Your Brain on Nature

http://nouslife.blogspot.com/2009/12/urban-verse-for-how-great-thou-art.htmlThis article does a nice job of capturing my main objections to a lot of romantic and only partly thought-through ideas about 'nature' in relation to human flourishing. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy being in the outdoors with trees and water. But I'm profoundly distrustful of the romanticism sometimes about it that has a down on the urban. It basically doesn't compare like with like and not only misses important points both about 'nature' and the 'city' but also drives policy and lifestyle in arguably dangerous ways that tend away from human flourishing.
So have a look at it: Your Brain on Nature: Outdoors and Out of Reach 2 � Neuroanthropology Here's one of the points that I found resonant for me:

The article, like in a lot of Western discussion of natural environments, is shaped by a romanticization of Nature and a failure to recognize what’s happening when urbanized people go into forests and other outdoor environments. I would argue that they are not ‘returning to Nature,’ in the sense of undoing the effects of technology, but rather moving into a setting which, although admittedly beautiful, is also full of information

So, myths are rightly challenged in this article:

So, in the ‘natural’ setting, is there no brain-taxing multitasking or demands to process information? In fact, Mr. Strayer describes a sensory rich environment, with a lot of potential ‘information’ in myriad sounds, smells, even ‘the earth’ itself. Admittedly, the participants are no longer ‘multitasking’ as they have a few relaxing days to float down the river (not even having to work against a current). But this hardly means that urban settings are full of ‘information’ and ‘natural’ settings are free of stuff to perceive or to think about.

Just so, and my thought almost exactly. And this next problematisation of the myth is very like what needs to be said to a lot of people about Celtic spirituality (and I think Donald Meek does indeed do so).

The inclination to relax is not coming just from the Nature, but also from the profound ignorance and sensory naivite of urban people in bushland or forests as well as the social distribution of responsibility that frees up some individual from worry (the neuroscientists) while imposing it on others (raft guides and even previous generations of outdoors-people who, for example, have virtually exterminated large predators in North America).

It's our experience of 'tamed' nature and oil-fuelled transportation as well as communications and technologies of coping (clothes, gizmos etc) that mean that we are free to experience the change as a rest rather than an anxiety provoking and multi-tasking concern for safety. In fact, if you really know what's going on and you are really not supported by the infrastructure of communications and transport, the wild is actually pretty scary. This is what I'm alluding to when I tell our students that in the UK there is very little of the country that is not, in reality, touched and formed by the urban: even the deeply rural in our society is actually servicing, formed by and reliant on urban markets, concerns, policy and -yes- dreams of escape.

Some of our spiritual retreat into nature is more formed by this romanticism and I worry that it may often mean that we are severed from looking for God in the urban: the 'sacrament of nature' becomes the enemy of the sacrament of the present (urban) moment. I worry too that the impetus from the city disinvests us from looking to serve the missio Dei in urban environments; we just see them as something to flee, godlessness and full of ugliness and vice.

It's this that lay behind, I think, the lack of uptake when a colleague of mine offered a prize for an urban verse for 'How great Thou Art'. I gave it a go, eventually, when I had an hour or so to spare...