Can Nature Save Our Very Souls?

I have long thought that one of the things most wrong with contemporary society is the distance from Nature at which most of us live.  It has seemed to me that the materialism, greed, lack of community, lack of empathy with both other humans and with our planet that mark our society so strongly must result from living and working in a built environment, bombarded by relentless media and the advertising that comes with it, constantly immersed in commercialism, financial worry, the acquisition of "stuff" and all the dehumanizing effects of life in this environment.  In a previous post I wrote about my own personal restorative experience as a volunteer at the Rio Grande Nature Center, an experience that continues and only gets better with passing time.  This place and the time I spend there, as well as many other natural places and experiences in my life have taught me that Nature is for me a deep healer, the place I go to pull the fragments of my life, my soul, back together, if only temporarily. And, it often is temporary - we all have to return to the traffic, the jobs, the griefs, the bills and worries of daily life in the 21st century, but some of the effects of time spent on a beach, a riverbank, a mountainside, in a forest or wetland, observing birds and other creatures, listening to the wind, the waves, birdcalls, coyote howls (Nature is never really silent, I have found) - some of the transformative power of this time stays with me for a good while, at a core level. 

So, I knew that nature makes me, and probably most of us, feel better.  But one of my ranger friends at the Nature Center passed along this press release from the University of Rochester on the results of a study researched and written by a team from the university, and published last September in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. ( available only by subscripton) . Titled Can Nature Make Us More Caring? Results of Immersion in Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations,  the study reveals the surprising fact that  experiencing our natural surroundings can have social as well as personal benefits. Richard Ryan, coauthor and professor of psychology, psychiatry and education at the University of Rochester goes on to say: "While the salubrious effects of nature are well documented, from increasing happiness and physical health to lowering stress, this study shows that the benefits extend to a person's values and actions. Exposure to natural as opposed to man-made environments leads people to value community and close relationships and to be more generous with money."

The four experiments in this research interestingly show that exposure to nature can affect our priorities and alter what we think is important in life. In short, we become less self-focused and more other-focused. Our value priorities shift from personal gain, to a broader focus on community and connection with others. The researchers explored responses to extrinsic life aspirations, such as financial success, or being admired by other people, and intrinsic aspirations, like deep and lasting relationships or contributing to the betterment of society.  The research subjects exposed to the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations.Good explanation of the research methodology here.

The Place That Saved My Life

Well, maybe that's a little dramatic, but it's really how I feel about this place.  The place is the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park, on  the banks of the Rio Grande river, on the western edge of the city of Albuquerque. It's a small park, no camping or boating, the main purpose of which is education.  School groups, senior citizen groups, scout troops and others, all visit the park and are taken on guided educational tours of the facility, learning about the river, the woods and ponds, the birds and creatures that  live there.  Educational volunteers also go to the schools and give classroom programs with hands-on materials, (Pond by Visitor Center)

There's an architect-designed Visitor Center, native plant gardens, cottonwood trees full of birds year round.There are beavers and porcupines in the woods, coyotes from time to time.  Sandhill cranes winter in the fields and on the wetlands,  wood ducks and Canada geese build nests along the edges of the pond pictured above, and red-eared slider turtles bask on logs in the sun. It's a place close enough to the city to be an urban getaway, yet with a feel of  being far away from the freeways and shopping malls.

Two months after my partner and I moved out here to New Mexico in early summer 2006, there was a tragic death in my family back east, and I spent that fall and winter immersed in grief, the inability to function in any normal way.  During that time Gail and I would go out to the Nature Center as often as we could, for long quiet walks and birding.  It came to feel like a haven to us us both, a place of peace and healing.  I hadn't found a job yet, and felt incapable of looking for one. When I discovered that volunteer training was about to be offered at the RGNCSP, I signed up immediately and spent six weeks of early spring attending classes every Saturday.  The group (Old cottonwoods self-pruning) of  volunteer trainees was friendly but low-key, mostly about my age, many of them retired teachers, not overly interested in the sort of personal questions and chat that I could absolutely not handle; and the educational rangers just interested in how much we could learn.  I looked forward to the classes as an occasion to get out of my own pool of mourning briefly once a week, learn the native plants and animals in a uniquely stressfree fashion, connect with the natural world and even endure some human companionship that didn't ask anything of me I couldn't give.

 We walked the trails, discovered where beavers had gnawed down trees, found their burrows in the river bank, found gopher and rabbit holes, hawks' nests high in the trees, tried to identify forbs and shrubs that were barely leafing out. We concentrated on what we were learning, and at the end of the six weeks had a potluck, met many of the old volunteers, and signed up for the work committees of our choice. (Opuntia in native plant gardens.)

