What do you remember from your childhood as the best thing you had? Not had as in ‘own’. Had as in ‘formed a key part of your childhood, helped you make fond memories and formed part of who you are’.

I ask because I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the non-negotiable things I want my children to have. (Disclaimer: This might well have something to do with the fact that my due date is now under a month away, and things feel Real.)

This morning, my partner and I were trying to figure out how to make more space for the co-sleeper by the bed, so I suggested moving the keyboard into another room. It’s currently squished between a window and my side of the bed, which let me tell you makes getting up to use the bathroom multiple times a night while eight-months pregnant lots of fun.

To this, he asked, “Do we really need the piano?”

“The piano is a non-negotiable,” I replied.

“Is it? I would say the bed is a non-negotiable.”

I admit, it does sound like he’s the reasonable one here. But I genuinely thought “No, it’s not. We can put the mattress on the floor and sleep just fine if needs be. We cannot throw out a keyboard and still play the piano.”

And so I got to thinking what the actual non-negotiables are, for me, yes, but crucially for the little wriggler inside me who is currently angling to get going and meet the world. For both myself and my partner, top of this list is a garden.

I grew up as an only child in a house with a garden, so I had one all to myself. My partner grew up in a terraced house on a London high road with no garden at all. We have both always felt like something was badly missing from both of these scenarios. For me, I was lonely. I wanted company, other children and play in that garden. For my partner, who played inside with his sister, he just wanted the outside space.

All of this has left me reflecting on what it was about my childhood garden that felt so magical. There was a time when I was a teenager that I couldn’t fathom how I could ever leave it. I felt so strongly attached to it, as if I had become myself in that space, as if it knew me and held me.

What was it about my childhood garden that made me feel so safe, that makes me feel like having access to a garden is of the utmost importance for all kids? As always, the best way I know to unknot a question is to write it out—to paint a picture of child me in that garden.

I grew up in a leafy green, suburban garden in north London, with an apple tree, a choisya and a rotten shed. I say I grew up in the garden because I did. It provided me with a release from the house in which I never felt quite right.

I would lay on my back on the grass, staring up at the blue sky and watching the clouds drift in and out of my view for hours. I watched the shapes they made as they became the background behind the trees’ spindly branches, like the 2D backdrops that are slid in and out of puppet shows. I would run blades of grass delicately through my fingertips as I lay there, gazing, feeling the ground hold me softly and so firmly.

This garden made me feel like the world was kind, that there was a space for me within in it, because there I felt calm. I felt accepted lying among the overpowering, thick scent of the linen-white choisya and the sickening, fermenting smell of the apples as they dropped around me. Sporadically, the tail of my childhood cat would snake into view above me as she sat with me for hours on end.

The garden was entirely bare when my parents bought the house, way back in the early 1980s—just a bare lawn and non-descript brown fencing on three sides. Weekend after weekend, they carted greenery back from their local garden centre, planting every bush until it was a green oasis among the loud, traffic-fume-laden concrete sprawl of Wembley.

The only trees that existed on their arrival were three towering fir trees, right at the bottom of the garden, standing proudly against the brick wall of the neighbour’s garage. I loved those fir trees. My mum hated them. It was a south-facing garden, so they never cast their long shadow over us, but their dark, deep conifer green provided a cool sucking of light that balanced out the bright, neon green of the rest of garden.

One day, when I was fifteen, I came home from school, and those majestic fir trees had been cut down. I stared out of my bedroom window at the bare brick wall that now glared back at me, at the three small stumps nestled sadly at its base. That was the first time I felt myself pull away from that garden. It felt like a warning—that I needed to find myself outside that garden in another refuge, that I couldn’t stay lying on my back gazing up at that small patch of sky above that suffocating London house forever.

That garden was the peaceful buffer that held our small family, just my parents and I, together, when we otherwise would have fallen apart. I was born when they were in their mid- to late-forties, and I always felt like I was growing up with grandparents. The three of us did not fit, but we fit together in that garden. It provided the space and calm for us to co-exist with each other, and that was enough.

When my father died, I collected the flowers from the crematorium a few days after the funeral—white lilies, tulips, carnations and roses. I laid them out gently on one of the flowerbeds in the garden on a sunny June afternoon. While the rest of the world was skipping out of COVID lockdown and waking up to laughter, I sat on the grass in front of those flowers. I was still sitting out there as it got dark, nearing 10pm, with those white petals glowing eerily but soothingly in the fading, muted light.

All the long evenings of past summers were receding away from me into a past life—a past life that had begun the day my dad died, as if my whole life could now be sorted into ‘Before’ and ‘After’. I cradled those gentle memories of standing with him, looking at that same flowerbed and our long, lanky shadows cast by the low evening sun.

This is the last memory I have of finding any kind of peace in that Wembley garden. Now, I have fled it. The delicate balance that made our family work has been uprooted, and I cannot face that garden anymore—the one my mother is now neatening up, pruning, homogenising, when before it was so full of life and secret crevices and new growth.

One evening when my father was ill, I turned to go upstairs to bed, after I had sat with him dozing in his chair. He asked if I could turn his chair to face the garden. He wanted to watch the sun come up in the morning over the lilac bush—that same lilac bush he had planted 40 years ago. It was his favourite.

He was over six-foot tall, monosyllabic and entirely comfortable with sitting in silence rather than saying something trivial—an intimidating stature and demeanour. But he was so very kind and gentle. The neon purple of that lilac bush, as it bloomed every summer—so understated and unassuming—brought him the greatest joy and peace.

How cruel, then, that it was not yet blooming in April when I turned his chair to face it. But by the time his funeral flowers were laid in front of it in June, its flowers had finished shining.

I used to think my sense of self and tethering to this world were enmeshed with that north London garden, that if I could choose to be anywhere in the world for eternity, it would be in that garden with my childhood cat. But since my roots were ripped out from under me, just like those felled fir trees over fifteen summers ago, I have been planting new roots in new gardens.

I have been carving out my own oases in Cambridge. The garden of our previous rental house was full of life, chaotic and buzzing—just some small shrubs and trees around the edges of a patio. I tried my hand at a herb garden, but it seems I am the kind of gardener who likes overgrown chaos much more than neatening. My chives flowered every year—tall and straggly—inedible little globes of purple, and this is just how I liked them.

One summer, I bought a lilac bush. I nestled it in a pot against a brick wall, where it could bathe in the sunshine. I was so very busy with my own life, though, that I was an awful lilac guardian. After its glorious summer, it entered winter looking very sad indeed—twiggy, bare and thirsty. True to form, I let it be, convinced and devastated that I had killed it.

The following spring though, I caught my breath. While outside enjoying a rare patch of sun and gazing up at the new patch of sky over my head, watching as the clouds formed shapes behind the many-shaped roofs of the terraced houses of Cambridge, I cried. There were the lilac’s neon flowers, shining out from the brickwork with bright green hearts for leaves. It was blooming at me, as if it had been doing so all winter.

Now, my partner and I have moved to a small flat with communal gardens. This is the best oasis of all because it is not just ours; it is shared. It fits right at the nexus of what we both needed all those years ago, and what we need now. My partner has access to grass and trees, and I have access to people. And our little one will be able to watch other children playing outside, and, once he’s old enough, join in.

I no longer have my lilac bush. I packaged it off safely to friends, who have their own baby and their own garden. Despite sheepishly handing them what looked like some twigs poking out of a large pot back in December, it is now blooming cheerfully in their garden, and I couldn’t be happier. This lilac bush too, just like our communal garden, is not owned but shared. And this is exactly what was missing from my childhood garden. I might have felt safe and held there, but not to being able to share it with anyone started to make it feel less like a safety net and more like a trap.

So our non-negotiable for our kid is not just a garden. It’s a home that is open to people, to the outside, to life. It’s a place of freedom and safety, of warmth and nature. It’s a shared space of belonging, safety, nature and community.

And all of this only seems possible when you have windows that open onto trees, grass to lie back on and watch the sky, and soft ground to run barefoot across with friends.

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How often have you heard the complaint that being environmentally friendly is expensive? It’s valid.

I was in my local shop the other day, looking for table salt and triple A batteries, when the pricing of toothbrushes caught my eye. A pack of three plastic Oral-B toothbrushes was £1.98—just 66p per toothbrush. A single Colgate toothbrush made of recycled plastic with plant-based bristles was £2, while one Colgate toothbrush made of FSC-grade bamboo with charcoal bristles was £3.85. Try to persuade a single, low-income parent of three kids to choose one of the latter two options, and it ain’t happening (unless, of course, they are a very particular, rare kind of person).

And toothbrushes are just one example. What about membership of conservation organisations, responsible for funding a large amount of conservation work? This is highly unlikely to be made up of those on low incomes.

This, obviously, is not a slight against those with less disposable income. This raises important questions about what the relationship is between income and money spent on the environment. If the more environmentally friendly choices are more expensive, is it true that as people get wealthier, they spend more of their money on greener options?

This isn’t just an abstract, theoretical question that’s interesting to ponder. We currently have an obsession with using GDP as a marker of progress. If it’s true that as GDP rises, people spend more on conservation, then is this obsession misplaced? (Spoiler: yes.)

Essentially, the dominant economic model is a capitalist one that has firmly linked growth with increasing incomes and higher consumption—does this mean environmental action is doomed to failure (in which case we need to adopt an alternative measure of progress, fast), or can we successfully protect the environment within this framework?

To answer this, we need to think about a graph. It’s not complicated—bear with me.

Have you heard of the Kuznets Curve? It’s an idea from economics that represents a hypothetical relationship between income and inequality.

The general idea is that, initially, as incomes increase, inequality increases too—think ‘money makes more money’, so those with higher incomes grow theirs, while those less well-off continue to stay less well-off. But then, the relationship reaches a tipping point beyond which, as incomes increase still further, inequality begins to decrease, as the benefits of rapid societal monetary growth start to be felt.

Existence of this curve is massively disputed, with most accepting that it applied only to a very brief period after the Second World War in Europe and the US.

But we’re not here to talk about economics. We’re here to talk about economics in the context of conservation.

Mirroring this idea is the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This proposes the same upside down ‘U’-shaped relationship between income and environmental degradation.

At first, its suggested, environmental degradation increases as incomes increase, since people tend to use more resources as their incomes rise (think more flights and travel, excess food, excess clothes and excess stuff). After a tipping point, as larger incomes allow people the luxury of being able to care about the environment and invest in it, environmental degradation decreases again.

Essentially, the Environmental Kuznets Curve suggests that being environmentally friendly is expensive, so only once people’s basic needs are met by having enough money can they afford to spend money on the environment. That’s the idea.

If this were indeed the case, then prioritising growth in GDP should eventually lead to better environmental outcomes. Let me explain why this doesn’t work, in case you can’t see the holes in this argument already.

In reality, there is very little evidence for the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. It’s likely that it represents more of an idealised hope that justifies our current economic model, in which resource use is firmly coupled with economic growth—i.e., the more we develop economically, the more resources we use and the worse-off the natural world becomes.

Firstly, let’s think about how biodiversity behaves. Biodiversity has a very slow recovery rate, and once a species is lost, it is lost forever. So clearly, the Environmental Kuznets Curve cannot apply here: once this type of environmental degradation has happened, it doesn’t matter if further down the line people invest in conservation more once they have higher incomes—the damage is already done and irreparable.

Then there’s the existence of historical, traditional practices that, despite being environmentally damaging, are entrenched and very hard indeed to overturn, even once people have higher incomes. Think of grouse shooting in the UK. This practice dates all the way back to the mid-19^th century, and it means that about 8% of the land in England and Scotland is still managed to this day to provide the best habitat for red grouse, as opposed to other, more biodiverse habitats.

Another example is the use of rhino horns in traditional Chinese medicine. In fact, this is a good example of how wealthier people tend to be drawn more to expensive items—high-status symbols that often have a high environmental cost: shark fins, fur coats and snake-skin bags, rhino horns, meat-heavy diets, four-wheel drive cars or long-haul flights.

While it might be true, at least in principle, that people have greater capacity to prioritise the environment monetarily once they have more comfortable incomes, in reality, this doesn’t seem to be how people actually behave.

In fact, the evidence suggests that, as people’s wealth increases, so does their disconnect from nature. People become less aware of their natural environment as they become more surrounded by material goods, so they start to care less about the state of nature. This makes it easier for wealthier people to make lifestyle and consumer choices that cause environmental damage.

A survey conducted by National Geographic back in 2014 found that people from wealthier countries feel less guilty about their environmental impact than those from poorer countries do, despite having a much larger negative impact on the environment. Take a look at the average carbon footprint of someone living in the Philippines versus the US, for example. In the Philippines, the average amount of CO₂ produced by one person in a single year is 1.5 tons. In the US, it’s 13.6 tons. And yet, it seems those who feel more guilty about their impact, and so more likely to make changes, are the very people doing less damage.

The final thing the Environmental Kuznets Curve fails to take account of is leakage of environmental damage. In other words, as a country’s internal environmental damage lessens, it is likely that part of the reason is they are exporting this damage to somewhere else.

At a country-scale, it might sometimes be true that environmental damage starts to decrease as income levels rise, but this is often only because a nation’s negative environmental impacts are being exported to other countries.

On the face of it, for example, it might appear that European countries’ agricultural practices are less damaging now than they used to be. In reality though, a large part of this is down to imports of beef and lamb from Brazil, rather than eating home-grown. The imported meat comes from livestock fed on soy, for which vast swathes of the Amazon are being cleared—the environmental degradation happens in Brazil, but it is caused by those in Europe.

In one study that looked at countries’ rates of deforestation and reforestation between 1961-2007, 22% of countries’ conservation investments were offset by being responsible for environmental degradation elsewhere. And this percentage increased as development increased—for the period 2002-2007, this percentage increased to 52%. So the evidence suggests that it just isn’t true that environmental degradation decreases as economic growth continues, despite what many would like to believe is feasible.

All of this points to the central idea that it isn’t possible for conservation efforts to succeed under our current capitalist model of economic growth—one that encourages increased consumption and greater exploitation of finite resources. Our choice of per capita GDP as our only measure of growth is inherently tying us to prioritising consumption and calling that progress. There just doesn’t seem to be any evidence that we will all start throwing our extra disposable income at environmentally friendly choices once we reach a certain income.

So what can we do about it?

The first thing we could absolutely do now, even under our current economic model centred on GDP, is to force the market to capture externalities—i.e., to regulate businesses and charge them for their true environmental footprints. Let me go back to our toothbrush example to explain what I mean.

The reason that the plastic toothbrushes are so much cheaper than the bamboo ones is not because they are actually cheaper to produce based on the resources used to make them; it’s because no one is forcing companies to pay for the environmental cost that is inherent in producing a plastic-based product. Plastic is ‘cheap’ according to the price tag we’ve given it because we haven’t built its environmental cost into our system—it’s a material made (mostly) from fossil fuels, so it has an inherently high cost in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, plus it is a huge source of damaging environmental pollution.

So the cost of a plastic toothbrush is, in reality, very high; it’s just that our monetary system hasn’t built this in, so we think it is cheap.

Forcing companies to truly bake environmental costs into the price of their products would go a long way to reducing that massive price difference we see in the shops between the more and less environmentally damaging goods. This may not be a sexy idea. It may not be popular because no one wants to pay more for things. But everything does ultimately have an actual cost in terms of resource use, and if our pricing doesn’t accurately reflect this, then all we are doing is shifting the cost onto future generations in the form of environmental degradation.

There are also ways of achieving an alternative kind of growth that isn’t based simply on increased consumption—‘green growth’.

We could shift to a focus on resource-use efficiency, so that we can continue having faster cars (or whatever it is we think we want) by using the same amount of resources, or even fewer if we can work out how. We could also choose to redirect investment towards helping the growth of service industries, like healthcare or teaching, as opposed to production. All of this is possible if we want it to be—if we stop swallowing the narrow, relentless focus on income and consumption as the benchmark for progress.

Ultimately though, the evidence suggests we need to adopt an alternative model of growth, one that is focused on a more meaningful measure of quality of life than GDP. At the end of the day, it’s an improvement in quality of life that we all want, isn’t it? This is what we really mean when we talk about progress. It’s simply that we’ve got stuck with the wrong ruler with which to measure it.

Other measures do exist. A particularly hopeful one is the Genuine Progress Indicator (or GPI), which tries to build a fuller picture of the wellbeing of a country. Only a part of the wellbeing of a country is made up of the size of its economy, so GPI also includes measurements of environmental and social factors to form a better assessment. These include things like carbon footprints, pollution, resource depletion, public health and rates of poverty.

This means that if a country improves financially, but this improvement is offset by increasing poverty and pollution, then the change in GPI will be zero, or even negative if GDP increases are more than offset by negative social or environmental costs. This makes a lot of intuitive sense. It seems entirely reasonable that economic growth isn’t synonymous with societal progress. It forms only a part.

Imagine countries having a genuine desire to improve GPI instead of GDP. Imagine if this were the measure always touted during election campaigns and used to compare countries’ progress. Until this happens, improvement will always be thought of as higher incomes and business profits, which are intrinsically linked to greater resource use, so foiling environmental efforts.

This is completely possible. Take Costa Rica, for example. They consistently top the charts on the Social Progress Index, which includes measures of human needs, wellbeing and opportunity. Costa Rica scores more highly than the US for health, life expectancy, democracy, personal rights and environmental quality, despite having an average income over three times smaller than the United States. The difference is simply that they decided to prioritise the right things, accepting this means they won’t top the GDP charts.

Sometimes, it takes seeing examples of what’s possible to let us dream about a future we actually want. Economics might have a reputation for being complex, packed with jargon, impossible to understand and graph-filled. But the principles behind it are really just decision-making, the type that you and I make every day.

Production and consumption of goods and services are driven by us—by the daily choices we all make—and understanding just a little bit more about how these can be linked and unlinked to environmental damage helps us make more informed, empowered decisions. This is how everything ever thought of as unchangeable got changed.

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Research is often inaccessible because of jargon and assumptions of prior knowledge. This shouldn’t be the case. Everyone has the right to know what we know. Knowledge is power, after all. AI can’t interpret and contextualise research for you, but I can.

