The great disconnect

Recently it’s been a delight to welcome some children from our church family to help on the allotment.

There’s nothing like digging up worms when you’re six years old, or watering young plants in the hot weather (I’m referring to the lettuce, not the children). As I’m sure every parent knows, getting children out into nature is good for them. It really isn’t just clever advertising by the makers of washing detergents.

Yet these children are atypical. Some years ago, the RSPB commissioned research into how well-connected children are with nature, which found that only a fifth of children in the UK were thought to demonstrate a reasonable connection with nature. Further research examined how best to measure this among children, teenagers and adults, and looked at the links between connection to nature and caring for it.

I was reminded of this by the recent publication of Reconnection: fixing our broken relationship with nature (Pelagic Publishing, 2023) by Miles Richardson of the University of Derby, one of the partners in the earlier research. I confess I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my summer reading list.

It’s not just about children and you can’t just blame the mobile-phone generation. We’re an increasingly urban society; globally we became more urban than rural in 2006 and by 2021 reached 56% urban. In the UK, we passed that threshold a long time ago and reached 84% urban in 2021, similar to many other industrialised countries. Our long history of industrialisation and urbanisation has had a sorry impact, leaving the UK as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, according to research by the Natural History Museum.

In my last few columns I’ve been working through the so-called horsemen of the ecological apocalypse, the most significant factors that are driving nature loss. I’ve looked at habitat destruction, over-exploitation, pollution and invasive non-native species. Finally, we come to the fifth horseman, which some argue underlies all the others: disconnection from nature.

The idea is simple. If people are disconnected from nature, they won’t look after it. Why would people look after something they don’t know or appreciate? As the blurb for Richardson’s book says: ‘There is a growing recognition that the root cause of wildlife loss and the warming climate is people’s disconnection from nature, which is also an important factor in our mental health.’ He goes on to say that we don’t just need technical fixes, but a whole new way of thinking.

I’m sure Richardson will have some helpful insights, but I strongly suspect that they will not include a Biblical perspective. Our disconnect from nature, or Creation to put it in Biblical language, started in the Garden of Eden with the Fall. Adam and Eve’s sin destroyed not only their relationship with God and with each other but with the rest of Creation; the rupture with Creation is exemplified in the painful toil that farming became. It’s been exacerbated by urbanisation and industrialisation, but to restore it requires not just a new way of thinking but a new relationship with our Creator, which is then worked out in practical Creation care in obedience to His commands.