Comment: Let’s nurture nature

Summer’s over. It’s that time of year when most people – especially families with school-aged children – have their most intense contact with the great outdoors.

SPIRITUAL WELLBEING

Contact with nature is good for us. Studies say connecting with the outdoors improves physical health, through walking, as well as mental wellbeing, with reductions in stress and improved powers of concentration. Many of us will experience greater spiritual wellbeing. We feel closer to God amid creation, gazing for miles from a mountain top or happily ‘lost’ in the depths of a wood.

That’s all good news. But we need to spread it fast. Britain’s population is 80 per cent urban – and rising. Whole generations have no regular contact with ‘wild’ landscape or abundant nature. That’s bad not only for people, but also for nature. People don’t defend what they don’t love. They can’t love what they don’t know. They can’t know what they don’t experience.

If we want to nurture UK nature, we must re-engage the young and disconnected with it. We must make it fun and easy. By all means urge our social media-obsessed teenager to walk in the country – if they’ll come.

AUTUMN PICNIC

But we can also point out the intricacies of a leaf in the garden to a toddler grandchild; prompt our church’s Sunday school to have an autumn picnic in a local park and offer to lead a bird or tree-spotting trail; challenge our couch potato spouse to a regular cycle along the canal tow path, subtly pointing out the surrounding nature, and ending at that great café.

Thank God for holidays. But if we want to turn around the loss of UK nature, we need new generations to know, love and protect it. And for that, experiencing nature needs to become part of the routine, not a holiday exception. (Pictured – some of the many young visitors to A Rocha UK’s urban nature reserve Wolf Fields)