That’s why I read science papers that won’t make it into the media but should, so you don’t have to.

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Dear friends,

This month, I’m looking at research on pot plants in classrooms. Yes, it exists.

A month or so back, I wrote a piece about our tendency to bring nature inside our homes in the form of pot plants, cut flowers and Christmas trees. So many of us do this, and for so many of us, our house would not feel like a home without a good dose of green leaves.

Despite us decorating our homes in this way, school classrooms, where we send our children to spend a good portion of their time, do not get the same treatment. The only plant I remember at school was an underwater plant, Elodea, that we used in science experiments.

This month’s study wanted to work out if introducing plants into school classrooms affected students’ perceptions of these spaces. In other words, does introducing pot plants into schools make students feel the same way towards their classrooms as we do towards our homes—positive, comfortable and like we want to be there?

‘Influence of limitedly visible leafy indoor plants on the psychology, behavior, and health of students at a junior high school in Taiwan’

I love this study because of its simplicity: take two classrooms, put plants in one but not the other, see if the students feel or behave differently. Not all science need be multi-million-pound-grant levels of complex.

I also love its real-world applications. Much like the paper I unpacked back in January, which looked at how views of trees might influence recovery after surgery in hospital, this study experiments with ways in which we can integrate nature better into our existing systems and how this might help.

I first came across this paper through reading another. It was about outdoor learning in primary schools, and it specifically referenced the findings of this one: ‘In one study, children with plants in their classroom experienced stronger positive feelings about their environment and had lower absences from school…’ One thing led to another, and I think you can see the rabbit hole I ended up down.

What did the researchers do?

To collect their data, the researchers worked with two classes of eighth-grade students at a junior high school in Taiwan. There were about 40 children in each class, and they were all about 13 years old. Their classrooms were right next door to each other, making them ideal for this experiment since they were practically identical.

For a period of just over seven months, the students in both classrooms were surveyed every other week. They were asked the same questions each time about their perceptions of their classroom, in terms of preference, attraction, comfort and friendliness. The researchers also got hold of data on students’ sick leave and the punishment records for misbehaviour.

Each of preference, attraction, comfort and friendliness was gauged by asking students to rate how much they agreed with a statement: ‘I like this setting very much’ (preference), ‘I am attracted to this environment very much’ (attraction), ‘I am very comfortable in this setting’ (comfort) and ‘This environment makes me feel very friendly’ (friendliness). This allowed the researchers to see whether children’s feelings towards the classroom changed once the plants were added.

All students completed the questionnaire ten times, the first four times before there were any pot plants involved, and the last six times once plants had been added into one classroom (the experimental group) but not the other (the control group).

Now, when I was reading this paper the first time, I was imagining cute little pot plants—maybe some succulents, a fern, a classic monstera or devil’s ivy. However, see below.

To the classroom of the experimental group, the researchers added six Botel Tobago cinnamon trees. I wouldn’t normally add such extraneous detail here, but these dimensions are worthy of mention: the six plants had an average height of 135cm, an average canopy size of 80cm, and they took up 6% of the classroom’s floor space. I think I literally said ‘Oh wow’ out loud when I saw the photo.

The plants were cared for by school staff, so the children weren’t responsible for this, although, as the author notes, tending to the plants might well have influenced how students felt towards them. Interestingly, despite not being part of the official data collection, several students were observed adding small decorations to the plants, which I think is just fascinating and heart-warming at the same time—I know what experiments I’d want to run next…

The point here was to see if simply having plants in classrooms affected how students felt towards these spaces, and I think you’ll agree, this was the perfect, simple set-up.

What did they find?

Firstly, students in the classroom with plants racked up significantly fewer hours of sick leave and significantly lower rates of punishment for misbehaviour over the test period in contrast to the children in the classroom without plants.

Secondly, the children in the group with plants showed significantly higher perceptions of preference, comfort and friendliness towards their classroom than those in the group without plants.

In summary then, plants in the classroom made these children prefer their environment more and feel more comfortable and friendly in it, which also meant they had less time off school and misbehaved less. As I said—simple, straightforward, not rocket science. But sometimes, we need to collect evidence for the stuff that isn’t rocket science.

Why do we care?

Frankly, the fact that people dedicate time and whole careers to collecting these kinds of data and asking these kinds of questions restores my faith in humanity. I’m not being hyperbolic here. Research that works out how to design robotic ‘bees’ to pollinate flowers or how we can send people into space faster does the opposite.

I think it’s a question of how we decide to use human ingenuity and intellectualism. Sure, we can throw money, resources, time, brain power at walking across the surface of the moon, but there are still people who can’t see the point of putting plants in classrooms to help children have a better environment in which to learn and spend so much of their time. And yet, it’s often this kind of research that’s deemed pointless, not worth the money and frivolous.

I care about these results because I think they get to the heart of everything we misunderstand about how children learn and what they deserve from school. So many classrooms and school environments have been designed around the idea that, in order to learn, children need no distractions—fine, in principle, but in reality, this has come to look like removing anything remotely fun, interesting or real from the room. Aren’t these precisely the things that help us learn?

It feels like a double standard to decorate our own homes with art, pleasing objects and plants so that we enjoy being there, but then not question it when we send children off into sterlised, boring, drab classrooms all day, expecting them to return enthused with a love of learning about the world.

Yes, the findings of this paper seem simple, even obvious—that children feel better about their classrooms when they have plants in—but sometimes, we need to be reminded of the obvious. Who could ask for a simpler, cheaper way to improve children’s time at school? It is rare that solutions come along so capable of being acted upon and with such little paperwork.

Full credit to the author of this paper: Ke-Tsung Han. If you would like to read the full paper, click here.

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I had zero ideas for this week’s newsletter, so I planned to do what I always do—go outside, sit in the sunshine and see what comes to me. But today, it is grey, overcast and rainy. I’m in the UK; this is normal. But it’s annoying when you rely on happy weather for inspiration, even more so when you write about how people interact with nature. I need to see this happen in order to write about it, and people don’t tend to do this in the rain.

So I’ve come to a café instead, to watch the rain pour from the inside, where it is cosy and there’s gentle jazz music. What a hardship.

But all this has got me thinking about our British obsession with rain. It’s clearly too simplistic to say that only sunny weather is inspiring—I doubt Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights in the sunshine.

Here in the UK, rain is such a large part of our lives that it is also part of our cultural identity, so much so that there are famously hundreds of words to describe rain in English. There’s even a book titled 188 Words for Rain, by Alan Connor, which explores this cultural quirk.

Even more extreme, the Sámi languages—those spoken in the far north of Europe, in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia—apparently have anywhere between 180 and 300 different words for types of snow, forms of ice and snow tracks. I’m no linguist, but I certainly can’t think of anywhere near this number of English words related to snow. Rain, on the other hand, I might get closer with.

This points to an interesting feedback loop between the environment we live in (e.g., a rainy UK), the language that has developed to describe it (e.g., English with plenty of words for rain but not many for snow), and how we think and feel. I think it’s remarkable how language finds ways to describe the most prominent aspects of our world and how we relate to it without any kind of proactive oversight.

It follows, then, that cultures with fundamentally different ways of relating to the natural world will have fundamentally different ways of talking about it.

This takes me back to the anthropology department in which I did my master’s, where I went to amazing talks on how language influences culture and vice versa, but I could never follow any of it up because I was there to study palaeoarchaeology and primatology. Thankfully, this rainy café day has given me the perfect excuse to dig up my notes…

How different cultures talk about and describe the world around us can hugely influence thinking patterns. This sounds abstract, but it has incredibly real consequences for how we frame problems and solutions, and for how we relate to our world. Let me show you what I mean.

You might think that every language has a word for each number, since counting things is essential—wrong. Several indigenous cultures of Amazonia and Australia don’t. This is obviously not because they are ‘primitive’ or somehow incapable of numerical conceptualisation; it simply reflects that the way they live—in harmony with, among and as an intricate part of nature—doesn’t require them to count things. You either have enough or you don’t.

A famous example is Walpiri, spoken by the Walpiri people of northern Australia. They only have words for ‘one’, ‘two’ and ‘many’. Older generations talk about time of day only by where the sun lies in the sky, and maps are held by this culture as songs, rather than as pictorial depictions of distances.

Another is the Pirahā people of the Amazon. They have words for ‘small amount’ and ‘large amount’—and that’s it because it’s enough for their way of life. Beyond this, their language has no tense to describe things that are not physically present, so they can’t talk about the future or the past. The language is remarkably unique—it has just three vowels and eight consonants, and as well as having no precise words for numbers, they also have no words for colours, describing things instead in a relativistic sense: ‘blood-like’. In other words, they see the world in a descriptive, comparative sense, rather in than our Western way, in which we slap reductive labels on the infinite variety of nature—a ‘red’ flower could mean such a variety of things!

None of this means their communication is in any way simplistic. They are able to dispense with words altogether and whistle or hum entire conversations. This makes total sense, since this is a better way to communicate while hunting in or moving through dense rainforest. Although they have no tenses, their verbs are incredibly complex. They don’t include markers that denote tense, gender, person or number, but they do encode information on whether an event is witnessed by eye, whether the speaker is certain of its occurrence, whether it is desired, and whether it was near or far away.

Culturally, the Pirahā language shapes their values: they do not store food, even when Western methods have been shown to them, preferring to eat when they get hold of it; there is no social hierarchy; no one tells anyone else what to do; and they uphold that their culture is complete and in need of nothing from external cultures. When taught how to make their own canoes, which they use daily for fishing, despite being perfectly capable of mastering the skill, they simply declared the ‘Pirahā do not make canoes’, choosing instead to rely on the work of neighbouring communities who make canoes for them, in exchange for resources the Walpiri provide them with.

Ultimately, cultures who do not count, like the Walpiri and the Pirahā, have embedded into their language and way of life the idea that not everything attainable is necessary. Living as part of the world, just as all other species of animals, plants and abiotic elements do, creates a greater focus on the present and a more realistic sense of actual need.

I’d argue this is a much more accurate reflection of reality than our twisted, far-removed Western way of living grants us. We are all living as an intricate part of the natural world, whether our society lets us realise this or not, and all the resources we need come from nature. We need a certain amount, and everything else is excess. Why bother counting in detail higher than ‘enough’?

You can see how the world would be a very different place if cultures formed around this philosophy were dominant.

Even further along this line of thinking are the many indigenous cultures who have no word for or concept of ‘nature’, since, they argue (and I’d agree), this word is only necessary if it has been ‘othered’ from us. The best and most well documented example of this is among the Indigenous Peoples of Northern America.

In one study from a couple of years ago, conversations with 17 Indigenous leaders were held to explore more about their conceptualisation of nature and perspectives on the Western approach to environmental issues. Spencer Greening (La’goot), of the Tsimshian of the Pacific Northwest Coast, explained why their people have no need for a word for ‘nature’:

‘…there isn’t really a word for [nature] in a lot of languages. And so it only becomes something when we other it. And so in an Indigenous sense, like, nature is just our place, our home, where we belong to. And you wouldn’t need to define it in that way. But in a Canadian or Western sense, we’re able to define it because we’ve othered it.’

Many of the Indigenous leaders proposed that our relentless anthropogenic framing of solutions comes from just how noun-based our English language is. The languages of these Indigenous Peoples, on the other hand, are verb-based. Quinn, of the Anishinaabe people, explained this in the context of the Anishinaabemowin language:

‘…[it] is really verb based, so you don’t have things. The amount of verbs in the language far outweighs the amount of nouns so everything’s in motion…things [that] are inanimate tend to be animate, where in English, and the idea of Western-thinking, things are always inanimate. In Anishinaabemowin, things are alive, they’re more than just alive, you know, there’s often things that are spiritual.’

This all sounds quite semantic, but it has the realest and most far-reaching of consequences for how they are able to assess and articulate the environmental problems of today—safe to say, they do this much more eloquently and in a much more nuanced way than Western cultures do.

Broadly speaking, the 17 Indigenous leaders characterised the root causes of the biodiversity and climate crises as: ‘the structural legacy of colonization and capitalism, a problem of human values, and climate change as the cumulative impact of industrial disturbances’—exceedingly more nuanced than ‘excessive burning of fossil fuels creates greenhouse gases’, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Refreshingly, in response to questions about the causes of environmental crises, many of those interviewed described a set of human values, underpinned by colonial and capitalist systems, that influence human behaviours responsible for driving these crises:

‘…the modern world, or the mainstream Western world, has lost touch with a human society that values relationships with ecosystems more than its own excess.’— Spencer Greening (La’goot), of the Tsimshian

‘…there [is] an increasing tension between how the world is supposed to work and how the dominant society want it to work… [Climate change is] …a product of that tension… [with] those two things coming into conflict with each other.’— Kyle, of the Métis

This allows them to frame the biodiversity and climate crises in a much broader context, taking account of the extremely long history of how industrial development has negatively impacted the natural world. Eriel, of the Dënesųłiné, suggested that the Western tendency to focus exclusively on oil and gas neglects the…

‘…long history of economic drivers that have been created and forced upon our communities by settler society without our participation… [such as] logging, agriculture, and mining for multiple different types of things in our territory.’

I find all of these quotes and perspectives wildly refreshing. It is exactly this mindset that our Western leaders cannot or refuse to grasp, and precisely this mindset that holds indigenous cultures the world over, along with the rest of the natural world, at the mercy of the economic-growth-obsessed, dominant Western cultures. And this is all enmeshed so intricately within the languages we use to describe our existence.

Stemming from a language and culture in which there is not just no word for ‘nature’ but no conceptualisation of ‘the natural world’ as existing as any kind of entity, the Indigenous Peoples of Northern America are much better able to assess and articulate the environmental problems of our time. They understand deeply and intrinsically how we got here and why it’s a relational shift that is necessary to prevent society from further adding to these cumulative, environmental problems—those that have inevitably followed from our separatist, capitalist and colonial mindset.

I find it so very revealing that you can see these antithetical perspectives reflected in our very languages and thinking patterns: in the noun-based, separatist languages of Western society, in which counting is an essential skill, versus the verb-, present- and needs-based languages of indigenous cultures.

Increasingly in the ecological and conservation literature, the importance of integrating traditional, indigenous knowledge and voices into environmental work is cited as essential to progress—something that is certainly advocated for by indigenous peoples themselves. Personally, I would argue that integration is insufficient—give them the mic and the power! What do we know living over here in our artificial concrete world?

I am clearly not suggesting that the way forward here is to ban the word ‘nature’ and stop counting, but I do think that a greater awareness and appreciation of alternative ways of existing in the world might be a powerful way for us to open our eyes to the possibility that Western cultures have a great deal to learn indeed.

Our warped relationship with nature, our insistence on the idea that nature exists as anything separate from us at all, has very deep origins. It’s both driven by and reflected in the ways in which we talk and think, and consequently the ways in which we build and run our societies.

So yes, we can improve things with top-down policy change, integrating more space for nature in our lives and our kids’ education, but we also need a roots-up approach. And this starts with listening to and learning from cultures who have got this right for millennia, with our minds and hearts open to and willing for change.

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When was the last time you learned something new because your mind went down a rabbit hole of questions? Where were you? What sparked it?

I’ll go first.

I was walking under a birch tree when my forehead knocked into a dangling catkin, dusting pollen into my nose. I sniffled a little. Then, I noticed that some of the catkins were green not yellow, and not producing pollen. I had thought all catkins were male and so produced pollen, so I found myself looking this up.

I was wrong—some species grow both male and female catkins on the same tree. In looking this up, I realised where I’d misremembered. It’s not that all the catkins on the same tree are of one sex; it’s that all the flowers on the same catkin are of one sex.

One thing led to another, and I found myself learning that the etymology of the word ‘catkin’ is from the Dutch word ‘katteken’, meaning ‘little cat’, because they look like kittens’ tails. This was several weeks ago, and I’ve remembered that. I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but I’ve remembered this.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to tell you about the etymology of obscure words.

It is to demonstrate that when we spontaneously come across something that catches our attention, we often end up becoming genuinely curious, doing a bit of self-led learning and then remembering what we learn—if only we could so easily remember those lists of French words we had to memorise for weekly vocab tests at school.

I’ve written a lot in recent posts about how important unstructured time outside in nature is for children—for their wellbeing and social development, mainly. But I acknowledge that some might remain dubious about shifting a school learning environment from an easily controlled, indoor classroom environment to outside, when children do need to actually learn some things.

Clearly, the point of school should be more than simply learning facts, academic skills and sitting exams. School is also about developing social skills, making friends, learning independence and critical thinking, having new experiences, learning to love learning and generally growing up into a well rounded human being. While a lot of people might accept that spending more time outside in nature might help with the second of these lists, we are so very stuck in the mindset of prioritising academic learning at school that this results in a reluctance to sacrifice any time at all in a conventional setting, where children ‘learn things’, in favour of outside, where children ‘merely play and feel happy’.

I would like to reassure you that these academic and social development functions of school are not so neatly divided from each other—that outside time is, in fact, a powerful gateway to academic learning.

Let me tell you a story set in a primary school nestled deep in the Norfolk countryside.

An oppressive, humid heat hangs heavy over a July day, that almost-summer-holiday excitement palpably bubbling out of the filled classrooms as the doors lie open, hoping to attract a breeze. Spying me surrounded by miscellaneous bits of kit and standing at the edge of their playing field, a whole class of seven- to eight-year-olds come rushing towards me as they are let out for breaktime.

“Kate!” they shout. “What are you doing?”

“I’m counting your trees,” I reply, slightly flustered as I wrestle with a 100m-long measuring tape that is unhelpfully unravelling out of its holder.

They nod approvingly, as if that makes perfect sense. I had visited this class about a month before to deliver a biodiversity workshop—their infectious enthusiasm for this has not dwindled.

“Can we help?” they chorus. Before I can assign jobs, several begin self-delegating. “I can measure!” “Can I have the clipboard? I can write it down!” “I can wind this back up!”

