Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

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The American West is defined as that which lay west of the 100th parallel, an appropriate definition since that land receives less rainfall than the land to its east and requires a very different land management ethos. Losing Eden begins with the author wondering what the world will look like for her baby daughter. ‘What was coming for her and her generation?’ she asks. ‘Every day brought news of another species in fast decline. Swifts, swallows, hedgehogs, all were on the road to extinction… With 80 per cent of Europe and the United States already without their dark skies because of light pollution, would she ever see the Milky Way? And what would this “biological annihilation”, as scientists had put it, do to her mind and spirit, assuming she managed to survive at all.’ Looking to the future, Jones emphasises the necessity of biophilic cities and robust legislation to protect the natural world. Detroit has established 1500 community gardens on derelict land, while Singapore creates green walls and roofs to make the most of its limited space. In certain countries, there are laws that cement the rights of nature and prevent it from being degraded. Putting things right “will require unprecedented change, and time is not on our side,” Jones concludes. But in her final chapters she offers many ideas for how societies and individuals can change their attitudes and behaviours. In person, she said that youth activism, ecotherapy and protest successes (like against a tree-cutting drive in Sheffield) give her hope. Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth.

Jones writes of the intersection of science, wellness, and the environment, and reveals that in the last decade, scientists have begun to formulate theories of why people feel better after a walk in the woods and an experience with the natural world. She describes the recent data that supports evidence of biological and neurological responses: the lowering of cortisol (released in response to stress), the boost in cortical attention control that helps us to concentrate and subdues mental fatigue, and the increase in activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing the heart and allowing the body to rest. Apowerful and beautifully written survey of the latest scientific research into the vast range of benefits to our minds, bodies, and spirits when we do things outside.” —Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See E.O. Wilson argues that humans have an innate animacy of life. That is, we prefer biological activity over non-biological activity from the time we are born – a squirrel is more interesting to our eyes than a stuffed toy, for example. This was tested in a 2008 study in which newborn babies were shown images of random dots and the movement of a walking hen. Babies preferred to watch the “biological motion display” of the hen (represented by dots) – suggesting that our visual perception has evolved to attune us to the movements of other animals.By the time I’d read the first chapter, I’d resolved to take my son into the woods every afternoon over winter. By the time I’d read the sixth, I was wanting to break prisoners out of cells and onto the mossy moors. Losing Eden rigorously and convincingly tells of the value of the natural universe to our human hearts’ Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun Also, one piece of New Zealand legislation has been called a “new dawn in conservation management.” The Te Urewera Act, passed in 2014, granted legal rights to an ancient forest of the same name that is sacred to the Tūhoe people, a tribe of the Māori.

Impassioned . . . urgent and complex . . . Jones conveys in evocative prose the exuberance of her own rediscovery of nature’s wondrousness, a significant component in her recovery from struggles with addiction and depression . . . These vivid elements of personal experience are interwoven with factual information drawn from a wide array of sources . . . compelling and wide-ranging.” Did you know that experiencing awe can make us more generous? Or that all human babies, left to their own devices, will eat soil? Or that three-quarters of kids (aged 5-12) in the UK spend less time outdoors than prison inmates? Losing Eden is a powerful and beautifully written survey of the latest scientific research into the vast range of benefits to our minds, bodies, and spirits when we do things outside. It made me want to throw my phone in a drawer and drag my kids outside—so I did!” Both these books remind us, as we look out of the window at the budding spring, or listen to birds on our daily socially distanced walks, just how very individual, and how personally precious, these experiences can be. But Reddy is also a product of her parents’ hard-won social mobility, her father getting help to study in the UK, before the family moved to Canada when she was young. Here, her childhood experiences of Quebec landscapes are transporting: “Into this weird, wild winter wonderland, I was delivered, agog… the space, the nature and the quiet were exactly what an inquisitive, imaginative seven-year-old needed.” Her interest in more shamanic relationships with nature also feed into her heritage, particularly her connections with her mother’s Hindu faith. As a child she had a shrine to Shiva and Lakshmi, and writes about how goddesses are believed to be present in trees, flowers, water, and the sun. Nature writing in recent years has often been about landscapes granting peace, even if that peace has mostly been limited to white men walking up mountains and having epiphanies. (If they tried that today, the police would send them home.) These books, each in their own distinct way, take that idea and twist it.

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones attempts to show us the science behind intuitive knowledge that being in nature is good for us. A fascinating look at why human beings have a powerful mental, spiritual, and physical need for the natural world—and the cutting-edge scientific evidence that proves nature is nurture. A British journalist examines the mental, emotional, and spiritual connections between human beings and nature.