Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World --And Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul by Lucy Jones

Author:Lucy Jones [Jones, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nature, essays, Ecosystems & Habitats, General, BODY; MIND & SPIRIT, Inspiration & Personal Growth, Psychology, science, Life Sciences, Ecology, Self-Help, Green Lifestyle
ISBN: 9781524749323
Google: cXfZzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-15T23:47:00.194916+00:00

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It’s not often that a scientific idea is called “beautiful,” but this was how one academic described the keystone work of Professor Mitchell at the University of Glasgow. His research suggests, convincingly, that greener neighbourhoods which offer a connection with nature might actually reduce the health gap between rich and poor and lead to a better, more equal society. “Inequality has barely got any better,” he said, at the start of his talk at a conference I attended in Bonn, Germany. “This matters; it’s unfair.” Could nature connection really reduce socio-economic health inequalities? My ears pricked up.

Mitchell’s concept is known as “equigenesis.” If an environment is equigenic, it may reduce the gap between the rich and the poor by weakening the link between socio-economic inequality and health inequality. Because of their many health benefits, natural environments are potentially equigenic.

Mitchell spent his early career mapping and measuring socio-economic inequalities, monitoring the health gap and showing that it was getting worse. It became clear to him that to fix the problem of inequality on a massive scale, “you would need a socio-economic revolution.” He began to find the work depressing as he realized it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon and, anyway, massive redistribution of wealth and income wasn’t democratically supported. “I began to feel that although a lot of that work was useful and valuable, it wasn’t moral,” he told me. “We were calling for some massive change that didn’t seem to be on the horizon and we weren’t offering any alternatives.”

He began to think about what might be doable on a short timescale. From there, he moved into studying resilience, and specifically the idea that there are groups of people in difficult living conditions who seem to do better than expected. He decided to look at places that were poor, but where the health of the population wasn’t too bad. There were certain places in the United Kingdom, some in the north-east, which demonstrated such resilience. There, a sense of community or having something in common was important, such as ethnic identity or common industrial heritage. Another factor was green space.

Mitchell had always been an “outdoorsy” type, and he started following the growing literature around nature and health. He theorized that income-related inequality in health would be less pronounced in populations with greater exposure to nature because green space acts to reduce stress. Looking at populations across England, he anticipated an association between green space and population health, but he wasn’t expecting to see such a strong result. “It was a genuine moment of discovery for us,” he said. With Dr. Frank Popham, he found that people who lived near parks and woodlands had lower levels of income-related health inequalities. Using national mortality records from the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics, alongside green space measurements, they paired low-income groups with varying levels of urban green space to see the effect on mortality rates. The rates of income-related mortality were much lower in areas with more green space.

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