I am admittedly immensely grateful for this last offer, as I somewhat apologetically hand over the large bundle of tape. Accepting that I may well have to re-collect this data afterwards, I decide to embrace the help and see how far we can get. Explaining all the measurements I’m taking from each tree, we start on the nearest sycamore.

Together, we estimate the tree’s height and canopy radius in metres. We identify it by looking at the bark and the leaves. We measure its diameter at chest height (I do not point out that this should really be my chest height, since they seem so thrilled to be involved), and we call all our measurements out to the designated writer.

Among all the giggles and fun, there is teamwork, cooperation, delegation and real learning going on. I watch, completely taken aback by the sheer simplicity of seeing exactly what my research is all about in full-throttle action right before me.

Together, we learn how to read the tape measure—what the difference is between a metre, a centimetre and a millimetre. Without realising it, these children are suddenly using a whole vocabulary they didn’t know five minutes ago: “What’s the species?” “What’s the diameter?” “How big is the canopy?” “One and a half metres!”

They feel confident about asking questions, too, I notice. The child writing it all down—who I had seen the last time I visited sitting shyly at the back of the classroom—replies, “Kate, how do I write ‘a half’ as a number?”

I show her the decimal point and the five, giving a brief explanation about five being half of ten, which she seems to swallow. At any rate, on receiving my clipboard and datasheet back as they race inside again, there are plenty of confidently used decimal points.

“Can we use these numbers in our maths lesson?” asks the boy who hands back my tape measure, not a bit sheepish despite the holder now being entirely separate from the 100m of tape.

“What do you mean?” I ask, in awe as to how the bundle I had handed over could have possibly grown so much in size in such a short space of time.

“Can we add them up and take them away from each other?” he asks, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world.

“Of course,” I reply, handing over the datasheet—an exchange in which I definitely got the rotten end. He takes it happily and skips off.

Looking down at the mess of kit now surrounding me, I somewhat hopelessly make a start at trying to wrap the 100m of tape around my arm. I may have ended up with a less-than-ideal set of data that morning, but that kid joyfully learning how to write a half—and hardly realising it—is worth much more than a fancy analysis and a published science paper, especially if other people eventually hear their story and it catalyses the change needed for all children to have this kind of experience regularly.

I often think back to that hot July day in Norfolk with those kids. It’s easy to read published papers with quantifiable results on how being outside affects this, that and the other. But seeing it happening right in front of you adds an extra dimension. I can’t remember the exact figures and findings from the paper I unpacked at the start of the month on children’s stress levels while learning outside, but I can remember every word and facial expression of this exchange from seven summers ago. It hits differently.

Children love learning. We all do. It’s human. It’s exactly why, hate it as we might, people scroll on social media so much—we want to feed information to our brains, even if it’s bad quality. If children aren’t engaging with or enjoying what they’re learning at school, then something about the way we are teaching, about the environment we put them in, about what we’re teaching them is wrong.

Ask a child a maths question in the form of how much change they get from buying X amount of sweets from a sweetshop (Who gets change anymore anyway?), and it’s no wonder their eyes glaze over, especially since the question is usually written in boring black and white on a piece of paper and there are no actual sweets involved. But make the numbers they are dealing with real, make them mean something in their world, make them tangible and active, and the whole process of learning becomes holistic and inherently more engaging. No longer are they practicing one separated skill, like addition, at a time. They are learning lots of skills all at once—measuring, writing, teamwork, vocab and addition—all built into a larger activity they are actively involved in.

I share this story with you because I think it perfectly encapsulates how nature is the ideal setting for learning anything. It isn’t just useful for learning how to identify trees. It’s a dynamic place that can be touched and felt, that is real not abstract. It’s a learning environment that defies reductive subject boundaries. It encourages curiosity, imagination, attention and experimentation.

Plus, the natural world contains so much that we don’t know. Isn’t it where our species have learned everything from, ultimately? Why, then, this recent and damaging mindset that the natural world might be able to offer play and fun, but it can’t support ‘serious’ learning? I beg to differ.

I don’t think I’d ever heard a child ask ‘How do I write ‘a half’ as a number?’ before. Usually, this concept is presented as part of separate maths lessons on ‘fractions’, ‘decimals’ or ‘converting fractions to decimals’. Yet here she was asking me because she wanted to know—because she wanted to be able to do the task in front of her.

I hope she remembered it. Given the events that led to this learning, I feel confident she will, just as I have remembered that ‘catkin’ comes from ‘katteken’. I decided I wanted to find out for myself, so I did, and now I find this information logged in my brain in a way the French word for ‘grapefruit’ just isn’t (Who eats grapefruit? And who needs to ask about this while on holiday in France?).

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both her and my recent learning experiences happened spontaneously while outside. Sure, sitting inside might help us adults deliver our learning objectives for a lesson via a PowerPoint—the things we want them to learn, that is. But what about their learning objectives—the ones they don’t set in advance but discover as they go?

If freedom to follow their own learning objectives leads to better retention, enjoyment and development of a love of learning, then this sounds like a better form of education to me. It might not result in the ability to regurgitate a mark scheme to get a certain GCSE grade, but it is more likely to result in the ability to tackle new questions and problems in a creative, flexible way, which, in life if not in exams, is usually how we get to an answer.

When was the last time you learned something completely unexpected while outside?

Incidentally, if you would like to read the science paper that came out of this day in Norfolk measuring trees, you can find it here.

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We need to talk about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. I realise this is likely not high up people’s priority lists right now, not being one of the world’s great pressing issues, but we need to make space for the less urgent conversations too, before they fester into something larger and we wonder why we didn’t see it coming.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this Award scheme, it’s a programme for young people aged 14-24 in which they set themselves goals to work towards in several categories: volunteering in the community, working on a physical activity, developing a new skill and—the most well known element—completing an outdoor expedition. The vibe of it is very much ‘Take on the world!’, ‘Overcome challenges!’, ‘Find adventure!’.

To be clear, it has certainly helped thousands of young people broaden their horizons and gain access to opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have had. This is clearly fantastic. It has also undoubtedly got thousands of inner-city teenagers out into nature, for so many providing a formative, first experience of the natural world.

You might expect, in a newsletter all about young people’s relationship with nature, that I am here to sing its praises. However, the astute among you will have sensed there is a ‘but’ coming…

But, despite all of the admirable achievements of this Award scheme over the last 70 years, I have never, ever been a fan.

Let me tell you why I think DofE, in the current climate of nature deprivation among school children, especially those in urban areas, is creating a PR nightmare for nature, and why I think the natural world needs a new comms strategist, fast.

Firstly, for purposes of full disclosure, I took part in DofE when I was at school. Not all the way through—I completed the Bronze and Silver levels before finally accepting how much it annoyed me and refusing to sign up for Gold, much to my teachers’ confusion.

My partner did Gold, and he loved it. For him, it really did provide that first experience of remote nature, and it’s stuck with him. However, my reservations about the warped relationship with nature it fosters remain. Every couple has their share of eternal, petty points of disagreement; this is a key one of ours.

My reasons for disliking DofE were, and are, two-fold.

Firstly, for kids like myself who already had access to plenty of opportunities like the ones the scheme encourages, it felt like an incredibly disingenuous way of getting an extra badge to list on your university application. I never actually took up anything new to complete each of the categories; I merely got teachers and instructors of classes and activities I was already privileged enough to be attending to help me set goals and sign me off. I am not declaring this as some kind of secret confession—this was normal for kids at my school and others like it. 75% of the Award scheme, for us, was literally a tick-box exercise.

Secondly, I despised the overly preparative attitude to the expedition. I did not dislike the expedition because I disliked expeditions. I adored hill-walking with my dad in the Lake District and Scotland. What I disliked was the way the scheme seemed to set out to make this aspect deliberately unenjoyable and prescriptive, which seems counterproductive if it is also seeking to provide teenagers with their first experience of a long hike.

I have a vivid memory of sitting in a classroom planning our route, being made to use string and a ruler to calculate the precise distance we would walk, simply to make sure it passed the minimum threshold required for the expedition section of the Award. I can quite see that these kinds of paper-based skills, as opposed to being reliant on technology, are important to learn, especially if you are planning a multi-day, remote expedition into the Himalayas. But I felt like screaming at the teachers: ‘This is insane! We’re going for a pleasant stroll across the south of England. This is utter overkill, and everyone here is bored and hating it!’

And this was borne out by the numbers of students who signed up for Bronze, then Silver, then Gold. At Bronze, it was about two thirds of the year group. Eight students did Gold.

Essentially, even back then, I couldn’t help but feel like this scheme wasn’t for us. It wasn’t for kids who already got taken to after-school clubs to do extra-curricular stuff, and it wasn’t for kids who already got taken out for semi-regular countryside walks or holidays. It was for teenagers whose parents didn’t have the time, money or experience to give them these opportunities, and for those who lived such an urban life that they would not otherwise have got to experience going for a proper good hike. I still feel this way.

But the reason I’m including my feelings about the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in this newsletter is because I think there’s another, underlying problem with it all. This may well not have been a problem at the Award’s inception, back in 1956, but I’m convinced it’s a problem now.

If you are an inner-city teenager who more-or-less never leaves an urban environment—you live there, go to school there, all your friends and family live in the city, all your holidays are city breaks, resorts or in otherwise very non-remote places—then your sole experience of the Great Outdoors will be this expedition section of DofE. Of course, you might take to it like a duck to water and discover what becomes a lifelong hobby. But, for many, the expedition is remembered as exhausting, challenging and, crucially, unenjoyable.

Clearly, things that are exhausting and challenging can be enjoyable if that’s your bag. I’ve run a marathon before—I’m very much not advocating for never doing anything out of your comfort zone. But I am saying that when this is a child’s first, formative experience with the natural world, this approach of framing it as a challenge to be conquered is a problem.

For many, spending time outdoors in the countryside ends up being synonymous with challenge, lots of expensive, cumbersome kit, oodles of preparation and danger (Insect bites! Nettle stings! Dangerous herds of livestock! Sun burn!).

It’s likely a similar impression is made on parents who are not familiar with this kind of thing. They are provided with a kit list that includes everything you could possibly need: waterproof trousers, sun hat, warm hat, sun cream, full first aid kit, 2L water bottle, walking boots, blister plasters… This stuff is expensive and needs storing, and much of it will likely return from the expedition unused and never get used again. I would not forgive them for thinking ‘Is this really worth it—this ‘going out into nature’ business? I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.’

Way back in 1956, when children did not live such urbanised lives, the expedition part of the Award likely didn’t hold such a formative role in the development of children’s relationship with nature. It made sense to frame it as an opportunity for adventure and challenge.

But 2026 is very different to 1956. The very young people for whom this Award can be so transformative, so needed, are also the very young people who are likely more nature-deprived. So yes, we are giving them access to new skills and broadening their horizons, but along the way, we are leaving so many with the impression that nature and the outdoors are ‘out there’, ‘other’ to ourselves, something to be conquered.

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is deliberately designed with this vanquishing attitude in mind; it’s integral to it. The programme was initially designed by John Hunt, a British Army officer who led the expedition in which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first to summit Mount Everest. The scheme has the philosophy of nature holding things we must conquer, defeat and dominate at its very core. This is the school of thought in which you must prepare for every eventuality and danger that the natural world can throw at you.

But we’re asking inner-city kids to walk across the British countryside with the same mindset, to complete an arbitrary number of kilometres to get a badge. Enjoyment, presence and spontaneity are not part of this scheme. The only enjoyment necessary is the adrenaline-type sense of achievement you might get after completing the challenge. Actual enjoyment of the walking and time outside might be a pleasant bonus, but it’s certainly not necessary.

I’ve got no problem with this kind of programme being offered to help kids build up their independence, confidence and resilience. But I do have a problem with it being the sole offering for teenagers that gets them outside. It must be part of a holistic, varied set of encounters with nature, else we risk this conquering mindset becoming the only lens through which so many are able to see the non-urban world. This is doing both nature and young people a disservice.

Don’t today’s young people deserve to be shown the joys of being outside among nature? Don’t they all deserve someone to show them how to smile through a simple, easy afternoon stroll with no need for outdoor kit and preparation, in which they are free to meander as their attention calls to them, in which they are allowed to stop and watch a swift fly overhead or bend to lay down in a patch of grass among wildflowers, to take a path they don’t know the destination of? Don’t they all deserve to understand that nature is a treasure trove of calm, life and curiosity, that it needn’t be conquered, that it doesn’t deserve to be dominated and extracted from, that we are part of it ourselves not separate?

Essentially, I don’t think we should be presenting the only way to experience nature as what feels like a military exercise.

If the school environments, curricula and opportunities that we provide for young people had a healthier attitude to the natural world covered, then by all means, let them plan a three-day expedition to get a badge. But I think some re-adjustment of priorities is needed now that this is the source of most, or all, of the outdoor experiences of so many kids.

When we talk about trying to get politicians and decision-makers to understand the true value of the natural world, to comprehend just how twisted, modern, colonialist and capitalist this attitude of separation, extraction and domination towards nature is, we are so often talking to people for whom ‘DofE’ is synonymous with ‘outdoorsy’ and ‘countryside’. And this philosophical stumbling block is so often the sticking point—the bit that leads to an environmental policy being jettisoned because those in charge don’t feel how important nature is to them on a personal level.

I can’t help but feel that the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is used as a sticking plaster for inner-city teenagers in underserved areas to get a double win: it broadens horizons and gets them into nature. While it certainly does the former, at least for those truly in need of these extra opportunities, the way in which it gets them out into nature is entrenching a damaging, vanquishing attitude towards the natural world in the next generation. It doesn’t serve them, since it only widens their gap in understanding what nature can offer them, and it doesn’t serve the future of the environment.

But I guess it does help them achieve some CV points. Sure, that’s important, but there are more important things.

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It’s happened! All the trees are well and truly neon, cow parsley and blue alkanet are shooting up wherever there is a bare patch of earth, and robins are collecting anything soft and fluffy.

Internally, the baby I spent so many months waiting to feel moving around inside me now regularly gets hiccoughs, peculiarly when I am trying to write, and I often find myself sitting here trying to string a sentence together while attempting to tune out the surreal feeling that a tiny human is actually living inside me. We’re heading to our first antenatal class this evening, and once again it feels as if May has arrived and someone has shifted the gear stick straight from gears two to five in one smooth move.

It’s certainly a wonderful feeling—feeling like you are being swept along as everything comes alive, the evenings grow lighter and warmer, and sunshine feels like less of a rarity and more of a quietly constant reality.

Except—and I don’t mean to ruin this welcome tidal wave—this new-found pace can sometimes feel overwhelming. It’s as if the car is sputtering a bit because there’s some part or other, buried deep within the bonnet, that is a bit old and rusty. So there you are whizzing along in the sunshine with the roof down, but every five minutes or so there’s a noticeable little clunk beneath you that jolts you out of your smooth ride.

This is all very metaphorical. But I can’t think of a gentler way to explain what it feels like to be carrying around the bubbling joy of spring, bouncing through the present and into the future, in the same small tote bag as heavy loss, which drags me backwards even as it heaves itself forwards into my future.

Loss sits there like a giant, rounded pebble, smoothed over by the rush of a gushing river, just weighing my stomach down. Most of the time, I can carry it around inside me, invisible and heavy but still. Yet every so often, this pebble seems magnetised towards reminders that cut straight to the heart of loss, jolting outwards and stopping me in my tracks.

I do so wish these reminders were only the things you might expect—horrible things that make sense when you wince away from them, like hospitals, ambulances, the name of a chemotherapy drug. But this isn’t how memory works.

The most gut-punching of reminders tend to be those that remind me of a perfect spring day that hung peacefully among the chaos: the sound of water gushing down a drainpipe as the person I love took their last shower, while I finished a book outside in the late-April sunshine; the male chaffinch who sang incessantly all May as if nothing were wrong; that magical mixture of the sounds of ducks and geese clamouring for food and children laughing while throwing crumbs as far as they could manage into the water, forming the soundscape to our last ever walk together in the place we loved.

I wrote last year about this feeling around magnolia blossoms—those beautiful, hand-painted, velvety petals that shock me with delight as I round a corner, only to be undercut by the memory of them falling around me as I sat there, stunned and heavy:

The problem is all of these memories are hitting their five-year anniversaries this spring. But they are not fading the way you might expect, the way society presumes they do. They do not get less vivid as they get farther away in time.

On the contrary, new layers get added on top—I will now also remember the magnolia blossoms I must walk under to get to that first antenatal class, the cherry blossom I sat under as I felt my baby’s first hiccoughs. These new layers do not erase the painful ones. They simply pile on top and weave themselves together into one big tapestry of messy, intense feelings that I must somehow find the strength and capacity to hold all at once.

I say all this because people are so quick to assume that, since you’ve got used to carrying this heavy pebble around, your stomach muscles must be strong enough by now, so it doesn’t bother you. They assume that, when good, new things start happening in your life, the big hole left by your person is being filled in, that since your future is looking bright and shiny, the absence of the past no longer matters.

But grief doesn’t work like this. When you lose someone before you imagined you would, every time you move to a new marker in your future, at which you presumed they would be there with you, you find yourself experiencing the loss all over again.

I’d never realised that at each of these life moments—some big, some small—my lost person was stitched into that future with me. So every time I realise anew that they are missing, I feel the rug being ripped out from under me all over again, and I am falling, when all I thought I was doing was buying my baby their first storybook. But suddenly, there I am, flipping from elation at imagining the future in which I turn these pages, to utter heartbreak as I realise I will never see my dad do that with his little grandchild tucked into the crook of his arm.

I don’t wish to spoil the welcome current of spring. It is indeed so very, very welcome. But I do wish to point out that it contains multitudes. The contradictions held by a single, soft magnolia petal are so incredibly angular and powerful that they give me whiplash. This hurts at the best of times, let alone when it feels like everyone else is simply able to walk past a magnolia tree unharmed.

I also don’t wish for spring to return to its previous simplicity. The fact that it holds these multitudes means it also holds my loss. As painful as this can be when I have no say over when and how it strikes, this is the only way in which our relationship continues to exist. Our lost people may not be stitched into our future in the way we had planned and wanted, but the repeated encountering of new dimensions of loss is the closest thing to bumping into them as we round a street corner.