I signed up as a front desk greeter in the Visitor Center and a gardener in the native plant gardens, and began working at these tasks pretty much immediately. In the gardens it was hard hot work that kept panic attacks and bouts of sobbing in abeyance; at the front desk it was harder, because I had to manage a semblance of normalcy: welcome people to the park, answer questions, convey information.  And I got better at it every time I put on my volunteer vest and nametag and took up my post.  it was impersonal, yet it felt very good to share a place I loved so much with visitors from all over the country, all over the world in fact.(Outdoor classroom in the cottonwoods.)

Once I was able to face looking for a job, then finding and holding the one I found, I had less time to spend at the Nature Center, so have temporarily dropped work in the gardens, as my own gardens now take up a great deal of my spring and summer available time.  I have been at the front desk for the past three years though, usually for an afternoon a week. I've welcomed hundreds of visitors, showed children the exhibits in the Center, had a chance to use my foreign languages often, directed people to the trails, birding sites, and gardens; in general felt like the Ambassador for the Center on my afternoons at the desk.  I take a short walk somewhere on the grounds whenever I am there; and Gail and I go for longer hikes by the river on the weekends.  Some of the rangers and other volunteers have become friends, and it feels to me now like not only a personal haven, but a community, a sort of home. A sanctuary. A place that saved my life when I really didn't know if I would be able to keep going on my own.(Snowy Sandias, Candelaria wetlands in foreground.)

There is a new class of volunteers in training currently, and the Volunteer Co-Ordinator asked me if  I would be interested in giving a "testimonial" at this coming Saturday's class.  A short talk on my own experience as a volunteer at the Center, why I started, why I continue, what they can expect if they complete the training and actually put on a khaki vest and a Volunteer nametag. This post is a sort of preparation meditation on what I might say Saturday morning.  I'm not sure if I'll tell them that this experience saved my life. It might be Too Much Information for most people.  But, then again, perhaps I might. We never know, do we, when we are in the presence of someone whose life might be in tatters, might need to know there can be, sometimes, salvation. In so many unexpected ways. In explaining to children about nurselogs or hummingbirds, telling people where to find a hawk's nest high in the cottonwood canopy.  In weeding and sweating in companionable silence in the bird garden on a summer morning; in walking a trail to check for fallen branches or trash.  In being a part of a place that is sanctuary for so many species of creatures and plants.(Panoramic view of Rio Grande and RGNCSP)

Nature Deficit Disorder

Following is the text of a post that I wrote a year and a half ago, saved as a draft and just out of curiosity opened to read this morning. Yes, there are drafts from that long ago hanging around on my computer; I'm afraid it's true. Anyway, since I wrote this draft, many moons have come and gone, and this past summer was spent almost entirely outdoors in my gardens. It was the healthiest and happiest I've felt in a very long time. Ironically enough, now that summer has faded into deep autumn, the mornings stay dark and cold for entirely too long, and I'm back in the classroom much of the time, or preparing for time in front of my classes, I once again feel I'm experiencing Nature Deficit Disorder. I seriously miss getting out into the yard as soon as light breaks over the mountains, and staying there until the sun sinks behind the volcanos. My little beds of cool weather crops are growing apace, and this morning I thinned out the lettuce, chard and spinach, going to use the thinned-out babies in tonight's salad. There's lots of garden cleanup that needs doing before it gets much colder, and we made a start on it this past weekend. We've had some good hikes in the bright gold October weather, and hopefully will be able to continue to get some more in before the short afternoons grow shorter and colder. I need to do everything in my power to evade a winter of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), and/or the lesser-known NDD (Nature Deficit Disorder)

Written in March of 2008
There is now a "social trend" called Nature Deficit Disorder, which so far is only associated with children.The term describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illness, The term was coined by author Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods. According to Louv, our children's lack of connection to nature is causing what amounts to an epidemic of overweight depressed kids with high rates of attention disorders. I'm so far past childhood that I'll soon be eligible for Medicare, but as soon as I read about this disorder, I recognized it as exactly the condition in which I've been living far too long. The book is one I've been meaning to read, as a person blessed with quite a few young children in my life; but I realized as I read about NDD that just about the only time I myself venture very far into nature is when kids are visiting. That's when we hike in the mountains, go to the Biopark, bird along the river at the Rio Grande Nature Center.

The rest of the time I'm like the kids in Louv's book, cooped up in the artificial lights and indoor air of a classroom, or in my home office in front of the computer, not, in my case, playing video games, but reading and writing, ironically, about the environment. I have been reading so much about gloom and doom lately that I fear I am also suffering from yet another twenty-first century disorder: Eco-anxiety.

And so, it seems to me that it's time to get out of this chair, away from this computer, and experience more of "the environment" than the view of trees and birdfeeders, tops of mountains, cloudscapes, that lies outside the office window. It's fully spring here, some days even feels like we're already moving into summer.