Prescribing nature: the restorative power of a simple dose of outdoors

This article by Donna Lu has been published in The Guardian. It begins:

“In my mid-20s, I undertook the quintessentially Australian rite of passage of moving to London for a few years. Months into my first English winter, I started having dreams about the Australian wilderness.

The images were so vivid and specific that I jotted them down. I had a recurring dream about looking at the sea from a high vantage point, somewhere along the south-east Queensland coast that I had always taken for granted. There was ‘all manner of ocean life’, I noted: dolphins jumping in the shallows; two whales, a mother and calf, out in deeper water.

‘Got really excited about seeing my first wild platypus,’ I wrote about another dream, still never having spotted one in real life.

I had never considered myself a particularly outdoorsy person, but London’s occasional urban grimness had triggered a nostalgia for the natural environment of my childhood. When I returned home, it was with a newfound appreciation for the soft evening chirp of cicadas, the fine sand that sticks to everything and the mist of humpbacks on the horizon.

As the pandemic has highlighted, I am not alone in desiring more time in nature when access to it is limited. The restorative effects of spending time in green spaces, it turns out, may be essential for our health and wellbeing …”

You can read more from here.