I only wish this experience felt less insular, less esoteric. Grief feels heavy enough to carry as it is, so the sense that no one else can even see this huge great pebble you are lugging around, which every so often jumps about inside you and makes you wince, merely adds insult to injury.

Yet grief is not rare—so many of us, most of us even, will carry it at some point. So my conjuring up these complicated metaphors marks my attempt to improve its visibility, in the hope that it either helps you feel seen or that it helps you understand.

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I wrote a poem a few weeks back in which I tried to capture this feeling, when I rounded a street corner to encounter a toddler going for a stroll with their grandparent past a buddleja bush:

Last rose

If missing you were as simple
As grieving what we had,
Like a day glowing gold in memory
Heart sinking as I turn out the light
Since it is no longer real
Exists only behind closed eyelids,
It would be a simple heartbreak

But missing you is every day
Having to reimagine my future
Reconfiguring the tomorrow I had built
With you in it
Threaded through like a red blanket stitch
Holding together the squares of a quilt
In which my life once rested

Each time I tackle a new day
I round the corner
I bump into your absence afresh
I realise the lack of you hangs somewhere new
I had not yet looked
I catch my knife-edged breath
As the red thread unravels yet another patch

I scramble desperately to catch it
In my clumsy palms
To keep from losing it
As it flutters away from me
I thought this quilt would hold me forever
Hold us entwined in a shared future
We did not have to work to imagine

But now it lies in tatters
And I must set to work
Again
Reimagining a new patch to fill the gap
One day, with so many new patches
It will no longer be the same quilt
My heart splits into shards

I do not want to reexperience
Your absence anew
Every time I live
It hurts
A wrenching, twisting agony
Of conjuring a new future
In which the lack of you grows only larger

The more I fill it with moments
In which I will need you again and again
I need you to catch me in all the newness
Of every rounded corner
But instead again and again
I am falling
With no quilt to cushion the drop

People think grief is missing what has gone
But that is easy
This is remembering
Grief is losing them again and again
From a future in which you were
Supposed to be stitched together
Having to sew over the holes and tears

That no one else sees
I wish missing you were as easy
As pining after the last picnic of a long summer
Longing after the last swift to screech across the sky
Watching the final rose
Drop to the ground
But missing you feels like

Having to pump blood
Around my hungry body
With my bare hands
When someone has ripped my heart out
But no one can see it is missing
I did not plan to live the rest of my life
With no heart

But each time my world gains a new dimension
One that grows and stretches away
From the fold of time in which our last conversation is cradled
I realise there is a whole new dimension
From which you are missing
In which there has been no peaceful fall of the last rose
But a decimated rose garden
That has lain in ruins behind my back
All along

I wish someone would show me
All the places from which you are missing
All at once
Having to discover them
Drip by drip
When I least expect it
Ekes out your loss and my heartache

But then I would not be able
To meet you again and again
Around each corner
Because every time I feel myself falling
Realising in horror you are not there to catch me
I feel your absence
Which is the closest thing to you

Since the rose garden is wrecked
Beyond blooming again next summer
In the way we had planned
I can be more honest
With myself
If I let myself
Look over its wreckage

It is a shame the garden
Could not turn out the way we wanted
But I would prefer to feel
Its thorns in a mess of brambles
Creeping round my ankles
Than pretend this rose garden
Was never planned in the first place

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Research is often inaccessible because of jargon and assumptions of prior knowledge. This shouldn’t be the case. Everyone has the right to know what we know. Knowledge is power, after all. AI can’t interpret and contextualise research for you, but I can.

That’s why I read science papers that won’t make it into the media but should, so you don’t have to.

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Dear friends,

This month, I’m looking at research on outdoor learning. Does outdoor learning, even in an urban environment where there is less nature around, still reduce children’s stress?

We know well enough now that being in a green, nature-rich setting can improve our wellbeing and reduce our stress levels. For children, we know it can improve their activity levels, social interactions, focus and ADHD symptoms.

But what about when children are outside for their lessons in an urban environment? That’s not to say they are exposed to no nature at all, but certainly to less than you might expect in an idyllic, rural school playground. In this situation, is it still worth learning outside?

That’s what this month’s paper decided to find out:

‘Outdoor learning in urban schools: Effects on 4–5 year old children’s noise and physiological stress’

I love this study because the researchers gathered data from children at their actual schools. I love how they worked with teachers and kids to design this experiment around the school day, which means what they found out can be directly applied and acted upon, rather than having to be adapted from some strange clinical setting.

It also has a really solid study design, which is frustratingly rare in the field of outdoor learning research.

I first came across this paper when one of my own studies, in which I was collecting heart rate data from school children, was under review by a journal. One of the reviewers was dubious about whether collecting this info from children during lessons was in any way reliable and asked if I could find a precedent for this. So I sent them this paper in response, in which they work with 4-5-year-olds (not the comparatively adult 11-16-year-olds I was working with) and had managed to get an excellent dataset. This felt satisfying.

What did the researchers do?

Put simply, the researchers measured children’s resting heart rates and levels of fidgeting during almost identical lessons inside and outside, as well as the noise levels in each of these environments during class.

We know that higher heart rates are indicative of higher stress and that more fidgeting and noise suggests less focus, so their question was ‘When children have a lesson outside, are they less stressed or more focused than when they have the same lesson inside?’

This research happened across four state-funded primary schools in the London Borough of Newham, where they worked with 76 children, all in Reception, which means they were all aged 4-5. All children took part in eight indoor lessons and eight outdoor lessons, with data collected four days a week for four weeks.

At each of the four schools, they created an outdoor classroom that replicated the indoor classroom as best as possible: they marked out the same size area outside, used furniture and resources directly from the indoor classrooms, and didn’t make use of any equipment that couldn’t be replicated in the alternate environment (e.g., interactive whiteboards couldn’t be recreated outside so they weren’t used inside, and vice versa with climbing frames and slides).

In other words, the researchers tried as hard as possible to make the only difference between these classrooms whether they were outdoors or indoors.

You can see photos of each of the outdoor and indoor classrooms at the four schools below, and I hope you agree, they’ve done a pretty good job:

Each lesson consisted of two parts: ‘carpet time’ and ‘choosing time’. Carpet time was—you guessed it—when all the children sat on a carpet to listen to their teacher either read a story or teach a maths lesson. Choosing time was when children could pick between several activities (puzzles, drawing, play doh, for example). Among the eight lessons for each class given outside and the eight given inside, half included a maths lesson and half included a story in the carpet time section.

If you’re more of a visual person, take a look at the example timetable below, which should clear things up:

Each lesson lasted for 35-40 minutes, during which time all the children wore a specially designed, compact piece of kit under their tops, which measured heart rate and the amount of ‘micro-level movements’ (a fancy way of saying ‘fidgeting’). To measure noise levels, researchers placed a decibel meter at the centre point of each of the indoor and outdoor classrooms, which they set up to take a total of nine readings during each carpet time and each choosing time, allowing them to work out an average noise level for each part of every lesson.

This kind of experimental set-up in education and outdoor learning research is so rare! No snub to researchers here—it’s simply very hard to work schedules like this into already packed and rigid school days, with overworked and tired teachers. So the information we get from these kinds of studies is worth its weight in gold.

The specific questions the researchers set out to answer, armed with their beautiful dataset, were as follows:

1. Was there a difference in children’s resting heart rates during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

2. Was there a difference in the amount of fidgeting during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

3. Was there a difference in noise levels during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

4. Was there a difference in noise levels during choosing time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

5. How did noise levels affect children’s resting heart rate, and was this different between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

What did they find?

Let’s look at the results for each of their specific questions in turn.

1. Was there a difference in children’s resting heart rates during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

Yes! Resting heart rate was significantly lower during carpet time outdoors than indoors. Curiously, this didn’t seem to be affected by class or school, which suggests that the drop in heart rate was purely down to being outside, rather than to specifics of the school, class or time of year in which the data were collected.

Below is a violin plot that shows this result, so called because the coloured bits tend to look a bit like violins. The white dot at the centre of each ‘violin’ is the median value (in this case, of resting heart rate), the grey lines show the interquartile range of the data (which is where the middle 50% of datapoints lie), and the coloured shapes show the distribution of the dataset—i.e., the wider the ‘violin’, the more datapoints are clustered here. The black bracket with asterisks at the top tells you that the difference between the indoor and outdoor data was statistically significant.

2. Was there a difference in the amount of fidgeting during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

Also yes! Again, there was significantly less fidgeting during carpet time outside than inside, and this effect didn’t seem to be impacted by the individual child—i.e., this seemed to be true across all children.

Behold—a second violin plot that shows the second result. The extra asterisk on this one means the difference was even more significant.

3. Was there a difference in noise levels during carpet time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

Indeed there was. There were lower levels of noise during carpet time outside than inside, suggesting greater focus on the story or maths lesson at hand.

4. Was there a difference in noise levels during choosing time between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

There was also less noise during choosing time outside than inside—the part of the lesson you might expect to be a little rowdier than seated carpet time. Looking at the graphs below, it does indeed seem that choosing time was generally louder than carpet time, but, crucially, both parts of each lesson were quieter outside than inside.

5. How did noise levels affect children’s resting heart rate, and was this different between the indoor and outdoor classrooms?

Finally, children’s resting heart rate increased along with increased noise levels. Interestingly though, this positive correlation was only significant in the indoor classrooms but not the outdoor ones. This suggests that being outside buffers some of the increased stress that noisier environments can lead to.

You can see this in the scatter plots below. The dots are the datapoints, and the straight line drawn through them is the line of best fit, meaning it’s showing you the correlation between heart rate and noise levels. You can see that this line slopes upwards on the ‘Indoor’ graph, showing a positive relationship, but that it is more or less horizontal on the ‘Outdoor’ graph.

In summary then, it seems that children were less stressed and more focused when they had their lessons outside, given that their resting heart rates, fidgeting levels and noise levels were all lower outdoors than indoors.

Why do we care?

This is where plenty of us will think ‘Obviously! Why do we need research to tell us this stuff?’ I agree. It is maddening. But it seems we do need it.

In past decades, this might have been less crucial—not just lower down the list of priorities for education boards but not even featured. Children were able to roam more freely around their homes and more likely to walk to school, all of which allowed them to be outside and exposed to nature much more frequently, in a way that was baked into their daily routines. Schools, too, were less pushed for space and places, and so could dedicate more space to outside, green areas, rather than indulging the modern tendency towards tarmac and climbing frames.

In this context, it makes perfect sense to teach every single lesson inside, avoiding the unpredictable nature of weather and making sure access to whatever stationery and resources needed was straightforward. It was less of an obvious problem, since children encountered time outside and nature on a much more regular, organic basis.

But somewhere along the way, we decided that taking children outside is complicated, lots of effort and only leads to them running around anyway. Now that children’s lives do not look like they once did—home ranges have shrunk, journeys to school are less likely to be on foot, home environments are less likely to be green—we need to be thinking about how best to counter this while they’re at school.

How can we best compensate for this lack of outside time and space to allow children to learn better and enjoy their education? What tweaks can we make to help them remain less stressed out and more focused during class—conditions, which, I’m sure you’ll agree, are likely to make learning easier?

Clearly, providing schools and teachers with the resources, space and training needed to take lessons outside on a regular basis should absolutely be on the list of solutions here. So often, when I talk about ‘outdoor learning’, people immediately think of forest schools, which is fair enough—they are fantastic—but that is a whole other conversation. We can also just take a lesson outside, with books, pencils, pens—all the traditional paraphernalia. The outside is an excellent place to learn about anything, even in a conventional way.

I’m grateful this kind of research exists. There are people working so hard in this area, gathering good-quality data that backs up what so many of us suspect but often presume isn’t being examined in a systematic way.

But this research needs to be listened to, and for that it needs to be known about. Go forth and spread the word!

Full credit to the authors of this paper: Gemma Goldenberg, Molly Atkinson, Jan Dubiel and Sam Wass. If you would like to read the full paper, click here.

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As I sit here writing this, I realise how accustomed I’ve grown to the sound of a little fountain that sits outside my open window.

It flows in the communal gardens surrounding our flat, often making me feel like I have struck lucky and am living in some kind of posh five-star hotel. But its sound isn’t grand. It is a beautifully calming, gentle trickle—the sort that reminds me of a clear running stream bouncing gleefully over rocks.

There is something about the sound of moving water that is reliable, constant and soft. The repetition of waves crashing on a beach is the same, as is the roaring of a wide river. Water just keeps on flowing, hurrying past us, making us feel like we have nowhere to be.

The sound of this fountain changes only at around 4pm each day, when children arrive home from school. They rush over to the small pond with its little fountain where they dip their hands into the water. I hear splashing, laughter and sometimes the sounds of a water fight beginning.

I find it fascinating how they are so often drawn to the water first, rushing over the grass peppered with daisies and past the trees that now hang, laden with leaves and seeds. I imagine it has something to do with water sounding alive.

Realising the familiarity of this background soundscape that keeps me company while I write also makes me realise how, for all that I’ve written about the importance of green space in this newsletter, I haven’t once mentioned blue space. How remiss of me.

Within the academic literature on the benefits of nature for our health and wellbeing, ‘green space’ is what’s used to mean land covered by vegetation or plant life of some kind, while ‘blue space’ is the term for land that’s covered by water—a pond, lake or river.

There’s been plenty written about our desire for water, about how being near it makes us feel calmer and happier. The book Blue Mind by marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols comes to mind. None of this comes as a surprise, I don’t think. Perhaps even more so than our sense of how being around trees, or out in nature in general, makes us feel, people seem to have a much greater awareness of their draw to water and how it makes them feel better—think of the prevalence of riverside walks, benches positioned next to ponds, and the universal appeal of a coastal walk or a beach holiday.

It’s true that blue space is certainly its own thing. It has its own set of sounds, textures and movements, quite different to those found in the rest of nature—the constant gushing; those glassy, clear, reflective surfaces that glisten; the turbulent, rockiness of crashing waves; the sheer dynamism of how it is continuously changing, never the same from one second to the next.

But, for my part, I’ve always wondered about the need to have two separate terms, to distinguish between plant-y nature and water-y nature. Isn’t it all part of the same thing? Isn’t it all just part of the richness of the natural world, within which we are weaved as just one fine thread in this vast tapestry?

There are plenty of papers that have tried to work out the relative importance of green space and blue space in relation to people’s health and wellbeing. Many find that green space has an effect but not blue space, many find the opposite, and several find no difference at all. I have repeatedly found myself wondering if this is indeed the right approach. Don’t get me wrong—it’s an interesting question, and it does have important policy implications.

If we found, for example, that there was a really clear relationship between bodies of water and people’s wellbeing, then this would make a fantastic case for including a pond or a stream on every new housing estate. I get that there is limited space, so being able to make the case for a particular aspect of nature as especially key for making a place pleasant and loved, as opposed to just liveable, is really valuable.

But I don’t think nature works like this. I don’t think you can separate out elements of it—an individual tree, particular-coloured flowers, a pond—and say ‘This is the magic element that we should prioritise!’

The most consistent trend among research on nature and people’s wellbeing suggests that it is complexity and naturalness that people value, that allows us to feel at home, relaxed and reset. This makes intuitive sense. We have evolved as part of the natural world, to live in it, contribute to it, depend upon it—it makes sense that the more elements we have around us that recreate the feeling of being outside in an untouched, natural place, the more at home we feel.

This feels like a highly semantic point to be making in a popular newsletter, I grant you.

But the reason it worries me is because it contributes to our perception that everything fits into neat boxes we have created: nature is ‘over there’ while we live in our world over here, this thing is valuable while this thing is not, we are human while all non-human animals are ‘animals’. Essentially, it’s the very foundation of the idea that we exist separately to nature, and that nature is made up of lists of species and environmental features that can be ticked off a list, rather than the wildly more beautiful, complex reality that this whole planet is in fact one tremendously intricate, interwoven living system.

I understand it’s useful to have precise terms for different things, particularly in academic and policy circles. But I also think it’s important we realise the limitations of these terms. They can certainly ensure we are all talking about the same thing, and they allow for nuance. But they can also channel our thinking down particular alleyways that can miss the big picture.

The best way I can illustrate what I mean is by drawing your attention to the ‘Recommendations’ section of papers or policy briefings. This is the place where researchers summarise all of their findings and great knowledge into a few key bullet points, or steps, that could be taken to put findings into action. Fine, this sounds sensible.

But I’ve worked in academia, and I’ve worked in policy. I know that busy people with no expertise or deep knowledge of a subject will flick straight to these bullet points, read only them, and maybe act on the easiest one if they can. Well intentioned from everyone involved, maybe, but it creates a downward spiral of simplification.

Imagine you’re a policy researcher who wants to integrate the findings of a paper that found vegetation density around homes can lower the risk of depression into a policy briefing for decision-makers. You might condense this down into a single recommendation: ‘House builders should always leave space for trees and shrubs on a new estate’. By the time this gets implemented, the housing estate gets allotted a few individual trees planted along the edges of roads. Admittedly, this is an improvement on a housing estate with no trees. But the point of the paper was that it is the density of vegetation, not just its presence, that is important—i.e., the more structurally complex the nature is around a home, the better its antidepressant effects.

If there is any truly consistent finding among nature-health research, it’s the idea that natural complexity matters. A group of several trees planted together will be better than a single one. A forest will be even better because it has other kinds of vegetation too, which means more diversity of animal life as well. A forest that includes a running stream will have an even greater diversity of sounds and colours and life, which will again be better than a single river running along the edge of a concrete footpath.

But the problem is ‘More nature in the form of living, functioning, dynamic ecosystems’ isn’t a recommendation that house builders can follow easily, so we end up splitting nature into easily digestible bits, feeding the illusion that this approach in any way reflects reality.

I am unbelievably lucky that I look outside my flat windows and I can see several trees, large patches of grass, a pond with a fountain and flowerbeds lining this beautiful little courtyard. It seems fairly obvious to all of us (doesn’t it?) that this whole view in front of me is greater than the sum of its individual parts, and that with the addition of each feature, the system becomes infinitely more dynamic, more alive.

