of voles. The year before that deer dropped by for a snack. Don’t talk to me about hail storms, they come later and more frequently. After seeing my veg beds completely machine-gunned by olive sized hailstones I needed an anti-depressor!

The news media are contaminated with an urban-centric point of view. It’s almost like the journalist think that rural people either don’t really exist, can’t read or are standing in a queue waiting to become urban dwellers and thus ‘real people’. The sort of thing which tends to annoy people who are ‘out here’ producing food and working the land. Bloody peasants.

The other thing that’s fun to note is that the vast majority of these ‘ooh! Nature’s so good for us’ studies are weird. That is they focus on western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic people. And of course they also concentrate on ‘white’ people, for example, only one study has been done in Africa, the same for South America. A bit of a biais there, whoops.

In the end what I find the most frustrating is the image these studies give about what ‘nature’ is. Covid, salmonella, that cold you’ve got, the mice that ate the left-over Xmas cake … they’re all ‘nature’ too. So is chlamydia, athletes foot and that nasty rash. Does this mean that I can sit quietly and watch a rat eat an abandoned KFC and get some health benefits? After all that’s ‘natural’ too isn’t it? Well the rat is at least.

The ‘beautiful nature’ image infects people and they come out into the countryside expecting it to be a particular way. They then get upset with those of us who are making a bit of a noise at inconvenient times whilst working the land. Or even worse making a smell as we spread manure whilst said people are trying to have a barbecue. For a brief period they’ll enjoy the cock crow but they soon get fed up with it and complain. A beekeeper I know had her hives poisoned because the new ex-city neighbour was worried about being stung. She’s given up keeping bees no after 25 of her hives got washed away in recent floods, well floods are nature too but she didn’t get all the health benefits the studies waffle on about.

I do get it though, urban dwellers don’t get out much, live in rectilinear environments that lack green space, trees and suchlike. I visit cities sometimes to see how the 58% live. I got taken to a mini-golf recently and was startled to discover that it was inside this massive warehouse and artificially lit. It cost body parts to do 3 sets of 9 holes. The bloke at the reception said it’d take an hour or so, nah, job done and dusted in 20 expensive minutes.

I’m always impressed by the number of cars in cities, there seem to be more cars than pigeons. Well if urban dwellers want to have so many cars that’s up to them. What happens however is they the read a ‘nature saves’ article, jump in their cars and drive out into the countryside to go for a walk. They get upset when they get held up by tractors or combine-harvesters and they block farm entrances and fill up parking spots.

They then stagger around the shrubbery stepping on those people who are ‘forest bathing’. The ‘forest bathers’ spend time complaining that a Bichon Frise just peed on them. The dog owners shout things like “OH, Geraldine, come here, you shouldn’t run off chasing sheep like that, come back here you naughty dog, stop doing that, come here, no, stop, come back here oh please, come on now, there’s a good dog”. I did wonder if being called a dog confused Geraldine, I had assumed that she was a bitch, but maybe that’s a rude word? It seems that working country dogs have much smaller vocabularies than their urban cousins. They tend to respond to short messages like ‘heel’ or ‘away’. Existential phenomenological monologues tend to go right over their heads.

That reminds me of a city bloke who wandered up to where I was leaning on a fence. He pointed out into the field and asked me if that cow was OK as it seemed to have strange udders. Yup, you guessed, it was indeed a bull. True story

Anyway, to cut a whassname thingy, real ‘nature’ bites, stings, scratches, poos, drops stuff on you and can make you ill. Just remember, that Herpes simplex sore on your lip is nature too, it’s fractal as well. So, in theory, looking at it in the mirror should lowers heart rate and blood pressure, reduce blood flow to the prefrontal cortex and instil a good mood.

Please let me know if it did.

I’m going to have a look at a tree now to see what happens to my pre-frontal cortex, the tree will probably fall on me.