I want you to take a moment, think about how much time you've already spent in front of the computer today, while having your phone at arms length away. Now think about how much time you've spent outdoors, be it gardening, a walk on the beach with your dog, just sitting outside, in the last week.
Not an awful lot is it? Now that I'm not on the allotment any more, and college deadlines are really kicking off, while in my mum and dads office there are audits and checks going on, no one in the Goulding household is spending a large amount of time outdoors compare to the summer. Most our individual time is spent in our work environments, which the same can be said for majority of people reading this. I decided to go back and look at all my research so far, just to keep my mind on refreshed on who, what & why I am designing for.
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At the minute I'm focusing on learning more about the plants I'm going to use, and how they'll grow and why we as beings feel connected to nature in a very primitive way. It lead me back to my initial research when I spent time on the allotment. From gaining the personal experience of interacting with nature and lessing what is known as your NATURE DEFICIT, and being able to compare that to others on the allotment, I began to wonder if there is another reason other than those already discussed as to why it feels good to be around nature. I feel like the more I understand the disconnection from nature we as humans have established over the hundred odd years, the better I'll be able to design a product to enhance and encourage the mindfulness that comes with a connection to nature.
In the book The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christoper Bird, they proved. in experiment after experiment, that plants have a much more complex interaction with the world around them than we think they do. They react to thoughts, feelings and emotions in a manner that could be described as quite humanlike if we were to be so arrogant as to assume we are the ones that originally developed such reactions. This is the same for animals as well.
"It is no accident that the oxygen we breathe is a by-product of the plants as they go through the life process of photosynthesis. Just as the carbon dioxide we exhale is exactly what plants require to live. But the connection goes even deeper than that. "
Recent discoveries in neuroscience have been trying to prove that more than 50% of the heart is comprised of neural cells. Seemingly, it is from our hearts that we process our energetic connection to everything we come in contact with. The problem is that we have cut ourselves off from this connection by allowing ourselves to be distracted by technology and all of its associated noise. We cannot hear it if we are not listening.. Sounds odd but stay with me here.
Perhaps we should be opening the lines of communication with them on an energetic level and attempt to balance out our nature deficits. We already know that it boosts mental health. But new research suggests the effects might last for years. It’s even been suggested that forest visits increase the number of natural cancer killing cells by nearly 50% –research paper here.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
