farmdoc's blog post number 142

In the September Australian Family Physician, artist and researcher Jillian Gates reports on her survey of patients’ hospital waiting room art preferences. Some 76% of participants preferred landscape images. Gates writes that ‘The essence of spirituality within the landscape is embedded within cultural memory’. I agree. For example, whenever I visit Cradle Mountain, I feel the presence of something I can’t explain, but perhaps a strong natural force. So I’m unsurprised by Gates’s results. I think a love of nature is hard-wired into us all; so when we have suboptimal contact with nature – which is the chosen or consequential fate of many city dwellers – something just doesn’t feel right; we feel strangely out of sorts. Of course this isn’t an original idea: Recently Steve Biddulph wrote in Quarterly Essay 30: ‘…humans have suffered the loss of a number of primary ingredients of mental health as…(we)…have moved further into the corporatised, individualistic way of life we now lead…First we lost our close daily contact with nature and its capacity to develop our senses and sooth and integrate our mental state. (Pets, gardens and nature documentaries are about all we have left of this.)’ I think this hard-wired yearning for nature was such a strong motivator for Chris McCandless (in the book and film Into the Wild) that it killed him. We ignore it at our peril.