Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
unraveling’, in which our environment, social structures, and species are collapsing under the weight of current stresses, and on the other is ‘the great turning’, where humankind will learn how to reconnect strongly with nature because we can—and must—live in harmony with all life. While the unraveling is expressed through destabilization and degeneration, the turning is made visible by the largest social and ecological justice movement the planet has ever known (Hawken, 2007), in which numerous small, medium, and large organizations address various dimensions of human activity, revealing ever more clearly the interrelationship between diverse areas of concern (Marques, 2011).
Natural systems are providing a rich source of ideas and wisdom for how we can approach the challenge of creating schools that have the capacity to successfully transition to a new living systems-based paradigm. Natural systems and processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because they are basic dynamics shared by all living beings (Wheatley, 2005). The underpinning philosophy and approach of the ecological paradigm is whole systems thinking in which the dominant analytic, linear, and reductionist forms of thinking are replaced by holistic thinking that reference natural systems to be understandable, accessible, and practicable. Supporting Macy and Hawken, Wheatley and Frieze (2007) assert that the way in which all large-scale change happens in the natural world is the process of separate, local efforts connecting and strengthening their interactions and interdependencies, which they refer to as ‘emergence’. In our effort to transition to the new, whole systems thinking-based ecological paradigm for both our society and our education system, this natural concept of change through emergence is motivating.
As Duane Elgin, founder of the Great Transition Stories project, emphasizes, ‘it is vital that the human community come together and consciously co-create visions and stories of a sustainable and thriving relationship with the earth and one another’. The ‘great transition’ is a vision of how humanity could turn the planetary phase of civilization into an opportunity to create a global society that reflects egalitarian social and ecological values, affirms diversity, and defeats poverty, war, and environmental destruction (Raskin et al., 2002). The defining feature of the great transition is the ascendancy of a new suite of values—human solidarity, quality of life, respect for nature, and interconnectedness.
Sterling (2001) argues that ‘the fundamental tension in our current age is between the mechanistic and organicist way of viewing the world’. In harmony with the hope of a great transition, Kenny (2001, in Eckersley, 2004) posits that we are on the threshold of a fifth cosmology: the creative universe in which the universe is understood to be a self-organizing and creative process in which ‘the human species is given the opportunity to take full control of our future’. Duane Elgin (2009) states that such a cosmology must understand the universe to be fundamentally alive in order to radically transform how humanity relates to life. Under this cosmology, rather than searching for meaning, people will create it by taking responsibility for the design of our personal, social, and planetary future.
Humans have a unique and extraordinary capacity to choose our destiny by conscious collective action, which is driven by their WorldView: a cultural system of customary beliefs, values, and perceptions that encode our shared learning. Human brains are flexible and learn about what we pay attention to; we can train our brains to understand systems thinking and pay attention to the land and our place in the land. We know that positive affiliation with nature is good for human health, development, and wellbeing and we can use our cognitive abilities to put this into practice and into our WorldView. Chapter 3 begins to capture the rich history of the ways that humans have interfaced with the natural environment for health benefits.
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