So yes, I am lucky that within 500m of my home I have both green space and blue space, but really, I am lucky that where I live isn’t so separated from the richness of the natural world around me that I can’t feel the reality that I am a part of it. I am lucky I can hear children outside my window everyday getting to play in a pond, run across the grass barefoot and laugh, that there are benches dotted around for people of all ages to pause on and enjoy being there—that this is a world in which people live as part of nature.

I feel quite strongly that trying to quantify the contributions of any of these individual elements to the general sense of belonging, wellbeing and contentment I feel while living here would be like trying to count the grains of sand on a beach to find the optimal amount for a beach holiday. I think there is such a thing as being too fine-grained in our approach—too ready to write itemised lists. These are great tools to help us focus, but we shouldn’t forget that focusing isn’t really where the joy is, where living is. A photograph is made up of everything, not just the focal point—we miss so much by not zooming out beyond ourselves, by not allowing lines to become blurred and colours and textures to run into each other.

So the next time you find yourself outside in nature with a moment to spare, try not looking at anything in particular. Try just inhaling the whole, messy, complicated picture—sounds, sensations, smells and all—like one giant bowl of Eton mess, enjoyed one mixed-up spoonful at a time.

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When do you usually throw out your Christmas tree? I’m asking because I only parted ways with mine a month ago, towards the end of March.

It was only a teeny table-top one, planted in soil, so I haven’t been living alongside a full 6-foot tree all this time. And I did take the lights and baubles off in a perfectly timely manner. But I can never bear letting the tree go, so I find myself putting it off.

Every year is the same. I buy a small tree in a pot of soil and bring it inside my home. I dress it up so it feels special, and I try my best to keep it alive. But fir trees aren’t meant for an indoor life, and as earnestly as I try to keep its soil nice and moist, its air cool and damp, year after year, they start to drop their little needles, and I am forced to take some kind of alternative action.

I’ve tried planting them out into a flowerbed in someone’s garden (with permission, you understand). I’ve tried leaving them in their pot but moving them outside into the cool, new-year air. I’ve tried repotting them into a larger pot with brand new soil and sitting them under the cooling shade of a larger tree outside. But all to no avail.

This year, I waited in indecision so long that there was no question whatsoever of which strategy I might try in order to save it. It was well and truly dead, and the only place for it was the green garden waste bin. As I held its dry, spindly trunk in my hands, needles shedding onto the floor and forming a brown carpet at my feet, I found myself wondering why on earth I do this every year.

What is it that makes me go through the rigmarole of taking a tree that is clearly capable of surviving the winter outside into my home, where I cannot keep it alive? Why do any of us do this?

Growing up, I always felt torn by Christmas trees.

One part of me adored them—the rich smell of pine filling the house, the deep evergreen being kept warm and celebrated rather than gathering frost outside, the sheer excitement of having a whole tree inside! On the other hand, I always felt sad that the tree was already dying. It had already been felled, and here we were sticking it into a golden stand under the bizarre premise of tradition.

This is why I switched to buying smaller ones in soil as soon as I could—an attempt to justify this strange practice of bringing a piece of nature into the warm to help it get through winter. At least this way I could try to return it outside come the new year.

Yet here we are several years down the line, several failed attempts to care for a fir tree later, and I think I must finally admit that why I still do this has truly, truly stumped me.

On the surface, it feels like a practice that is rooted in connection to the natural world—an acknowledgement of the cold of winter, of the gratitude we feel towards our warm homes and towards the reliability of evergreen. But it is also blindingly obvious that it would be better for each of these trees if we left them to their own devices outside.

So I find myself questioning how honest we are being with ourselves. How can it be about a celebration of winter if the actual result is us killing some of the most iconic winter trees there are? It’s clearly about ourselves and about what this practice gives us. So what does it give us?

I imagine it must be motivated by a similar call to the one that encourages us to tend to pot plants and put cut flowers in vases.

A fresh bouquet of blooms never fails to make us smile, breathe deeply and brighten up a room, but when their heads inevitably start to droop, their petals begin to fall and their stems start to rot, I find I am struck by a similar confusion as I am when the pine needles of a once-celebrated Christmas tree begin to fall.

While our need to put flowers in vases is clearly an attempt to seize life in all its colourful glory, to gather it inside our homes and our hearts, to drip-feed ourselves with a moiety of their joy every time they catch our eye, we have, in fact, removed them from their source of life and brought them inside only to watch them slowly die. There is something especially sad about a living thing fading in this unnatural way, removed from its natural cycle in which it is supposed to die and rot down, giving way to more life.

And so I find I leave flowers in their vase until they start to smell, since I cannot bear to wrench them away from water while they are still blooming. I could simply throw them out before they get to this stage, but that would be worse somehow. Wouldn’t that be removing from these beautiful, living things the right to end? If we’ve done them the disservice of bringing them inside, we might as well do them the service of letting them fade away on their own terms.

The poet captures this perfectly in her poem ‘On Leaving the Flowers Too Long in the Vase’. When she shared this poem back in October, I remember thinking ‘Aha! So it’s not just me!’ But there the clarification ends. That’s where poetry comes in, I guess, it sketches a vague outline of a feeling, within which we can bounce around asking ‘why’, even if we never come to a conclusion.

I am less confused by pot plants.

On a surface level, they look nice, and they make our homes feel lived in and calm. But the deeper reason of feeling like we are tending to them, keeping them alive, despite the fact that they are more than capable of doing this for themselves outside, is at least justified here, since we can actually keep them alive.

The happiest pot plants I look after are spider plants. In reality, they are one plant made up of several clones, since they reproduce via tiny plantlets or ‘spiderettes’ at the end of runners, which drop off the parent plant.

My spider plants are not much to look at, but they fill me with a profound sense of resilience because of their resolute determination towards life, much like a rescue pet with a heart-wrenching origin story.

My PhD supervisor, back when he was himself a PhD student a good 20 years ago, rented a room which, when he moved in, contained nothing but a sad, parched-looking singular spider plant. He felt so sorry for it that he nursed it back to life. This was so successful that it started dropping plantlets everywhere, and his current office in the university department, and the office down the corridor we shared as grad students, is now full of pots containing clones of this very plant.

Inevitably, at some point during my PhD, a little plantlet started forming over my desk, hanging there above my head, literally poking my forehead and asking very politely if I might take it home. Obviously, I felt moved to rescue it, so I bundled it up in a damp piece of kitchen towel and took it home to plant in soil. Fast forward six years, and I now have four large spider plants and have donated several plantlets to friends.

This courageous spider plant and its many offspring feel like the antidote to all dead Christmas trees and wilting vases of flowers.

They are full of so much life that they keep dropping little versions of themselves everywhere they go, persistent and relentless in their determination to keep growing, to keep responding to our eternally unsatisfied need to tend. Who is tending to whom really?

Not to make this reflection grander than it need be, but this sums up precisely why I am endlessly fascinated with the wondrously varied shades and shapes that different people’s relationships with nature take. Mostly, we can’t explain why we feel drawn to doing something the way we do—why do we stop and look at that flower and not another? Why do we lean over a footbridge to peer into a clear, running stream? Why do we walk outside into the sunshine, close our eyes and sigh?

I’m reminded of a quote from Alfred Wainwright, a hillwalker who wrote and sketched beautifully about the fells of the Lake District. I adored his books as a teenager, and my battered copies have been up many Lake District mountains in all weathers:

‘Why does a man climb mountains? …It is a question every man must answer for himself.’

I shall pose my version of his question like this (since I am not a man writing in the 1950s):

Why do we insist on tending to plants that do not need us? Why do we cut them down, bring them inside from where they would inevitably have been much better off, transplant them from where we could quite easily admire them in all their glory, alive and whole? Perhaps it is no more than because we like their colours and fronds. Perhaps it is because we are so in awe of nature’s ability to tend to itself that we feel inadequate, so we carve out a role for ourselves, conjure an illusion that makes us feel needed and important. Whatever the reason, it is a question we must each answer for ourselves.

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This week, I’d like to draw your attention to the weird and wonderful things children say when they’re outside. These comments are adorable, of course, but the true reason they make me feel so uplifted is because they reveal the sheer range of ways in which children are encouraged to think and play when surrounded by nature.

Last week, I had spent so much time inside with lots of people while the sun was practically banging on the window for attention in indignation, that as soon as I could, I took myself outside for a wander, if nothing else hoping this would pacify the growing incredulity of the sun. Within minutes from my front door, I was met by the beautiful sight of a mother and a small toddler sitting on the grass. It was not grand—there was no big picnic blanket accompanied by a feast, no toys strewn all over the ground—just two people sitting in each other’s company, gently talking and looking at the grass and daisies beneath them.

Being me, I approached slowly so as not to miss any gems. Sure enough, as I got closer:

“Are there a million grasses?”

“Oh, more than a million!”

Then, taking that information in calmly and continuing to place her little hands deep down among the grass blades, she went back to sitting in quiet contemplation.

Just further along, as I meandered past a flowerbed overflowing with spring scents, I passed a small girl who was calling for her dad, sounding mildly concerned about something. He appeared and crouched down next to her as she pointed urgently into the flowerbed in front of her.

“Daddy, that butterfly’s broken,” she sounded earnestly heartbroken about it.

“Where? I can’t see,” he replied, taking her seriously.

She continued to point, “There!”

“Oh, I see. She’s not broken. She’s just resting in the sunshine. Look, see how she’s gently moving her wings?”

The girl remained dubious, not wanting to be fobbed off. So they stayed for a good while until she was convinced the butterfly was indeed enjoying a sunbathe and was not broken.

These comments might seem trivial to us, offhand, but they reveal just how deeply these young children are thinking about the world around them, and how they’re using the living world to prompt this thinking, naturally and slowly. I struggle to think of examples when I’ve seen or heard children behaving this reflectively in a fully urban space, unless some kind of animal is involved—the ant crawling across the paving stone, the bird hopping around the base of a table looking for crumbs.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen toddlers and children let loose in a particular café I often go to (I’m writing this there now), when they run straight over to the patch of stones in the middle (This is literally happening behind me right now), or just round the corner to where there is a patch of grass, immediately putting their hands on the ground to feel the textures.

I’ve often wondered if there are more toys bought and carted around for children who live in urban areas with poor access to green space versus those who can pop outside to a natural space whenever they need to. The more we separate children from nature, the more bored they are, the more they crave some kind of external entertainment, which paving stones, tarmac and brick just can’t provide. So the more we try to fill the gap with toys—things which can never be as dynamic, interactive and varied as everything the natural world has to offer. And the more this seems to be the only way to keep them entertained, the more toys we buy.

If you remain unconvinced, there’s a spot I often go to when I’m feeling experimentally minded.

It’s technically a maze grown out of grasses planted in a big whirl pattern, but this sounds grand and complicated. This maze has no dead ends or treasure in the middle—not that this would be a bad thing—it is literally a spiral of grasses planted in such a way to create paths between the strips, so you can walk in a big coil shape to get to the middle, where waiting for you is a small stump of wood. These grasses are not adult height, or even child height; they are about two-feet tall.

I wander here whenever I want to test out my thoughts. I always seem to find children playing in this maze. Despite researching and writing about children and nature for over a decade now, something about the simplicity of this maze and the massive variety of play it attracts never fails to amaze me (ha). Whenever I’m feeling a bit curious, a bit like I might try to catch myself out on my theory, I walk over to see if I can catch this maze left unused.

In fact, I’m going to try this right now to illustrate my point.

It’s no longer the school Easter holidays here, so it is much quieter than it has been for the previous few weeks. I am surrounded by retirees, adults on work lunchbreaks, and adults minding tiny humans way too small to waddle anywhere or toddlers who are indeed waddling everywhere. No longer are there groups of thrilled, school-aged escapees. It is also a cloudy day, a very ‘meh’ temperature and early-afternoon on a Tuesday. Hold these thoughts while I relocate.

Sure enough, the capacity of this maze to draw children in and unleash their imaginations has struck yet again!

As I approached just now, it was empty, and I was caught between ‘Aha! I’ve caught it lying unused!’ and ‘Oh no, my experiment has not illustrated my point in the way I had hoped’. But I’ve sat down on a bench just next to it to get my laptop out, and within five minutes, in has swooped an eager toddler at full pelt, with adult strolling behind.

From my boring, unimaginative adult mindset, I cannot fathom what you might do with this maze other than walk the swirl in from the outside to the middle, stand there for maybe 30 seconds, and then walk back out again. But I have lost track of the number of games I have seen invented here.

There’s the classic ‘race to the centre’—no deviating from the path or cutting through the grasses allowed. Then there’s ‘I’ll stand in the middle while you race towards me, then we swap’. There are endless versions of hide-and-seek, generally featuring someone ducking down to lie flat on the ground and someone else surveying the maze to spot them. Then there are combinations of hide-and-seek and racing to the middle, where you have to get to the middle undetected by repeatedly hiding. And, of course, there are the mavericks who just blast through the lines of grass and race into the centre in straight lines. At the most basic level, but no less fun, there’s simply repeating the same running in and out in a swirl pattern again and again, and again.

I personally love the fact that different-aged children have the advantage in different games—an older kid might reliably win at racing, but the toddler wins with absolute glee and giggles at the hide-and-seek variations.

This kind of unstructured play is so vital for children’s development and wellbeing. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you this if you’re reading here. And so many studies have shown this.

We know that the amount of time children now spend on free, unstructured play is decreasing, in part because of parental expectations to involve children in structured activities, and perceptions of risk and safety linked with fear of judgement on social media, and in part because children are given fewer opportunities to direct their own learning and play at school.

But we also know that engaging in more risky, outdoor play is important for children’s healthy social and physical development. A study from a few years ago even showed that the amount of time young children spend engaged in quiet, free play on a regular basis is a good predictor of their self-regulation abilities later on in childhood. Another looked at the amount of undeveloped green space around a child’s home and the amount of free, physical play in 11-13-year-olds, concluding that for each additional 5% increase in the proportion of neighbourhood land covered by trees, there was a corresponding increase in free-time physical activity outside of school hours.

None of this research is new or niche. These trends and concerns abound internationally.

But there is limited discussion within this of how improving access to nature-rich spaces during childhood might be key to mitigating against these trends. All outdoor spaces are equal, but some are more equal than others. I recently unpacked a research paper that showed how children’s ADHD symptoms improve the most when they are outside in a natural setting, more so than when they are outside in a built setting:

I think a big part of this complicated puzzle is societal expectations around what school and play spaces are meant to provide.

Obsession with structured, directed activity and learning outcomes that we decide are important leads educational institutions to feel pressure to pack their outdoor spaces, if they have them, with climbing frames, toys and sports pitches—things we as adults can look at and see as productive. But what if we just let these spaces be tree-covered, be wild, have a wildflower patch, a pond, vegetable patches, just grass, or even spiral mazes made of grass and only two-feet tall?

There are ample spaces in which children can go to learn about, watch and participate in sport. There are not ample spaces in which children are able to run free, barefoot and in each other’s company in the presence of nature. If this is what we have removed from children’s lives by urban development, then this is what we must put back through the spaces in which children spend so much of their time.

I struggle to think of any of these contemplative, inquisitive and gentle moments happening in a soft-play area. I fear that if a child did spot a butterfly in there, it would not be long until it was indeed broken.

Yes, it’s important that we focus on global nature declines and international environmental crises for the sake of the species and ecosystems that don’t deserve destruction at our hands. But it’s also vital that we remain pertinent to the loss of nature that has been creeping through childhood for the last several decades. If we lose it here, future generations will have no chance of protecting it at the vast scale needed.

It all starts in the back gardens and playgrounds of today’s children—for their sake and for the sake of nature itself.

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Here in the UK, we are in that hazy, tantalising period when spring is arriving and disappearing, arriving and disappearing again, like a tide you can’t quite work out the direction of. It’s a strange rollercoaster. One day it feels like spring has fully bloomed, never to leave again, and the next like it is tentatively poking its head out from behind a bookshelf, peering at us through a gap between the spines.

Spring feels different for me this year, everything does, because I am pregnant.

I’ve known since the end of October, and my excitement has been building steadily since then. But now that I’m seeing all the plants burst forth with their spurs of new growth, with all the energy they have been storing inside them since the last autumn sunshine, I simply cannot help but do the same.

Over these last several months, the progression of the seasons has felt deeply aligned with the new life growing inside me, and this has made me feel profoundly grounded amidst the tumultuous ride of it all.

When I got that positive pregnancy test back in October, autumn was in that perfectly crisp phase when everything feels crunchy and fiery, chilly and cosy, when the most appropriate drink is always a rich, velvety hot chocolate with warming nutmeg and cinnamon. It feels like nature is still dancing in colour and sounds, not yet ready to accept that the muted colours of winter are on the horizon.

I held that stick with those two little lines on in my hands, my eyes brimming with tears of disbelief and utter, mind-bending joy. On one level, just like autumn, I knew what was coming. On another, I was riding a blissful wave of complete ignorance, clutching at determination to exist in each individual moment.

There are many things incredibly uncertain about early pregnancy. All my emotions lay at either end of a seesaw: at one end, anxiety and desperation at whether things outside of my control would pan out; at the other, sheer elation and restless excitement that it all might, indeed, pan out.

The first trimester traipsed its way through the dark winter months. During that low-energy, nauseous, exhausting phase of pregnancy, the seesaw was tipped resolutely diagonally—the elated end rooted firmly to the ground and the desperation end sky-high. Yet on the outside, no signs were there.

Likewise, the natural world, to all onlookers’ surface-level gazing, seemed dormant and inactive. But below the surface, this deep stillness was fostering the new life that would burst forth in the spring sunshine. The soil and slumbering plants were busy nurturing and holding the energy of last year’s rays until it was time.

I first noticed how comforting this seasonal alignment felt on Christmas Day, when the wind was icy cold, the air was bitter and clear, and all the plants were asleep.

