How is nature healing in lockdown ?
During lockdown we have been enjoined to connect – or reconnect – with nature. For the sake of our mental health, we are urged to leave behind a world mediated by screens, get out into the green stuff, breathe some air, see some horizons. Wonderful advice it is too, and I have heeded it. In successive lockdowns I discovered the unlikely charms of the river Wandle, twisting its way from its source in Croydon, through the burbs and light industry of south London before discharging into the mud of the Thames. Likewise, Mitcham Common – several hundred neglected acres of slightly feral, down-at-heel scrub butting up against the Wandle.
But for all the exhortations about connecting with nature, there is a paradox. We are in the middle of the single biggest global upheaval since the second world war. Its purpose: precisely to disconnect us from nature, or from that tiny fragment of it known as Sars-CoV-2. The nature we are invited to connect with is ordinarily a small, picturesque and highly managed subset of the wild world. In the UK, the chances are it resembles parkland or farm country. These are places where any threat to us has largely been removed. There will be footpaths to facilitate access, neighbouring car parks, proximate pubs and cafes. Along with reconnection, this is the nature we ordinarily have in mind when we consider conservation: defending our green spaces from various forms of defilement. Lovely as much of it is, this is nature as amenity, somewhere deliberately set back where we can wander and breathe, get a little respite from the heckle and commotion. However rewilded, it remains under human sovereignty: it is effectively nature as garden.