LOSING EDEN

A British journalist examines the mental, emotional, and spiritual connections between human beings and nature.

While climate change remains the world’s most pressing problem, there are not enough considerations of its effect on the human mind and spirit, especially among children. Jones argues that replacing nature with human-made spaces has created an alienation that is extremely detrimental to our well-being. Citing ecologist Robert Pyles’ concept of the “extinction of experience” and Richard Louv’s idea of “nature-deficit disorder,” Jones suggests that increasingly urbanized living is causing everyone to lose their connection with nature. She looks to her own experiences for evidence and remembers how big-city life in London seemed to exacerbate her experiences with depression and, later, drug and alcohol addiction. The author further suggests that the conditions of the Anthropocene are causing significant distress brought on not just through disconnection with nature, but through awareness of the current environmental chaos. She bases her ideas on the recent work of thinkers like Glenn Albrecht, who has coined such terms as psychoterratic and solastalgia to refer, respectively, to “earth-related mental health issues” and the nostalgia for dying natural spaces that once offered solace. Despite the sobering nature of her arguments and sometimes elegiac tone, Jones offers glimmers of hope. Social scientists and the medical establishment, for example, have begun to accept the idea that greening poor neighborhoods could “mitigate the negative effects of income deprivation on health.” In England, “green gyms, walking-for-health programs, care farms, forest schools, green-therapy groups, surf therapy, and horticultural initiatives” are springing up to counter neoliberal tendencies toward overindustrialization. Both thoughtful and lyrical, this book—which draws on personal experience, research, and interviews with experts from around the globe—offers a powerful plea for humanity to actively seek a more balanced relationship with a planet in crisis.

Vibrantly topical reading.