How Mother Nature and I Manage My Depression

a post by Amie Gabriel for the Tiny Buddha blog


“I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” ~John Burroughs

I sat on the front stoop sobbing, unable to move. Hunched over like a heaving dog hugging my knees and clutching a wad of decomposing tissues. About fifteen minutes before, I’d managed to get myself off the couch where I’d been parked, withered and absent, for the fourth consecutive day, and had made it through the front door.

Once there, I tried to stay upright, but like cool syrup I slid down the side of the wrought iron railing and down onto the steps. Now all I had to do was get up and walk to the mailbox and back and maybe I’d feel better. But I couldn’t do it. It was too much.

I hoisted my ladened head from my knees and stared out the driveway to the mailbox about seven hundred feet away. It may as well have been ten miles… or fifteen feet. It didn’t matter, it was too far.

“Please just help me get up,” I pleaded to a sombre sky. The help didn’t come and so there I sat crying, searching for the energy or the wherewithal to make myself move. Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, twenty-five… the time oozed by thick and distorted.

It had happened before, more than once, and had overtaken me at varying speeds and intensity. Sometimes it leached in with the change of seasons; like an inflatable pool toy left floating past the end of summer, sad and wilted, the air having seeped out in infinitesimal degrees. Sometimes I could fight it off, catch it before things got too grim. Not this time. I’d felt myself spiralling down, hot wind escaping me until I was in a deflated heap, slack and flaccid on the sofa.

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Geneticist: It's time we stopped human evolution

as post by Alasdair Mackenzie for the Big Think blog

People trust Mother Nature to keep us healthy, forgetting that evolution is brutal and uncaring.People trust Mother Nature to keep us healthy, forgetting that evolution is brutal and uncaring.

Measles cases in the U.S. have hit a 25-year high, with 78 new infections in the past week alone. In a sign of the times, a cruise ship with hundreds of Scientologists on board was quarantined in St. Lucia after one passenger was diagnosed with the disease. It's the sort of news you can expect when parents stop vaccinating their children, which many did from the 1990s onward for fear that scientists were foisting remedies on them that were more dangerous than the diseases themselves.

As society has become ever more convenient, hygienic and wrapped in cling film, many hark back with dewy eyes to the natural and supposedly wholesome lifestyles of our ancestors in pre-industrial times. Besides the fear around vaccines, growing numbers of people put their faith in the organic movement, the anti-GM lobby and New Age philosophies. They have increasingly rejected the ability of science to improve our lives, placing an almost religious trust in the benevolence of Mother Nature instead.

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The Healing Power of Nature: How Walking in the Rain Saved My Life

a post by Suzanne Falter for the Tiny Buddha blog

“All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” ~Nietzsche

A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences found that a ninety-minute walk in nature slows our worried, troublesome thoughts about ourselves and our lives. Even better, it reduces the neural activity in parts of the brain linked to mental illness.

On the other hand, if you spend your time walking down city sidewalks, don’t expect much. The science says you’ll have no change whatsoever in your neural activity. Or even in your thoughts about yourself.

This means that if you’re inclined to be anxious, depressed, grieving, or harried, go find the nearest nature trail.

But I could have told you that.

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Is weeding defensible? Moral consideration for crabgrass

an article by John Hainze (Seattle University, WA, USA) published in Interdisciplinary Environmental Review Volume 18 Number 3/4 (2017)

Abstract

How we relate to other species undergirds our approach to sustainability.

This paper traces the development of human regard for other organisms, considering philosophical and religious perspectives in light of recent developments in biology.

Aspects of the biology of pest organisms like silverfish, dandelions, fruit flies, and crabgrass are reviewed as supporting moral considerability. It is determined that the findings of science, philosophy, and religion lead us to abandon a Cartesian conception of non-humans as machinelike other, and towards an attitude of moral consideration for other organisms.

This position requires that we adjudicate conflicts between members of different species, affirming the need to survive over lesser needs such as efficiency or aesthetics. A respectful attitude towards common living things like crabgrass can only enhance our relationship to nature in general.

Hazel’s comment
Pest organisms have a right to life? Philosophically yes but silverfish in my kitchen cupboards do not; dandelions in the rose bed need to be removed; and fruit flies are yucky. Crabgrass I had to look up (see http://www.garden-counselor-lawn-care.com/kill-crabgrass.html) but I feel murderous about the Japanese Knotweed encroaching from my neighbour’s garden.

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Strengthening Wellbeing in Urban Communities Through Wildlife Gardening

an article by Laura M. Mumaw, Cecily Maller and Sarah Bekessy (RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia) published in Cities and the Environment Volume 10 Issue 1 (2017)

Abstract

Conserving biodiversity and advancing well-being are goals usually siloed in environment or health portfolios, yet compelling evidence is emerging regarding the relationship between these activities. There is increasing academic and practitioner interest in the well-being benefits to be gained from experiencing nature in urban parks.

Here we explore the understudied relationship between actively conserving nature in urban backyards and gaining well-being benefits. We investigate a municipal wildlife gardening program run by a community group-local government partnership in Melbourne, Australia whose purpose is to conserve the municipality’s indigenous biodiversity.

Semi-structured interviews with program members in their gardens, supplemented by material from open-ended questionnaires from program garden assessors, were analysed for the program’s impact on participants’ well-being. Participants described experiential, social, and eudemonic well-being benefits including strengthened connections with nature, place and community, derived from participating in a program that immersed them in nature at home, gave their gardening a conservation context, and involved local government and community.

These findings demonstrate that initiatives engaging urban residents on their properties to care for nature as part of local government-community collaborations have important well-being and environmental outcomes that should be recognised and further explored in both conservation and well-being policy and program approaches.

Full text (PDF 20pp)

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