Can you please briefly introduce yourself?
I started to work in the early 1980s within what has become the nature-and-health field, mainly with research and teaching but also with community outreach activities. The work reflects my scientific training in environmental psychology, social ecology, and social epidemiology, as well as a broader scholarly orientation that also reflects appreciation of the lessons we can draw from humanistic disciplines such as environmental ethics and environmental history. More fundamentally, my involvement with the field has long drawn sustenance from a rich personal history of nature experience and concern about the harm that human activities have brought to the natural world.
What is your own involvement with nature-based therapy, either as a practitioner or scientists?
I have mainly worked as a scientist, but in doing so I have often supported practical work, for example by supporting practitioners with evaluations of therapeutic programs and by generating research findings that can serve to inform interventions that may serve public health, environmental protection, and other goals.
Do you have an example of your own NbT work that you would like to highlight?
Do note that I distinguish between therapies that target individuals in need and interventions that serve prevention on individual and collective levels. When it comes to my involvement in nature-based therapies (NbT), I would do best to call out the work by colleagues who I have helped to conduct clinically oriented program evaluations. Most prominent among them are Marianne Thorsen Gonzalez, who conducted a series of studies on the psychological and social processes carried in therapeutic horticulture for people suffering from clinical depression, and Freddie Lymeus, who has developed the restoration skills training (ReST) program for people experiencing problems with stress and attentional focus. Freddie’s work has continued as a case study within RESONATE, and I am happy to now follow the further development of ReST in my role as a member of the international expert advisory board.
What makes you excited about the RESONATE project?
I have had the great good fortune of participating in the nature-and-health field as it has coalesced out of what might seem to some people as rather disparate areas of inquiry. Work in some of those areas started from quite humble circumstances, and it was in such circumstances that I made early contributions to the field, particularly with regard to restorative effects of nature experience. For these reasons and others, I find the RESONATE project not only exciting but also a source of personal and professional gratification.
Through the project, Mathew White, Matilda van den Bosch, Sabine Pahl and our other colleagues are raising standards for the field in terms of scientific quality, integration across research areas, engagement with clinical and public health practice, and professionalism. It all reflects on an impressive unifying vision. This kind of project was simply beyond my imagination when I started work as a PhD student in 1984, and it is a joy to be able to join now with so many talented and capable senior and junior colleagues who represent such a diversity of valuable perspectives and a promising future for the field.
Where do you see some of the greatest or perhaps untapped potential for nature-based therapy?
I see great untapped potential in nature-based therapies and interventions that target relations between people, whether at the level of dyads and small groups or in much larger collectives. These could serve to help people in more deliberate ways build stronger relations or repair and restore relationships that have failed or weakened. I also think the field would do well to give greater consideration to existential issues.
What can we do to ensure that the RESONATE findings will also make a real impact and enhance the implementation of NbT?
Communication of findings to diverse groups will of course be important, but from my perspective the quality of the scientific work has paramount importance for matters of impact and implementation in the given social and cultural contexts. Much of the history of the nature-and-health field has involved moving public understanding in those contexts from widely held beliefs along the lines of “nature is nice” to a deeper appreciation of the many ways in which the natural world and experiences of nature can sustain and enhance human health. That shift in understanding in turn supports a deeper appreciation of the role humans play as part of nature.