THE NATURE PILL: EFFECTIVE CLIMATE ADAPTATION

BY SUZANNE JEWELL

Most community resilience efforts focus on built infrastructure, from raising roads to seawalls and septic-to-sewer conversions. As the heat turns up and climate impacts increase worldwide, very little focus targets the inner state of well-being of humans. Yet adaptive resilience skills are learnable and actionable. From breath to attention training practices to taking “The Nature Pill” as an antidote, mindfulness is the most powerful key to human resilience.

Patch of Heaven Sanctuary is a 20-acre rewilded, regenerated, and reforested nature preserve 20 miles south of Miami, where we are creating the world’s first Mindful Pocket Park. Our most radical perspective is that if you turn toward nature as a resource of resilience, it is the most effective climate adaptation for human infrastructure. I’m going to talk about how neuroscience backs up why taking the nature pill daily is one of the best things you can do for your well-being.

What Is the Nature Pill?

What exactly is the nature pill? A study came out during COVID from the University of Michigan’s School of Environmental

Sustainability that tested cortisol levels to determine the magic amount of time spent in nature that it takes to reduce stress or anxiety levels. It found that 20-30 minutes in nature will drop the stress hormones in the body.

The Preventatives Services Task Force says that 77% of people report stress that affects their physical health. It is even more so in marginalized entities and audiences, including women. It also said that 1 in 4 young people experience climate and eco-anxiety. There is even a phrase called solastalgia, which speaks about someone’s grief and mourning that the planet and nature will never be what their parents or grandparents experienced.

Disconnection: The Core of the Climate Crisis

We believe that the core of the climate crisis is a crisis of disconnection. We are disconnected internally, disconnected from one another, and disconnected from nature and the natural rhythms of life. When you break that down, we realize behaviors of running away from how uncomfortable we are. How often do we go for shopping therapy? How often do we doom scroll? How often do we grab a drink, some pharmaceutical, or even something more dangerous to our well-being? We are disconnecting from our experiences and missing the richness. Isolation and loneliness are also reaching epidemic levels, and we feel very alone.

The other disconnection that has occurred is nature deficit disorder. We are probably at the cusp of the generations that will be the last to grow up having a field or a place to play at the end of the street. There is an entire generation growing up not only on screens but not having that opportunity for imagination, exploration, wonder, awe, beauty, and all those things that occur when you spend time taking the Nature Pill.

The Physiology

What happens at the physiological level? Cortisol is both good and bad. Cortisol exists so that if you are being chased by a sabertooth tiger or large animal predating upon you, you’ll get those hairs standing up on the back of your neck. But what happens in this hypervigilant and hyperactivated world (and, by the way, new Harvard research says that the average person touches their phone 250 times a day) is that we are always on, and our nervous systems are feeling like everything is a fivealarm chili fire. That impacts our immune systems. It begins to lay down the markers for heart disease and inflammation, along with increased blood pressure. The ones experiencing this are often teachers, frontline workers, women, and young children.

A Park with a Purpose

What do we suggest? A daily dose of the Nature Pill. Patch of Heaven Sanctuary is a 20-acre park in Miami. It is like a Garden of Eden and feels like this is where we are meant to live naturally. The greater Miami Chamber of Commerce offered us the opportunity to be supported as a nonprofit so we could build this first-ever park with a purpose: the Mindful Pocket Park. A 20-minute miniature drop into nature, along with the app we’re building, can impact your calm and decrease your anxiety. During the experience, you will learn the evidence-based practice around reducing stress by paying attention to your senses. It’s followed by a 10-minute guided visualization. Nature plus mindfulness plus community engaged in the container of a park can help you learn how to have inner human resources of resilience.

How Do We Adapt?

How are we going to adapt? We believe that nature is the teacher and resource that humanity needs most right now. We believe it’s also overdue to integrate something called ayni, which means the right relationship. We believe this is a teachable technique to help humans reconnect with nature one mindful walk, one breath, one butterfly, and one tree at a time.

Suzanne Jewell Chief Experience Officer, Patch of Heaven Sanctuary Miami, Florida

Suzanne Jewell is a thought leader in modern-day mindfulness spaces, offering mindful resilient leadership training for Babson College’s Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab, the Idea Center at Miami Dade College, and PhilanthropyMiami, as well as corporate clients like Credit Agricole, Allvue Systems, and the first World Happiness Summit. A former global TV executive, Jewell became a “green space connoisseur” as she bounced back from burnout, which led to her concept of the “park with a purpose,” the Mindful Pocket Park Project.