I was walking past a patch of grass I knew erupts with wildflowers every summer, and I found myself acknowledging that nestled within that soil were thousands of tiny seeds, asleep for now but patiently biding their time until they could awaken. I placed a hand on my belly, recognising that the tiny ball of cells I was carrying and nourishing was doing the same. I could not feel it or see it—no one could from the outside—but there, cocooned inside me, was my own tiny wildflower seed, who would appear when these flowers, invisible on that cold winter’s day, would reach full bloom.

The most surreal aspect of this early pregnancy uncertainty, for me, was knowing something magical was happening inside me, yet looking on the outside just the same. Spotting that patch of grass, harbouring its July colour palette so secretively in December, quenched this anxiety for me.

As I walked past that spot, not a part of me doubted those wildflowers would bloom in time. I held in absolute trust the slow, gentle cycle of growth that was rumbling on, unseen, beneath the surface. And there was my body, harbouring the same unassuming but reliable rumbling. It knew exactly what it was doing.

Now that we have reached the arrival of spring—at the same time both so dramatic and so gradual that you could easily miss it—I cannot fail but be swept along by the continued alignment of inner human growth with outer seasonal cycles.

My pregnancy is now hanging in a similar limbo phase to the ambiguous arrival of spring.

My bus passes a row of trees and I catch myself spotting what look like the first hints of green shoots, but then the bus has moved on too quickly for me to be sure—in the same way, I feel my baby kicking and fluttering inside me, tempting me with their permanence, before they lie still again. The arrival of my bump, too, is similarly flirtatiously dramatic yet gradual—in some outfits, it is so easy not to clock, but in another pair of trousers, it is a magnet for strangers’ eyes and wins me a door held open or an offered seat.

The more spring establishes itself, the more my pregnancy does. The more blossom and blooms and insect buzzing that builds, the more new baby things arrive at our flat, and the more real and tangible everything feels—the more the seesaw tips itself towards its opposite diagonal.

I can only look ahead with foolhardy excitement to midsummer, when I shall be large and constantly too hot and heavy, just as the summer heat starts to feel the same way. Just as plants move from their spring and early-summer luscious, neon greens to the richer, headier shades of maturity, just as the heads of flowers begin to sag under the weight of pollen, too many blooms and too many insects, just as some begin to dry out and nod sleepily in the July heat, so I too will reach that stage of pregnancy where I shall be like a well fed cow, flopped over on their side in the shade, tail swishing half-heartedly to brush away the heat of the day.

I am hungry for the transformation that is coming. I am waiting at the side of a wildflower meadow, pacing, desperate for everything to bloom loudly and all at once so that I can run through it, arms outstretched, never to emerge out again the way I went in. Instead, I want to materialise from a footpath I never knew existed, covered head-to-toe in grass seeds, Velcro-sticky umbels and pollen grains, with petals caught in my hair and grass stains painting me like fancy purées smudged across an up-market dinner plate.

I want all the chaos, both the outer and the inner. I cannot wait to ride the wave, to catch just the right one, leap on and see which way up I end up and how far down the shoreline. For now, though, these waves are breaking too far out, and here I am bobbing up and down close to shore, just waiting until the right one reaches me and we can break together on the rocky pebbles.

I long for those never-ending August days when I will find myself nap-trapped and indisposed, able to do everything one-handed or not at all. What an absolute privilege. But they will come in their own time, as spring will one day make up its mind that it is finally here, just as it merges into summer and we wonder where spring went after all.

This seasonal alignment has given me permission to pause and look in the mirror, to sit in each present moment, even as I watch a long sequence of these moments stretching out behind me, like a line of footprints on wet sand, and as I imagine this sequence extending out ahead of me across the smooth, blank beach. I’m sure there are many transformations in life that feel like this—like a big, beautiful blur made up of many individual, crystal-clear moments—and I imagine a similar seasonal alignment might help ground many of them.

It is comforting to realise that nature continues its cycles relentlessly, undeterred by the blurriness of it all, and that we never doubt its capacity to do so. In much the same way, we pass through the multitude of cycles that make up our lives, pushing forwards no matter what our thinking brains choose to fixate on or worry about.

Spring may be indecisive, but no one, least of all her, doubts she will get here in the end.

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Below, I’ve included a poem in which I have tried to capture this whirlwind sense of being swept along by something stronger than myself:

Quickening

I am determined
To lean into the joy
Of you

Sure, there is confusion
Layers to navigate
In which to get stuck and twisted

But you exist
Outside of these layers
And complications

For now
I want to exist there
With you

To be swept along
On the tidal wave
Of joy and change

Magic and disbelief
You ride
In the melee of our own making

For now
I want to feel
Your tiny heart

Beating inside me
The heart we made
When ours collided

Bound together
By nothing
But love and trust

I want to be overcome
By the possibility
Of you

Of the unknowns and mysteries
You hold
For now

I am choosing
This whirlwind
Over the one of hurt and emptiness

Because I need a break
From that whirlpool
Pulling me downwards

I think I deserve instead
To be swept along
As a pile of crisp fiery autumn leaves

Caught in a breeze
A gust of energy driving forwards
I know this is the weather you bring

I want to do you the service
Of being present
With you

As you fly
I want to let my heart
Just this once

Soar into the future
Carried by hope and excitement
That all I’ve ever wanted

Might be
Not just within my grasp
But already fluttering and kicking

Inside me
Could it be true
All I need do

Is trust you
Trust this magical quickening
Is our future already in motion

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Research is often inaccessible because of jargon and assumptions of prior knowledge. This shouldn’t be the case. Everyone has the right to know what we know. Knowledge is power, after all. AI can’t interpret and contextualise research for you, but I can.

That’s why I read science papers that won’t make it into the media but should, so you don’t have to.

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Dear friends,

This month, I’m looking at research on how an outdoor adventure programme can affect children with autism.

This isn’t nature-specific; it’s about physical activities outside that require problem-solving, communication and social interaction—things like crossing a rope bridge and asking other children for help to hold the bridge steady. But I’ve decided to include it in this series because it is still ultimately about kids being outside.

It’s about free, unstructured play that encompasses both physical activity and social interaction, about spending time outside beneath the sky, exposed to weather and trees, and it’s about breaking our society’s firm belief: the outdoors (where nature is) is either too messy or for organised sport only; the inside (where nature is not) is for learning.

It is certainly true that ‘If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism’—something famously said by Dr Stephen Shore, a professor of special education at Adelphi University. Although those diagnosed with autism do share many commonalities (in particular, differences in communication and social interaction, sensory sensitivity and highly focused interests), exactly how these commonalities manifest and blend for each person varies hugely.

This study set out to understand how taking part in an outdoor adventure programme could affect the presentation of these typical autism symptoms:

‘The effectiveness of an outdoor adventure programme for young children with autism spectrum disorder: a controlled study’

I love this study because it looks at the environments in which children are spending so much of their time—the ones we have created and deemed good for them—and asks what elements of these spaces work for children with autism and which elements don’t. Essentially, it’s asking not how we can force children within the rigid confines of our expectations, but whether there’s anything we can do that might make it easier for them to learn, make friends and enjoy their education.

I first came across this paper when I briefly worked with a fellow PhD researcher, Samantha Friedman, whose work focused specifically on how nature could support the wellbeing of those with autism. (She is now a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and continues work on this vital topic!) While this wasn’t the focus of my own research, the simplicity and implications of this paper have stayed with me.

What did the researchers do?

This study had a very simple set up. Parents and caregivers were asked to complete a questionnaire that measured the severity of their children’s autism symptoms. Then, roughly half of the children took part in a 13-week outdoor adventure programme, while roughly half did not. At the end of the 13 weeks, the parents and caregivers were asked to complete the same questionnaire again.

The researchers could then see if there were any differences: did the children’s autism symptoms appear reduced, more extreme or just the same, and were any patterns the same or different for the children who took part in the outdoor programme versus those who didn’t?

There were 51 children who took part, all between the ages of three and seven years old, all with a diagnosis of autism, and all attending one of seven special education kindergartens in the same city. 30 of the children (from four of the seven kindergartens) took part in the outdoor adventure programme, while 21 (from the other three kindergartens) did not.

This way, the researchers had a control group that they monitored for the same changes in autism symptoms over the same time period, meaning they could be more certain that any changes were likely due to the outdoor programme itself and not just the passage of time.

The physical activities in the programme involved trusting, working and communicating with other children—things that require being emotionally in tune with what others are feeling and doing. For example, the kids got to play on a ‘rope elevator’—an activity in which a group of children used a pulley to pull another child in a harness up towards the top of a tree. As simple and fun as this sounds, for this to be successfully enjoyed by everyone, the children must trust one another, work together in a coordinated way, exercise responsibility towards a friend and be aware of how the child in the harness is feeling.

To assess the severity of autism symptoms, the researchers used a standard questionnaire called the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), which is completed by parents or caregivers who regularly interact with the child. As well as providing an overall score, the scale also separately measures five key aspects of autistic behaviour: social awareness, social cognition, social communication, social motivation and autistic mannerisms.

The higher the scores, the more severe the presentation of symptoms. Scores of 60-75 indicate mild to moderate symptoms, while scores of 76 and above indicate severe autism symptoms.

What did they find?

There were key differences in changes to symptoms between the kids who took part in the adventure programme and those who didn’t. The children who spent time on physical, social activities outside showed a reduction in the severity of their autism symptoms, while those who didn’t take part showed an increase.

In terms of the overall SRS score—a measure of the general severity of autism symptoms—children who only attended their usual kindergarten showed a significant increase in the severity of their symptoms over time. On the other hand, the children who took part in the outdoor adventure programme showed a reduction in theirs, although this didn’t come out as a statistically significant reduction.

Looking at each of the five behavioural aspects that the SRS questionnaire measures, we can also spot differences in which kinds of symptoms changed in severity, and how, between the two groups of children.

For the children who only attended their usual kindergarten, the scores for each of the five behavioural aspects increased, with those for autistic mannerisms significantly so.

In contrast, for the children who took part in the outdoor adventure programme, scores for three of the five behavioural aspects—social cognition, social communication and autistic mannerisms—decreased, with the decrease in the score for social communication being statistically significant.

In other words, children in the outdoor adventure group showed a mild reduction in the severity of their autism symptoms, which was particularly strong in terms of social communication, while the children in the control group showed a mild increase in symptom severity, particularly in terms of autistic mannerisms.

I’ve included the original graphs from the paper below, since they are super clear and straightforward to interpret.

These three graphs show the changes that came out as significantly significant: the overall SRS score (a significant increase for the control group), the score for social communication (a significant decrease for the outdoor adventure group) and the score for autistic mannerisms (a significant increase for the control group).

Remember, an increased score means an increase in symptom severity, while a decreased score means a reduction in symptom severity.

The dotted lines show the change between the scores before and after the study for the control group—i.e., those who attended only their usual kindergarten, while the solid lines show the same for the children who took part in the outdoor programme.

A reminder that scores of 60-75 indicate mild to moderate symptoms, while scores of 76 and above indicate severe autism symptoms. So when you look at the vertical axes on the left, you can see that all of these changes are well within the mild to moderate range. But they are significant and directionally interesting nonetheless!

Why do we care?

I think these results are so cool! Just 13 weeks of regularly spending time outside in a social group doing physical activity led to significant changes in the severity of children’s autism symptoms. Regardless of the details, this alone demonstrates just how important the environment in which we place children is for their behaviour, and therefore for their ability to learn, make friends and enjoy school.

It makes intuitive sense that taking part in an outdoor adventure programme might lead to an improvement in social communication for autistic children, as it did here. As the researchers say in their paper, ‘This improvement reflects gains in verbal and non-verbal communication, imitation, and social reciprocal behaviours. The outdoor adventure programme offered opportunities for the children to cooperate with their peers, and required the use of interpersonal communication to achieve group goals… Therefore, these outdoor adventure programme components may have facilitated the development of social communication skills.’

In other words, while interacting with other children in a conventional classroom setting might work fine for the development of social communication skills in children without an autism diagnosis, it seems that outdoor activities might provide autistic children with the extra support they need to improve their social communication skills too. Of course, it is highly unlikely that this will result in no differences between autistic and non-autistic children at all, but if something as simple as this can make a small yet significant difference, then this is a powerful argument for improving our education offer for autistic children, rather than simply sticking them in a conventional classroom setting.

Many studies have shown the importance of early diagnoses and interventions for children with autism. This one makes a solid case for supplementing mainstream education with regular time outside in a physical and social setting. It might just be the difference for many autistic children between being able to stay in mainstream education and not.

Full credit to the authors of this paper: Ditza A Zachor, Shira Vardi, Shani Baron-Eitan, Inbal Brodai-Meir, Noa Ginossar and Esther Ben-Itzcak. If you would like to read the full paper, click here.

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How many WhatsApp groups do you belong to? More importantly, how many WhatsApp groups would you like to leave?

I can’t remember how there came to be so many group chats, but I find there is now one for every possible combination of people. No matter. As someone who writes about people and nature, I view these chats as a gold mine (as long as notifications are firmly muted).

The sheer range of attitudes to nature on display is fascinating. Everywhere is an arena in which to observe our relationship with nature, but WhatsApp groups are particularly revealing.

We start almost eight years ago, with a group chat I could not wait to leave, but from which I learned a great deal about the kinds of people I want to live among.

This chat was for the residents of a block of flats I lived in with my partner for four years, including through the COVID lockdowns. Somehow, despite us all sharing the same building, garden, trees, parking spaces and bins, it felt like the opposite of a community. It felt like a bunch of individuals who begrudgingly lived in the same space.

It was not an especially active WhatsApp group, which didn’t help the feeling of disquiet every time a notification popped up. (I hadn’t yet learned the power of the mute button.) 95% of the time, it was used for complaints: ‘There is an Audi parked in my parking space. Could whoever owns this please move it?’, ‘A reminder that we do not have space for guests to use the car park’, ‘There are too many bikes in the bike shed.’

But the complaint that kept cropping up was the one that bothered me the most. It is also the reason why I’m writing this at all.

The consensus was that the two beech trees at the entrance to the car park ought to be severely pruned or cut down. The rest of the complaints were easy enough to put out of mind. But this one left me feeling quite different from the other people with whom we were sharing our building.

The beech trees in question were beautiful. They were huge, healthy and huggable, and they were what made our flat feel like a home, not just a rental property.

Every autumn, these gentle trees produced the most gorgeous red canopy that bathed our bedroom in a magical morning light, making us feel as if we were living in a treehouse. They dominated the view from our home office window—a god send in lockdown in particular—and I remember them being a key reason we wanted to rent this flat in the first place. Setting our building back from the road, they enveloped us in a blanket of quiet that absorbed the noise of traffic (and no doubt plenty of fumes too).

Admittedly, beech trees do drop their leaves and nuts every year, and in mast years this does indeed feel like an assault. We were one of the most affected since our parking space was tucked right beneath them. We bought a cover for the car which we attempted to put on every time we parked up.

After a while though, we gave up and embraced having the debris of these trees over our windscreen for a month or two each year. Worse things have happened—in my opinion, things like having no trees at all in view from the tiny windows of your flat.

One day, the WhatsApp group became the most organised and active I had seen it: they were planning a joint email to the landlord to ask for the trees to be cut down. I couldn’t bear the thought of this happening and my having said nothing, so I respectfully made my case for keeping them: ‘Could we not just prune back the branches that hang over the driveway, leaving those that reach over the road?’

My message was received by silence. These were the days before you could react to messages, so I didn’t even get a pity thumbs-up.

During this time, next door to our building lived an elderly retired couple with a large and lovingly tended garden. They must have been in their 80s. I can’t remember how it began, but we collected groceries for them each week when shops reopened. Every weekend, we would receive an intriguing list of items to pick up, a serious regular of which was Branston pickle—very particular, no substitutes allowed.

As the summer bloomed, they invited us round for tea and cake in their delightful garden, which we could just glimpse from one of the windows of our flat if we stood on our tiptoes. We passed a wonderful afternoon talking about their garden and plants, which we could now see were not just confined to their garden but filled all their rooms, overpowering them with scents, leaves and colour.

Later that summer, we were recruited to water their plants and greenhouse for them while they were away for two weeks. I was honoured but also slightly horrified—my record with plants is not good, while their tomatoes were so healthy we could almost smell them from next door. I’m pleased to report that every single plant made it out of those two weeks alive.

I was struck by how vastly different these attitudes to nature were: the grumpy, domineering one shared by everyone in our building contrasting completely with the nurturing, welcoming one shown by our elderly neighbours. I couldn’t help but notice that these attitudes seemed mirrored by those towards each other. The people in our building, despite actually sharing the same bin collection schedule, seemed individualistic, the WhatsApp group existing merely as a place to complain when someone was making life difficult. Those next door, however, were all about sharing, helping and building connection.

Now, we live in a wonderful, small flat that we actually own. We fell in love with it last June when we viewed it, not just with the flat itself but with the building, with the community and gardens that seemed, from that brief visit, to be bustling, friendly and alive.

Sure enough, on moving-in day, our new neighbour climbed the stairs to see us stuck outside our new front door, unsure how to work the fancy lock. As we heard her coming up the stairwell, I could feel the apprehension building inside my partner and myself—would our hope of this friendly community be realised?

When she reached the top of the stairs, she beamed.

“Are you my new neighbours? We’ve been so excited to meet you!” she introduced herself and the rest of her family, including two little girls who were especially thrilled to meet us. Then she showed us how to work our lock and celebrated with us when the door finally opened, making the moment even more special.

Coincidentally, outside her front door is a beautiful display of plants—succulents, spider plants, a happy monstera in a gorgeous yellow pot. (“We have billions of them inside,” the eldest daughter informs me.)

Across the way lies a third flat on our floor, also decked out with well cared-for pot plants. A month or so later, it was Christmas, and both sets of neighbours sent us cards, home-baked mince pies and shared Christmas plans.

But, the pièce de résistance, let me tell you about the WhatsApp group.

On joining, I wondered whether we had simply got lucky with the neighbours on our floor. But the first messages were ones welcoming us to the building, ones of introductions and ‘Please drop round and say hello!’ These were followed a few weeks later by heart-warming messages about taking round a collection to the local hospice.

