Nature fights back with tooth and claw as we persist in destroying it

Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite the ravages inflicted on it by humans, continues to offer solace and hope to many. Such, at least, is a possibility linking these fine but quite different books.

Lucy Jones’s starting point in Losing Eden is her own struggle with depression and addiction a few years back. She writes that three of the things that helped her recover — psychiatry, psychotherapy and the support of others — were straight-forward, but the fourth was more mysterious: a greater connection with the natural world. Surprised and interested, she embarked on investigating the power of nature to heal.

The result is a thorough, well-balanced report, even if it covers familiar ground. Carl Jung certainly recognised the importance of connecting with nature. Better health outcomes were apparent in the public housing projects built in Chicago in the 1960s with green spaces and trees than in those without. And gardening is well known to have marked benefits for those with severe mental health problems.

A sympathetic interviewer and scrupulous journalist, Jones visits project after project and cites study after study documenting the positive effects of time spent out of doors and in the wild. But why, she wonders, when the evidence of benefit is so compelling, do policy-makers not take ‘time in nature’ more seriously? And why do so many continue to perpetrate or tolerate its destruction?

She becomes increasingly radicalised as she investigates. Most children in the UK, she finds, spend less time outdoors during the school day than the UN deems the minimum permissible for hardened prisoners. She entertains concepts such as ‘equi-genesis’ — a proposal by Rich Mitchell of Glasgow University for increasingly equitable access to the natural world to reduce health inequalities between rich and poor.