I N N O V A T I O NS IN PRACTICE
Health and wellbeing in nature Ewan Hamnett Retired GP
Just before I retired from general practice five years ago, I was asked by Birmingham City Council to promote activity across the city. Our health service is drowning in the consequences of the terrible triad of inactivity, obesity and unhappiness, all of which are arguably caused by increasing isolation, particularly in our most deprived citizens. We must reconnect people and allow them to become resilient rather than reliant. If we fail to do this then the consequences for both the individual, the NHS and the planet will be disastrous. Ewan Hamnett
Gareth Morgan Head of Education and Engagement, Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country
The education and engagement team at the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country aims to connect people with nature. The incredible and beautiful natural resources of our urban areas are rich in wildlife, on the doorsteps of 2 million people, and freely accessible. We need nature and nature needs us – but unless people have those inspiring experiences in our wild spaces, they will miss the opportunity to embed this in their life. Gareth Morgan
The evolutionary health messages are clear: walk more and drive less, get together with others ideally in nature (and on nature’s behalf ), eat real food, not too much and mostly plants. The Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country was founded to protect and improve wild spaces, and make them more accessible to urban Midlanders. The Trust’s wide-ranging courses mix talks, walks and hands-on practical activities that get people of all ages out into nature, to make the most of wild spaces and feel the mental and physical health benefits.
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The problem It is a sad fact that we find ourselves in the midst of our planet’s sixth period of mass extinctions, called the Anthropocene extinction because it is due primarily to human activities. Globally, as populations of people and livestock overwhelm our other-thanhuman cousins, we have already lost 83% of all wild mammals and half of our plants (Bar-On et al, 2018). Just as our ancestor hunters once eradicated the megafauna of the New World, the aggregated impacts of industrial agriculture and overfishing, rising human consumption and climate change now threaten to extinguish half of the world’s remaining biodiversity by the end of the century. Are humans living well in this brief apex of planetary dominance? In the UK we spend 92% of our time indoors, watching TV for eight times as long as we exercise; our children fail to recognise 50% of common species (while identifying 80% of Pokémon characters); those that have the least
access to nature also have the worst levels of physical health and mental wellbeing. Something is going wrong here, and clearly we need to make urgent changes to the way we live. But what will it take for us to collectively change course? Here are three facts that might help. The first should make us sit up and be truly alarmed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that in order to avert catastrophe, we have 12 years to reduce our carbon emissions by 45%. If we don’t then within the lifetime of our children, life on Earth could become unsustainable. This is not some distant event and though even two degrees of warming would spell disaster in south east Asia and Africa, several forecasts show likely rises in excess of 3º by 2200. The global impact would be a devastating buildup of today’s already intensifying forest fires, floods, fighting and famine, accompanied by mass migration and dire conflict over dwindling resources.
© Journal of holistic healthcare ● Volume 16 Issue 1 Spring 2019
