A walk at lunchtime, a trip to the woods during the weekend or even keeping the houseplants alive. Despite many people's need to feel connectedness with nature, all too often these kinds of activities fall by the wayside due to everyday busyness. Using the Earthfulness Challenge, an initiative in which people did short exercises for 21 days, Bernadette van Heel, Riyan van den Born and Noelle Aarts investigated how people can strengthen their connectedness with nature.
During those 21 days, participants performed a short exercise every day. From listening intently to the birds and walking barefoot through the grass, to thinking about your favourite place in nature and imagining that place will decay. 'The challenge started with accessible exercises, focusing more on using your senses, and then built up to exercises where you had to reflect on your connectedness with nature,' Riyan van den Born, associate professor of Socio-Ecological Interactions, tells us.
Grass between the paving stones
'We know from previous studies that there are multiple dimensions to connectedness with nature,' Van den Born explains. 'You can feel connectedness with nature on a sensory level, but also on an emotional, reflective level. One level is stronger than the other. That's why we deliberately built the challenge using exercises that connected to the different dimensions of connectedness with nature.'
'More than a hundred people took part in that challenge,' explains Bernadette van Heel, PhD student and postdoc at the Centre Connecting Humans and Nature (CCHN). 'We approached all participants asking if they wanted to keep a diary of their experiences. We also distributed questionnaires and conducted several in-depth interviews.'
'Based on the data, we can conclude that the short exercises do contribute to a greater sense of connectedness with nature.' About 40 per cent of the participants indicated they experienced this after the challenge. 'One participant expressed he now realises that nature is not only the forest but also the grass between your paving stones or the little birds in your neighbourhood. Another resolved to let the garden deteriorate lovingly from now on for the sake of biodiversity. Participants also reported thinking more often about the effect of their behaviour on nature, for example about the consequences of flying.'
Helping to protect nature
At the same time, people stressed how difficult they found it to fit the exercises into their busy schedules on a daily basis. Van Heel: 'Even people who find nature very important and always seek nature in their holidays indicated that they did not get around to it every day.' Whereas previous research on connectedness with nature distinguishes dark-green and non-green people, or people who do or do not feel connected to nature, the researchers found that this is more nuanced. 'There is also a group of people who feel connectedness with nature but are unable to experience this connection due to their busy daily lives.'
Furthermore, 30 per cent of the participants said they felt extra willing to do something for nature after the challenge. 'This too is interesting for us. It confirms previous studies, showing that greater nature connection is associated with the willingness to engage in nature protection,' Van den Born argues. 'At the same time, too much commitment to the fate of nature can lead to a feeling of powerlessness. People start avoiding the news, feeling powerless by negative reports about the climate.'
Although Van den Born and Van Heel are not (yet) involved in a new Earthfulness challenge, they will take the results into account in their follow-up studies. 'For me, it is part of my dissertation studying the relationships between humans and nature,' Van Heel says. Van den Born: 'And for me, the findings tie in nicely with FLOW, a European research project in which we are studying the extent to which young people across Europe are involved with water - the rivers, seas and oceans - in their habitat and how that involvement is linked to their willingness to protect these waters.'
Do you want to read more?
Read the publication via: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/3/1119
Photo: Felipe Lopez via Unsplash