Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild

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Lucy Jones interweaves her deeply personal story of recovery from addiction and depression with that of discovering the natural world and how it aided and enlivened her progress, giving her a renewed sense of belonging and purpose. While nature’s positive effect on human mental health is something we know intuitively and can explain anecdotally, Jones was determined to investigate the scientific mechanism behind it. She set out to make an empirical enquiry and discovered plenty of evidence in the scientific literature, but also attests to the personal benefits that nature has for her and explores the spiritual connection that many have found. Looking to the future, Jones emphasizes the necessity of biophilic cities and robust legislation to protect the natural world. Historical narratives often concentrate on wars and politics while omitting the central role and influence of the physical stage on which history is carried out. In Losing Eden award-winning historian Sara Dant debunks the myth of the American West as “Eden” and instead embraces a more realistic and complex understanding of a region that has been inhabited and altered by people for tens of thousands of years.

Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones attempts to show us the science behind intuitive knowledge that being in nature is good for us. And yet, despite years of protection, it was significantly logged in 2010. Six years later, citing a bark beetle infestation, then-environmental minister Jan Szyszko altered the forest laws and tripled the amount of logging allowed to take place. The minister’s personal priest Tomasz Duszkiewicz cited the Bible’s instruction that man should “subdue” the land, but activists, ecologists, and scientists claim this was merely a ruse to chop down more of the forest. There is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change-other than adolescence. And yet this life-altering transition has been sorely neglected by science, medicine and philosophy. Its seismic effects go largely unrepresented across literature and the arts. Speaking about motherhood as anything other than a pastel-hued dream remains, for the most part, taboo.Beautifully written, movingly told and meticulously researched ... a convincing plea for a wilder, richer world' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding Urgent, accessible, moving [...] A beautifully written, research-heavy study about how nature offers us wellbeing" In 2015, the United Nations officially recognized the principles of Earth Jurisprudence, stating that “human rights are meaningless if the ecosystems that sustain us do not have the legal right to exist.” In 2008, Ecuador’s new constitution included the “Rights of Nature,” and in 2010, Bolivia passed a “Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.” Today many of us live indoor lives, disconnected from the natural world as never before. And yet nature remains deeply ingrained in our language, culture and consciousness. For centuries, we have acted on an intuitive sense that we need communion with the wild to feel well. Now, in the moment of our great migration away from nature, science has begun to catch up, with more and more evidence emerging to confirm its place at the heart of our psychological wellbeing. So what happens, asks acclaimed science journalist Lucy Jones, as we lose our bond with the natural world – might we also be losing part of ourselves?

By the time I’d read the first chapter, I’d resolved to take my son into the woods every afternoon over winter. By the time I’d read the sixth, I was wanting to break prisoners out of cells and onto the mossy moors. Losing Eden rigorously and convincingly tells of the value of the natural universe to our human hearts’ Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun

During pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood, women undergo a far-reaching physiological, psychological and social metamorphosis.

Wonderfully intoxicating. In meticulous detail, Jones quests to bring us an impressive array of answers to the question of whether ‘nature connection’ has a tangible effect on our minds, and how and why it does.”

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Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists’ couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.

This is an insightful environmental read on the existential impacts of our separation from nature. Lucy Jones waxes poetic with her prose about the wild while she presents rigorous research on the myriad benefits of exposure and immersion in nature on our mental health and childhood development. Throughout, Jones has called upon a lot of nature writers and ecologists, drawing upon their prose and ideas. One of the real strengths in Losing Eden is the way in which she writes about the incredibly diverse reaction to nature through the ages. When Petrarch, for instance, climbed Mont Ventoux in 1336, Jones remarks: ‘… he chastised himself for “admiring earthly things” and fled angrily from the peaks in shame.’ From the eighteenth-century in Britain, when travel for the middle classes became more widespread, blinds were pulled down on trains to ‘avoid offence’ from the ‘mountains and hills that had previously been seen as pimples, warts or blisters on the surface of God’s earth.’ |Beautifully written, movingly told and meticulously researched, Losing Eden is an elegy to the healing power of nature, something we need more than ever in our anxiety-ridden world of ecological loss. Woven together with her own personal story of recovery, Lucy Jones lays out the overwhelming scientific evidence for nature as nurturer for body and soul with the clarity and candour that will move hearts and minds – a convincing plea for a wilder, richer world."Delicately observed and rigorously researched, Losing Eden is an enthralling journey through this new research, exploring how and why connecting with the living world can so drastically affect our health. Travelling from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches, Jones takes us to the cutting edge of human biology, neuroscience and psychology, and discovers new ways of understanding our increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the earth. See teos on kindlasti üks, mis oma tohutult paljude näidete ja tulemustega maailma eri paigus korda saadetust aitab meil nii ühiskonna kui ka indiviidi tasandil sellest east ka Eestis ja mujal kiiremini välja kasvada.