But the most regular messages are nature-based ones.

At 7am the day it snowed: ‘Catch it while you can!’ News of spotting a frog on the path and chats about how far it must have travelled. Updates of two ducks taking up residence in the pond.

It’s a communal narration of the nature that is such a key part of why we fell in love with the building in the first place. There are picnic benches out around the gardens for anyone to use, and deck chairs just waiting to be put out when the sun appears. It’s truly shared. There’s even a bench by the gates where people leave used books and magazines for exchange.

Yes, these are just three data points: three sets of people’s attitudes to nature and attitudes to community. But I know how much more at home we feel living among kind, friendly people who both ask for and provide help, and so far, their mirrored attitudes to nature have been helpful and reliable pointers to this.

Maybe it has something to do with nature being inherently shared. A tree outside a building is no more yours than it is your neighbours’ or the blackbirds’ who live in it. A butterfly flying past your window flies past your neighbours’ a minute later. If we truly delight in this, it simply does not fit to want to keep it all for ourselves.

Helping each other share in this joy and these observations, in the lives that go on around us, is all part of living together, is it not?

We might share a building and a WhatsApp group with our immediate neighbours, but we all share the same planet and resources, not just with each other but with other living things too—we are all members of the same club that is life.

When we spend time with nature, allowing it into our lives as both teacher and receiver of our care and attention, we can’t help but learn this lesson. Maybe this is just what the world needs more of now more than ever—instruction in what living in community means.

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This week, I’d like to talk to you about something very basic indeed: pointing.

Yes, there’s the obvious kind—when we want something or are trying to direct someone towards something in particular: ‘Please bring me that glass of water’ or ‘…that book to your left.’

But then there’s this other kind, the kind that seems bizarrely pointless (ha)—the kind we use simply to draw someone else’s attention to something interesting we’ve spotted. We don’t expect anything from this interaction, we don’t need anything, we merely find ourselves instinctively pointing at a thing because we want to share our view of the world with someone else: ‘Oh wow. Look at that leaf. What a funny shape.’ That kind of thing.

Let me show you what I mean.

The other day, I was enjoying a gentle walk in the sunshine. It’s that perfectly lovely time of year here in the UK when the sun feels so delicately warming on our skin, but we do definitely still need a light jacket—the level of warmth that makes us close our eyes and turn our faces to the sun just to feel its rays bounce across the surface of our eyelids.

At the time, I was clutching a hot coffee in one hand and a freshly baked, still-warm pastry in a paper bag in the other—a combination that never fails to make me feel like I am rich beyond words, especially when it’s sunny and the daffodils are dancing. Out of nowhere, my gaze was caught by a flash of neon yellow flapping somewhat haphazardly across a nearby flowerbed, awash with grape hyacinths, jonquils and blue alkanet.

In the UK, this distinctive fluttering of yellow is a brimstone butterfly, and it means only one thing—spring. Immediately, and without thinking, my face broke into a wide smile, and I found my left arm flying upwards to point out this little brimstone. So instinctive was this, that I actually snapped my hand into a point with my index finger, almost dropping my precious pastry in the process, and then I went to catch it with my other hand that was still holding the coffee.

Do not fear. This story has a happy ending. The pastry did not quite slip out of my grasp, only the smallest drop of coffee was spilled, and the brimstone butterfly remained unperturbed to continue his flowerbed patrol.

But so strong was that impulse of needing to share this joyful dash of flapping yellow, simply for sharing’s sake, that my hands had actually forgotten what they were already doing.

I’ve always been fascinated by human behaviour, by which I really mean primate behaviour, of which humans are just one kind, so much so that I did a master’s degree in human evolution and behaviour just so that I could fulfil my little dream of watching some species of monkeys or apes all day in the name of science. So this is not the first time I’ve considered our strangely human propensity to point.

Plenty of other animals can understand our pointing—dogs, wolves, elephants, dolphins, sea lions, horses, pigs, goats, even cats (when they want to…).

But the only other animals that point at things themselves are chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest living relatives), gorillas, orangutans, rhesus macaques, Japanese macaques and capuchin monkeys. As you can see, pointing is quite limited across the vast animal kingdom.

Crucially though, until very recently indeed, all examples we had of other primates pointing were to request something they or another individual wanted. It was thought that our capacity to point at something simply for sharing’s sake was uniquely human. It’s something very young humans start to do before they even reach a year old—simply wanting to direct someone else’s attention at something they themselves have seen.

But, in 2022, wild chimpanzees were caught on camera doing the exact same thing. An adult chimpanzee was spotted pointing at a leaf simply because she wanted her mother to join her in looking at it. Incredible!

What is the first thing you generally say when you spot something outside in nature? I’d wager it’s one of fairly few options: ‘Wow’, ‘Look at that’, ‘What is that?’, ‘Ah, a red kite! (or whatever else might have caught your attention)’. Can you justify why you do this? I can’t. It just happens, and it’s usually accompanied by a point (ideally without dropping what you are holding).

This instinctual need to share our view of the world with others, which is so often particularly active when we’re outside in nature, is so deeply instinctual, it seems, that it is shared by our closest living relatives. (I would be willing to bet an unreasonable amount of money that it is only a matter of time before we see bonobos doing this too.)

What this means, in all likelihood, is that this desire, this instinct to have our attention captured by nature and to share this with another, was very probably present in our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos, meaning that every extinct species of human that has ever existed had this capacity too—including Neanderthals (who have unfairly garnered a reputation for being brutish cavemen without culture).

These kinds of discoveries, right here, are why I’ve always been fascinated by primatology. It used to be so simple: humans were special because we have language, fire and use tools. One by one, items from this list have had to be scratched off, and so others have begrudgingly been added in their stead, desperate to prove our golden-child status: ‘Fine, but no one else feels empathy (even chickens do, as it turns out), counts (also chickens), has culture (most primates, plenty of whales and dolphins) or points (see above), and certainly not just to share something (also see above).’

And one by one, we continue to learn, when we watch, that we are not so special after all.

It firmly takes us off our pedestal, each behavioural discovery another blow to our mighty opinion of ourselves as separate from, above and more worthy than other living things. The sooner we learn this lesson, the safer all nature will be and the more balanced our lives will feel.

The reason I couldn’t help but share this particular discovery of pointing with you all is because of how it relates to our relationship with nature. I’ve written here before about how the natural world is full of things that capture our attention and about how this enables us to feel awe, both of which make us feel better. I’ve even written about how nature-rich environments can improve patient recovery, reduce rates of depression and improve ADHD symptoms in children.

This all helps us make perfect sense of why we are drawn to spending time outside in nature, and why our modern urban lives, that try so hard to separate us, can make us feel so unbalanced and mentally overwhelmed. But to learn that our desire to share these little deflections of our attention with others—to share the beautiful bark on that tree over there, the intricate shape of that flower, the tiny drop of dew caught at the centre of a leaf—is so deeply woven within us that it existed before humans did, this adds an extra dimension.

We like to think so cognitively, but our draw to nature lies so much deeper. We can see it when a baby points at a cloud, when an elderly patient struggling with dementia lights up at the sound of birdsong, when an unbidden smile breaks across our cheeks at the smell of a spring flower. To know that some level of this fascination might well be shared with chimpanzees brings us closer than ever to reconnection with the rest of life on this planet, and I cannot think of anything else as deeply grounding.

The next time you sense this urge to notice, to share, to smile, give into it.

You never know whom you are setting an example for. Maybe don’t give into it so completely that you drop your coffee and pastry, but, thinking about it, I’d prefer to have dropped them entirely than to never feel the joyful impulse to point at a brimstone butterfly.

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Have you heard of ‘biophilia’?

It’s become a bit of a trendy word recently. I remember it being the theme for a party once when I was at uni. The décor was all luminous insects, rainforests plants and glow-in-the-dark corals—both punk and hippie at the same time.

If you have even a smattering of knowledge of Greek or a casual interest in etymology, you can probably work out that biophilia has something to do with life (Think ‘biology, ‘biography’, ‘biosciences’) and loving (Think ‘philosophy’, ‘bibliophile’, ‘myrmecophile’—okay, this one’s a bit niche: species that have symbiotic relationships with ants…). And you’d be right.

It literally means ‘love of life’, from the ancient Greek ‘βίος’ for ‘life’ and ‘φιλία’ for ‘love’. I’ve noticed the word has started to creep out of its academic closet in recent years as it’s become more commonplace to see bees on tea towels and beetles on tote bags—as being seen as ‘environmental’ has become a little less whacky.

I’d like to believe this is because we, as a society, have started to reassess our relationship with nature. But it feels like only the superficial start of a very complicated, nuanced and soul-searching conversation we need to be much more proactive about having—if societies can have souls.

The reason I’ve been turning the idea of biophilia over in my mind recently is because of a strange, unexpected and delightful encounter I had the other week with a long-tailed tit.

I was climbing the stairs to my flat when I heard a strange kind of flapping sound coming from the top of the stairwell. At first, I thought it might be one of my neighbours struggling with something, but as I got closer, I realised the noise was too small and quiet to be human.

As I reached the top floor, I was met by a tiny long-tailed tit flying repeatedly at the window. I could hear its small wings flapping, the tiny thud of its little body against the glass and its small squeaks of distress. I gasped. I have no idea how it had got itself up there, but it clearly couldn’t get out if I didn’t help it—the windows in the corridor don’t open, so the only way out was back down the stairwell.

I racked my brains. I felt its desperation immediately tug at my heart strings. I wanted to rush straight at it and grab it so that I could set it free and return it to the trees. But I had absolutely zero confidence in my ability to snatch this tiny, fast-moving bird out of the air with my bare hands, and I knew logically this would only distress it further, possibly injure it.

I could feel my heart beat faster, more strongly pulsing against the insides of my ribcage as I felt the responsibility of this tiny life fall into the palms of my hands.

I’d once done some mist net training—that thing where you string up a very fine net in a forest to catch birds. You can then go back to it, gently remove the birds from the net and take measurements or whatever other data you need.

But it’s one thing to pick a delicate body out from a net and quite another to catch one that is distressed, flapping and free.

Eventually, I hit upon the idea of rooting around for an old flowerpot and something flat to cover the open end.

What followed were several minutes of me trying to gently scoop up the poor long-tailed tit and cover the open end of the pot with a saucer. It took quite a few attempts, between which I kept speaking to it: ‘Trust me’, ‘Please let me help you’, ‘I know I’m big and scary, but this will be over quickly’—even though, you don’t need me to tell you, this did nothing to calm its distressed little pants.

After about four attempts, I got it.

The weight of its body was imperceptible, and it settled so instantaneously still in the darkness of the flowerpot that for a moment I doubted it was in there. I honestly wondered whether it had vanished into thin air.

Gathering the logical part of my brain that prevented me from removing the saucer to check, I walked it down and out of the stairwell, straight outside to release it over a flowerbed in a quiet corner.

It flew straight up into the tree above, chirping at me quite loudly and angrily—an undeniably indignant sound in comparison to those frightened little squeaks just moments ago. I peered up and saw its beady dark eyes glaring down at me. I wished it ‘good luck’ and felt huge relief that it didn’t seem to be injured.

Now, whenever I spot a long-tailed tit out the window of my flat, I wonder if it is this same little unlucky bird—or lucky, I guess, given that I came across it in time.

And this is where my puzzlement comes in. Would this same bird have been just as lucky if anyone else had come along? Would everyone have felt this same firm pull of their heartstrings on clapping eyes on something so small and out-of-place? Was my reaction inherent to all humans, or only to some of us?

I simply cannot imagine someone coming across a bird in the way I did and not feeling intense sympathy. It was so small, so utterly helpless, so trapped, that my heart couldn’t help but break.

But regardless of the capability of my imagination, is an alternative reaction possible? Clearly, despite how much I want to believe it isn’t, it is. We’ve all met people who seem to show no care towards other living things at all. So the question is ‘why’?

This is where I find myself going back to read up about biophilia, in search of answers.

Biophilia is a concept that comes from both sociobiology and sociology. This love of life is thought to be, depending on which eminent professor’s work you read, either an innate quality of being human that is always present, or an innate quality that only comes out when a person is in the right situation.

Neither of these theories is really empirically testable—in other words, we haven’t yet, or can’t, figure out which of these is true. But either way, these frameworks are helpful for trying to understand why some people would never hurt a fly while others buy fly swats.

Sociobiology—the study of social behaviour in the light of evolution—posits that everyone has an innate tendency to love life and life-giving environments because it is evolutionarily advantageous to us. In simpler terms, we love life because it benefits our survival to do so. This is called the Biophilia Hypothesis.

It makes intuitive sense. It’s logical that we have evolved to gravitate towards life-filled places that make us feel good, safe and have all the resources we need. It also makes sense that at the other end of the scale lies ‘biophobia’, which is an aversion or fear towards elements of nature that are dangerous and unsafe—being fearful of a poisonous snake or a cliff edge, for instance.

On the other hand, sociology—the study of human societies and behaviours—suggests that biophilia is a tendency that only appears when people’s existential needs are met—security, justice and freedom. If they are, then biophilia manifests as care, curiosity, responsibility and respect towards other living things. If these needs aren’t met, then a destructive attitude towards life develops—the other side of the same coin.

In other words, one suggests that humans never hurt flies, while the other that people only buy fly swats when they are in an existentially stressful environment.

Evidently, one of these theories suggests that everyone would react to my long-tailed tit in the same way, while the other implies it’s dependent on an individual’s situation. Regardless of which is closer to the truth, I find both frameworks helpful and uplifting.

Both imply that all humans are capable of respect and tenderness towards other living things, on a very deep, intrinsic level. If this is failing to manifest, then it is either because someone is in an environment or society in which they feel inherently unsafe, undervalued or un-cared-for, or because people have become so disconnected from nature that coming across a tiny bird now falls closer to the biophobia end of the scale, simply through a lack of familiarity and interaction.

Both of these explanations suggest we can do something about it. We can build a society in which everyone feels secure, free and justly treated, and in which children grow up with regular contact with other creatures. And we don’t need to do this merely to ensure that all long-tailed tits will be rescued in future similar situations. I would wager that a society full of people who treat nature with kindness and respect is a happier one.

Clearly, biophilia is a much more nuanced concept than luminous butterflies stuck on the walls at a party suggest. But I do recommend it as a great conversation starter. I think keeping this idea in mind as we move through life is important because we all have agency over shaping our own and our children’s attitudes towards all life—what could be a more important job than that?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about those kids who burn ants through a magnifying glass. I think they’re the same ones who chase birds round a park and try to kick them.

This kind of destructive behaviour towards other living things is a complete anathema to me—also, it seems, to the plenty of children I’ve seen showing a touching level of care towards other animals and plants.

How different from that child I wrote about last summer, who was so keen to rescue a woodlouse from being stepped on that she halted a ticket queue:

I’m reminded, too, of my friend’s two-year-old, of whom I have been sent several videos showing his gentleness towards ladybirds and woodlice. A particular favourite of mine is one in which he is transfixed by a woodlouse crawling across a step. His mum says “Say, ‘Hello!’” and he responds with “Cuddle!”, which he repeats in earnest a few times. My heart is a puddle every damn time.

But then there are the children I see running after pigeons or ducks in a park, legs outstretched, arms flailing and shouting, apparently finding joy in making the birds so flustered.

Why do children—and by extension, people—turn out so differently?

Our understanding of psychology has progressed sufficiently for us to no longer believe some children are inherently uncaring or evil, while others are born as kind souls. Clearly, this has something to do with the environment they are growing up in, the behaviours they see modelled and encouraged, and a little bit of different temperaments thrown into the mix too. It is not a child’s fault.

So what is it we are doing, either individually or as a society, to lead children to burn ants?

I imagine it might be that children are consistently seeing some behaviours modelled and others not. More subtly, are they persistently noticing that some attitudes and values are encouraged while others are discouraged?

I don’t think modelling of behaviour needs to be explicit for it to be powerful. I’m not saying a child who chases pigeons does this because they have literally watched their parent do the same thing. But if there’s one thing that can be said with certainty about children, it’s that they are always more perceptive than we give them credit for.

Could the subtle cues in the way our society works be enough: the way we bulldoze and trash nature for our own entertainment—think of the wreckage left behind after a music festival or the state of plenty of natural spaces after a sunny bank holiday, the way we don’t take time to stop and appreciate flowers or birds chirping but brush past it all as if it doesn’t matter, the way people express disgust for animals like pigeons and rats as if it’s their fault the rubbish is overflowing?

We teach children that nature has no worth or value, that our needs as humans are inherently superior and dominant. In this context, why not chase a pigeon if it seems like fun?

But it could be even simpler than this. Is it merely the inevitable result of a lack of interaction with nature?

Could it be that many children now grow up with such little interaction with wildlife that it doesn’t occur to them that these animals have feelings, that their actions are causing them distress?

This doesn’t occur to them because they haven’t had enough life experience interacting with other living things to learn this themselves, and because no one has taken the time to show them. I find this both chilling and heartbreaking in equal measure. They aren’t doing it to cause harm, just to have fun and have an effect on the world around them.

Imagine no one taking the time to show children that other animals have feelings and worth, to show them how to slow down and care rather than rush in and dominate. I’m struggling to come up with anything that is as perfectly symptomatic of humanity’s disconnect from our place as part of the natural world as this.

There is something I find deeply disconcerting about young children who are already out of touch with their caring instincts, especially when many sociologists and sociobiologists have argued that a respect for other forms of life might be an innate facet of being human. (More on this soon...)

Whether or not destructive behaviour towards other living things is learned, the logical consequence of a lack of nature experiences or a combination of the two, should we not view it as just as vital to encourage kindness towards all living things as we do towards other people—their friends, classmates, siblings and parents?

Seeing children behaving carelessly towards other animals makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable, but even more so when I see just how comfortable with this other people seem to be. I’m reminded of a quote from Possessing the Secret of Joy by Alice Walker: ‘There could be no happy community in which there was one unhappy child’. I can’t help but feel there can be no caring society if children’s empathy does not extend towards other living things.

