LOSING EDEN BY LUCY JONES
Is Nature good for you? Can wild places really restore body and soul? Maybe the soul is the easy bit – the Ancients knew it, the Romantics re-engineered it in vivacious verse; being out and among the grasses, frolicking with the fauna – we all know it makes you feel better. Beethoven in his Pastoral Symphony knew the calming balm of a woodland walk; Shakespeare was well aware that forests can drive you sane (after some initial madness maybe). But can nature actually heal the body and mind? Should she be called Mother Nurture?
These were questions I have rarely thought through. It was only a chance encounter with the rich pickings offered by Cambridge Literary Festival online a few days ago, that my re-education began. The author in question, Lucy Jones, was doing a lengthy filmed Q and A and her new book started (slowly) to win me round to the point where a click brought the tome to my front door a day or two later. Her book is an unusual mixture of daydream, reflective prose and hard, solid scientific evidence. It’s an ambitious project whose disparate tones don’t always gel. Before I tell you the great things about this book, and why it’s worth reading, let me begin with a negative.
The first chapter, a type of prologue, muses on life in a century from now; nature has vanished and humans are left in a green-less world where children ask their grannies what bird song sounded like. It is all a bit predicable and heavy handed – if nature goes, we go with her surely?
Beyond this stuttering start, the book really takes off. Jones riffs on the inborn desire of babies to scramble around in the earth, even to eat it – ‘the one life, within us and abroad’ as the poet Coleridge put. Jones writes movingly of her recovery from addiction. Her walks in Walthamstow Marshes had an amazingly curative effect: ‘I started to feel that I belonged to a wider family of species, a communion of beings, the matrix of life […] I felt born again.’
She says of nature that it, ‘stroked my hair and held my hand. I was caught, a burr on the leg of her, hooked on wonder and abundance.’
It is this uplifting deeply personal prose that carries you along her fertile woodland path offering jaw-dropping factlets such as why we are suckers for lawns – a throwback to our natural habitat on the savannah. She talks about the enmity folk used to have for mountains – seeing them as embarrassing warts pock-marking God’s lovely, but flat, earth. She quotes research that shows
Jones feels that ignorance or antagonism to nature is on its way back. Far from embracing our connection to it, we are moving further away from understanding its power to heal.
The book is peppered with research findings which to me read more like a ‘body and soul’ section of a magazine. What caught me in her spidery trap was the poetry of her narrative and that personal journey from hell to high water. She describes a chance meeting with roe deer in a forest like an encounter in the Emerald City, a transformative experience.
Jones’ thesis, not a surprising one, is that in detaching ourselves and our children from nature, we are doing harm not only to the environment but also to our bodies. Psychological health is going to be a huge issue post lockdown (which happened before the book was written) and though pills can help, nature is powerful as a healer. I learnt lots of new words from this book: ‘ecotherapy’, ‘equigenesis’ and ‘biophilia’. Her dogged research takes her round the world; from Walthamstow to Svalbard and California. It is very broad brush.
Jones rings many eco alarm bells for our own wellbeing: we spend a tiny percentage of our time outdoors these days (though Covid may have rebalanced that a tad) and research shows that many people are fearful of even walking in a public park.
The science, though essential to Jones’ method, and fascinating in detail, does often dampen her vigorous prose like some verbal blotting paper. But when Jones writes about herself, it is an essay of great delight and insight. It is a timely work offering a glimmer of hope. Eden is not yet lost but the concrete mixers are standing by.
‘Losing Eden’, Lucy Jones. Allen Lane, 2020.