And yet, go to a busy park, and you will surely see this in action, unchallenged: ‘Kids will be kids.’

They will, of course. But I don’t believe this is kids being kids. I believe this is kids playing at being adults in the society we’ve created.

As much as I don’t think ants deserve to be burned or birds deserve to be chased, neither do I think children deserve to be brushed with the stereotype of being destructive engines of chaos. They deserve to be seen and encouraged to be the caring people they are, before we teach it out of them.

If we don’t consistently encourage the heart-lifting goodness we see in kids, then we’ve lost all hope of redressing our damaged relationship with nature before we’ve even begun.

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I hate complaining for the sake of it, but sometimes it helps. I’d like to complain about leaf blowers.

They are loud, smelly, unignorable, polluting, energy inefficient and highly pointless. They also seem to have a habit of popping up at precisely the worst moments in precisely the worst places.

But the ultimate reason why I think leaf blowers merit complaining about is because they symbolise absolutely everything that is wrong with our relationship with nature.

I was sitting in a café the other week, trying to write, when a man in high-viz rocked up across the road with a leaf blower. Within minutes, a number of people had audibly huffed and extracted hefty noise-cancelling headphones from their bags, the previously coffee-scent-heavy air had been filled with the obnoxious smell of diesel, and several people had got up and left.

And all so that some fallen leaves could be blown off the pavement and onto the road, from where, no doubt, they would shortly blow back again.

You might disagree. Perhaps you have a leaf blower of your own and it’s a favourite tool of yours for gardening.

I can see the importance of keeping pavements and paths free of debris so people don’t slip, especially those with extra mobility needs. But I think I would find leaf blowers less offensive if they reliably led to clearer paths. They don’t.

It’s well known that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I might add to this list ‘Deciduous trees will drop their leaves’.

It seems to me that if we insist, as we should, on planting trees and shrubs in urban areas, then to repeatedly resort to leaf blowers in an attempt to keep the environment tidy is much like very calmly, and in all seriousness, continuing to mop the kitchen floor when the nearby river has flooded its banks, and seeing absolutely no problem with our approach.

The best dystopian fiction about the future, in my opinion, is not the kind that sketches a world far away from our own in time and space, with disasters that would instantly shock people if they happened right now in the real world. They are those that paint a picture just subtly different from our own, through suggestions, slight alterations to our own reality that lie just on the other side of the line we are comfortable with.

Think of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The four ministries Orwell introduces at the start of the book are not immediately horrific (‘The Ministry of Truth’—sounds reasonable…). The workplace he creates in which Winston works is not really so very different from our own. And this is precisely why it is so deeply disturbing. The book builds from these subtleties that are not so far from our own experience to its logical end point—complete totalitarianism. That’s its genius.

Call me crazy, but to me, leaf blowers are the environmental equivalent of the Ministry of Peace. If I were to write a book of environmental dystopian fiction, it would certainly have leaf blowers in it. If they didn’t already exist in reality, I am sure I would have tried to come up with some similar kind of machine.

Imagine a society so completely cut off from the natural world that they regularly go around with vacuum cleaners to suck up any natural debris. Dead leaves are nothing but waste and an annoyance. Soil does nothing but get stuck on the soles of people’s shoes. Blossom does nothing but blow in through the windows and get stuck in vents. Much better to clean it up. In fact, much better to just replace all the plants with plastic ones. It will save money on the clean-up.

I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you that this is already reality in so many urban places.

Why are we so obsessed with making ourselves busy, with thinking our contributions to the world are so important that we have the right to clear up the ‘mess’ left by other species? It seems our conditioning to tidy and control nature is powerful. Even when we create societies far removed from nature, we still feel the need to cement that separation.

I can’t remember what I was writing before that leaf blower arrived outside the café and all I could hear inside my head was the roaring of its engine. But at least I have now written this.

I am not trying to create some kind of movement to overthrow the leaf blower. I understand that local authorities have responsibilities, quite rightly, to make public paths safe for all users. But I am trying to point out the stupidity of thinking that the leaf blower is the solution to this, and also of thinking that the biggest threat to people’s safety is dried leaves on the floor.

Of course, when it rains leaves can become slippery, but if we design our urban spaces to work with nature, rather than shutting it out altogether, then these problems can be lessened in a much more cost-effective way. Have you heard of Sustainable Drainage Systems, or SuDS? These are ways of designing urban surfaces, like pavements, roads and driveways, to manage flood risks from urban run-off. Not the flashiest name or idea, but they do have permeable pavements. Imagine that! Urban surfaces that actually acknowledge the fact that rain will fall from the sky.

What about leaving trees and shrubs with roots in flowerbeds and soil—i.e., creating space for more nature? The natural world has evolved over millennia to regulate itself. Curiously, millions of years’ worth of dry leaves had not piled up out there before we invented the leaf blower. Dead leaves can mulch down when they fall on soil. Just think of all that money local authorities could save on pointless tidying if we allowed nature to tidy itself.

I am very keen to alert you to the dystopian nature of leaf blowers. So many elements of dystopian worlds, if recognised early on in the story for their true insidious potential, could serve as useful warnings for the ending. Maybe we prevent the ending of our story if we pay attention.

This is what I propose we do with leaf blowers. Let’s not accept these machines as essential. Radical, I know, but it is possible to design our urban spaces to work with nature in such a way that it benefits us all and nature, and means we don’t have to sit in cafés breathing in diesel fumes and resorting to noise-cancelling headphones to hear our own thoughts.

Urban planning policy may not be sexy, but it sure is the secret to avoiding an environmental dystopia.

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Research is often inaccessible because of jargon and assumptions of prior knowledge. This shouldn’t be the case. Everyone has the right to know what we know. Knowledge is power, after all. AI can’t interpret and contextualise research for you, but I can.

That’s why I read science papers that won’t make it into the media but should, so you don’t have to.

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Dear friends,

This month, I’m looking at a paper on ADHD and nature.

I keep being asked questions about this, and with good reason. We know being outside in a green environment calms us down, even when we don’t have ADHD, so can it be beneficial for managing ADHD symptoms?

This research came out over 20 years ago in 2004, and it’s the work of Frances E. Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor. These two have been prolific on the topic of attention, concentration and related behaviours, and how these are affected by natural environments. Today’s paper presents the results of a national survey of parents from across the United States with children who have a professional ADHD diagnosis:

‘A Potential Natural Treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence From a National Study’

I really love this study because it places its question squarely in the context of the wider literature around the psychology of being outside. Our current best understanding of why natural spaces calm our minds, making it easier for us to focus and concentrate, is that they allow our attention to replenish.

How much attention we can pay to things is a limited resource that we drain when we engage in highly attention-demanding tasks—reading, watching TV, driving. But nature allows this kind of attention to restock, since it is full of things that don’t take effort to pay attention to—birdsong, leaves blowing in the breeze, a flowing stream.

This is known as Attention Restoration Theory, and I’ve written about it in more detail here, in the context of why I often go outside to write this newsletter:

Since nature helps us when we are suffering with attention fatigue, Kuo and Taylor ask, can it help those with ADHD, who struggle with even greater attention fatigue than the rest of us?

Research can often seem super niche, with scientists asking only marginally different questions from each other. I love this work because it is so clear why we need to figure this out: ADHD is the most common neurobehavioural disorder of childhood, affecting many adults too. How can we better design environments and activities to help manage ADHD, rather than make it harder?

What did the researchers do?

Very simply, Kuo and Taylor asked parents from across the US to rate 49 common after-school activities according to the effects they thought they had on their children’s ADHD symptoms. They received 452 usable responses.

Parents were asked whether each activity made their child’s symptoms ‘much worse than usual’, ‘worse than usual’, ‘the same as usual’, ‘better than usual’ or ‘much better than usual’ for the hour or so after the activity finished. The instructions asked parents to focus specifically on four symptoms from the official ADHD diagnostic criteria that were thought to be easily observable by parents: ‘difficulty in remaining focused on unappealing tasks’, ‘difficulty in completing tasks’, ‘difficulty in listening and following directions’ and ‘difficulty in resisting distractions’.

Crucially, many of these 49 activities were the same, apart from the social and environmental contexts in which they were listed as taking place. Reading, for example, could happen alone, in a pair or in a group, and it might take place in a green outdoor setting, a built outdoor setting or indoors.

The researchers could then see whether a child’s ADHD symptoms were exacerbated or reduced after doing the same activity in these different social and environmental settings. In other words, can children’s ADHD symptoms improve when they are in a natural space and is this affected by the size of the group they’re in?

What did they find?

In short, yes—being outside in a green setting reduced children’s ADHD symptoms regardless of whether they did something alone, in a pair or in a group.

In fact, being in a green area was the only environment in which ADHD symptoms improved regardless of social context. When children took part in activities outside but in a built setting, parents judged their symptoms to be reduced only when the activity was done alone or in a pair, but not when in a larger group. When it came to indoor activities, ADHD symptoms actually appeared more severe when in a group.

Remarkably, these findings held regardless of children’s gender, age (all in this study were between 5 and 18 years old), household income (ranging from less than $25,000 to $75,000 or more per year), region of the United States and home environment (from rural to large city). The results were also consistent between children with hyperactivity (i.e., those diagnosed with ADHD) and those without (i.e., those diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder), among children with mild, average and severe symptoms, and among children with both ADHD and learning disorders.

There are two key takeaways here then. First, children’s ADHD symptoms are reduced by activities that take place outside in a green environment. Second, symptoms also appear reduced when activities are done alone or in a pair, as opposed to in a larger group.

Why do we care?

This is very simple, with very clear applications. It is also over 20 years old.

The worst setting for children with ADHD, then, is inside in large groups. Where do we send children all day, expecting them to ‘behave’? Into school classrooms—inside spaces with little to no nature, with tens to hundreds to thousands of other children. What’s the second worse setting? Outside in a built environment in large groups—a pretty exact description of most schoolyards and playgrounds.

ADHD diagnoses among children have been increasing for the last few decades, just as children’s home and play environments are becoming progressively less green. I know there are complex reasons and debates raging as to why diagnoses are on the rise—I am not for one second suggesting that all of this is down to nature access. I also know correlation doesn’t prove causation.

But regardless of the strength of the association between environment and ADHD symptoms or its mechanism, if we know green environments are better, not just for those with ADHD but for all children, then what are we doing?

This is why I think placing this study in the context of Attention Restoration Theory is so important, and why I like that the researchers did it. Yes, a study that shows a correlation doesn’t necessarily prove causation. But based on what we already know about environmental psychology—about the effects of natural environments on our attention, concentration and behaviour, we should absolutely expect this kind of relationship between the severity of ADHD symptoms and green environments.

20-plus years ago, not as many people were talking about ADHD, but this research was happening. It’s continued in the intervening years, too. I think it’s important that we listen.

I worry how many children are being forced into environments that do not work for them, being made to feel as if the problem lies with them and not with what we are expecting of them. I think we have both more liability and power in this than we realise—the environments we design for our children matter. This means, when we realise something isn’t working, even if it is our fault as a society, we can put it right.

How much more effort must we expend trying to medicate and discipline children so that they fit the environments we build for them, before we decide to work with children and their environment instead? Nature has given us an environment that helps, for which we have evolved—let’s stop shutting kids out of it.

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Full credit to the authors of this paper: Frances E. Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor. If you would like to read the full paper, click here.

I’d like to leave you with a couple of quotes from the paper itself:

‘This line of research has exciting implications for the management of ADHD. If clinical trials and additional research confirm the value of exposure to nature for ameliorating ADHD, daily doses of “green time” might supplement medications and behavioral approaches to ADHD. These “doses” might take a variety of forms: choosing a greener route for the walk to school, doing class work or homework at a window with a relatively green view, or playing in a green yard or ball field at recess and after school.

While medications are effective for most children with ADHD, they are ineffective for some, and other children cannot tolerate them. In the case of children for whom medication is tolerable and effective, exposure to green settings as part of their daily routine might augment the medication’s effects, offering more complete relief of symptoms and helping children function more effectively both at school and at home. …among those children for whom medication is not an option, a regular regime of green views and green time outdoors might offer the only relief from symptoms available.’

‘The findings outlined here, taken in the context of previous research, suggest that common after-school and weekend activities conducted in relatively natural outdoor environments may be widely effective in reducing ADHD symptoms. If controlled experiments and clinical trials bear out this potential, such natural treatments promise to supplement current approaches to managing ADHD, with the advantages of being widely accessible, inexpensive, nonstigmatizing, and free of side effects.’

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I was in my local café last week when I overheard something that made me look up.

I won’t beat around the bush—I was eavesdropping. Along with people-watching, coffee-drinking, reading and writing, this is a top function of cafés, I think.

It was around lunchtime, so the usual rush of teenagers from nearby schools was alive and well, a queue of them forming and beginning to reach the door.

“Ugh, I hate the environment.”

I looked up from my laptop, not intending to judge, just immediately captivated. I must have been unsubtle, since I instantly caught her eye. I smiled. She smiled.

“I mean… I don’t hate the environment,” she sheepishly clarified, loudly while glancing at me sideways, both of us still smiling. “I hate learning about the environment.”

Her friend nodded strongly, her back to me, unaware of my nosiness.

They looked about 15 years old, their school uniforms perfectly neat and bags bursting with books and folders. They did not strike me as particularly apathetic students, on the contrary.

And yet, there it was. Despite being of a generation that has come to be known for climate strikes, climate anxiety and their environmental inheritance, which they know as well as we do is coming to them, here were two 15-year-olds complaining about learning about the environment, just as generations of school kids before them have bemoaned their least favourite and most boring subjects.

Let me be clear. I do not blame them.

The way we teach children about the environment at school in the UK is poor. It’s quadrats, counting different types of grass on a school playing field and endlessly learning the same facts about CO₂ emissions, fossil fuels and global warming. It is far from the joined-up education the next generation deserves.

What other topic lends itself so perfectly to truly cross-curricular learning? Genuinely learning about the environment requires getting to grips with politics, engineering, geography, geology, ecology, biology, chemistry, physics, history, economics, anthropology, literature, art. I’m sure I could go on.

Yet, although the environment is a subject all of itself, we reduce it to its bare bones and stick it, as an afterthought, onto the curricula of pre-existing subjects. We teach about a field guide or identification key, and a little bit about biodiversity and its measurements in biology. We teach about climate in geography.

There’s a reason that one of the key demands of the Fridays for Future climate strikes in the UK has been environmental education. This isn’t to say all children involved in these strikes simply adore learning about the environment at school and want more of it. This demand is likely there because they can see the lack of holistic teaching.

I have frequently written in this newsletter about how we cannot care for something unless we know about it, unless we are aware of it. But it does not follow that simply becoming aware of something makes us care.

There’s a difference between learning about something and connecting with it. They are not mutually exclusive, but one does not necessarily follow directly from the other.

How we learn about something, how we are made aware of it, matters. If a topic is stripped of its heart, its intrigue, made dull and reduced, overly simplified, then fostering care and love for this topic is going to be an uphill, if not impossible, struggle.

Of course young people care about the environment. It’s their future. It’s a huge reason why they feel anxious about it.

But the mismatch with how they feel when they sit in a lesson supposed to be equipping them with knowledge, leaving them feeling empowered to take hold of their own future, when instead they feel dead bored, only adds to their anxieties. It must be so confusing, sitting there in a classroom thinking ‘Ugh, I hate this topic!’, but also knowing deeply how important it is, as that young girl in the café so perfectly articulated.

I do not think, when young people demand better environmental education, that they want more detailed facts in textbooks. I think they want to really understand how we’re in this mess. They get the chemistry. They get the technological solutions. Heck, 20 years ago when I was at school we were learning about solar panels, hydroelectric power and wind turbines. It’s not rocket science, and young people aren’t idiots.

But what about the complexities of the geopolitical context around how and why we are so slow to act? About how different cultures have had vastly different relationships with their environments across millennia, and how this has led to enormously different cultural philosophies of extraction and separation from nature, or oneness and stewardship? How these, in turn, have led to and been fed by different religions, artwork, literature, folklore and ways of life? How the complex interplay of local versus national versus international governments, and how democratically elected individuals are influenced by industry, are just as much, if not more, key to all this than how different types of photovoltaic cells process energy?

These are meaty topics that require class debates and discussion, essay writing, argument and thinking—not merely filling in multiple-choice questions that reduce even the keenest of students to sighs, eye rolls and coffee.

Perhaps, when it comes to the natural world itself, rather than just ecological terminology and measurement techniques, getting out into actual nature might help. This is not easy, I grant you, when schools have so little nature in them. But using quadrats to count the grass on a playing field might just be—and maybe I’m going out on a limb here—actually boring students close to death.

We might be turning them away from ecology and environmental science before they’ve even had a chance to fall in love with what the natural world has to offer.

How about bringing nature to life through integration into the typically more creative subjects? Sessions outside in art lessons, English lessons, using nature as inspiration for poetry, short stories and artwork. Encouraging children to connect with the natural world in the ways we re-learn as adults is a much more powerful way of fostering that care they already feel.

Then, learning about how to measure and quantify elements of the environment might not feel quite so pointless, because these measurements are about a place that matters to them, to which they feel connected.

I guess, in a very roundabout way, I want to say to that girl in the café:

“I hear you! I hated learning about the environment at school too. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about the environment. It means you’re being let down by an education system that you have every right to demand more of.”

I worry that people leave school thinking they don’t like learning about the environment so they must not care about the environment. It’s not true, but we are making it very hard for them to pick this apart, among everything else they’re trying to pick apart when they’re 18.

My favourite thing about this particular eavesdropping episode was the eye contact between us and the mutual grinning. It felt like, by inadvertently catching her in the act of ‘hating’ the environment, I saw through it, and she did too. I still can’t not laugh when I hear her swift and sheepish clarification in my head.

I only hope there are enough kids out there who are sure enough of themselves to realise they are justified in hating learning about the environment at school. The more confident they are in their gut feeling that it is taught in a dull way, that they deserve better, the more confidently they can hold onto their true feelings of care towards the environment, the more they can continue to demand more from the education system through which we funnel them.

Never change, teenagers. It is us adults who must make the changes.

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