Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing: Connecting Health and the Environment through Literature

The connection between human wellbeing and the natural environment is a pervasive theme in C.20th and C.21st literature. However, there has been no significant scholarship that addresses nature-wellbeing connections in modern writing. Current campaigning by the Wildlife Trusts for a Nature and Wellbeing Act suggests that now is an opportune moment to consider what C.20th and 21st century literature reveals about the role that engagements with nature play in enhancing wellbeing. What new perspectives can literature offer on subjective experiences of nature? Can policy debates about nature's value be enhanced by insights into how nature and wellbeing connections have been understood and expressed in literary culture?

This project examines literature that reflects on human-nature relations at several key moments between 1914 and the present, beginning with post-WW1 accounts of warfare as devastating to nature and the human and including New Nature Writing focused on relations between nature and health and popular science accounts of childhood experiences of nature. This latter period corresponds with the rise of 'green care' approaches in health and the growth of scientific studies of nature-wellbeing relations. Green care has emerged in the context of worsening environmental crisis, which environmentalists have linked to disconnection from first-hand experiences of nature. This project explores links between literature, health and environmentalism over the last century. Its aim is to inform research and policymaking at a moment when human-nature relations are of increasingly urgent local, national and global significance, both in current wellbeing initiatives, and manifold environmental crises.

Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing brings literary research into direct dialogue with other perspectives on nature-wellbeing relations in ways that will impact on campaigning by The Wildlife Trusts (WT) as they build a case a Nature and Wellbeing Act. While the WT have numerous scientific partners, this project offers unique cultural and historical insights that add new layers of understanding to research linking nature and wellbeing, showing the dynamic role that humanities research can play in public life.The project also offers an original contribution to humanities scholarship by pioneering new research methods. Using a 'citizen's science' model for the humanities, its interactive website allows readers to share literary examples of nature-wellbeing relations. This forms the basis of an online Nature and Wellbeing Library. Three Nature and Wellbeing Forums will involve experts with backgrounds in health, environment and public policy in the discussion of different perspectives on nature and wellbeing. These methods are geared to collecting evidence and expanding perspectives on the key questions and themes of the project. For example, how do the public and experts from different areas understand the terms 'nature' and 'wellbeing', and how have these understandings been shaped culturally? By combining collaborative and interdisciplinary research methods with textual analysis and archival research, the project explores how nature and wellbeing relations have changed over the last century and reveals how this history shapes current human-nature relations.

Finally, the project brings the fields of health and environmental humanities into dialogue. This involves overcoming the human-centred and ecocentric biases of the respective fields to examine literary responses to green care, first person accounts of recovery in encounters with nature, and the medicalisation of environmentalism, particularly the controversial notion of 'nature deficit disorder'. How can collaboration between health practitioners and environmentalists be reproduced in new fields in the humanities? What new perspectives on the question of what it means to be human, and to be in health, might be opened up by a combined health-environmental humanities approach?

The project has been thoroughly planned to ensure that it has valuable and timely public and policy impact. Core non-academic groups will benefit in the following ways:

The Wildlife Trusts (WT) and their partners, including the RSPB and Centre for Sustainable Healthcare
Between 2016 and 2018, the WT will be building evidence, exchanging knowledge and forming a multi-institutional network to advance their campaign for a Nature and Wellbeing Act. The WT support this project's aims to develop cultural and critical thinking about nature-wellbeing relationships. My research into literature's representation of subjective experiences of nature and wellbeing will be used to inform policy reports, quantitative and qualitative research, and the campaign narrative. Forums will be part of the WT's nature and wellbeing programme; posts and articles in WT publications will reach their members, their multi-institutional network (25 organisations) and interested members of the public.

Environmental groups
Direct impact through involvement in Forums; access to outputs including the project blog, the WT's blog and pamphlet in order to explore how cultural, environmental and health humanities theoretical perspectives on human-nature relations may inform the direction of their own campaigns.

Health providers and service users
Direct impact through participation in Forums; blog posts and leaflets that broaden knowledge about health and wellbeing in ways that may influence how and where healthcare is provided and the values that underpin it; discussion of different health care approaches from literary perspectives.

Policymakers
The project has the ultimate goal of offering original cultural and historical insights to inform a campaign aiming to shape UK government policy and the policies of the Departments of Councils and Local Government, and Environment and Rural Affairs. The Secretary of State, public bodies including the Environment Agency and new independent body ensuring nature is protected in law would all have specific responsibilities if the Act was passed. My research will be broadcast by The Wildlife Trusts and will influence the case made for the Act in their policy reports. There is considerable policy impact potential for this research if conducted during the timeframe proposed, and in collaboration with The Wildlife Trusts.

Public and environment
The Nature and Wellbeing Act would have pervasive impact in terms of provision of green infrastructure; support for healthy environments in local planning; engagement with nature in schools; protection of exploited ecosystems; wellbeing benefits of access to nature; human and environmental benefits of thriving ecosystems and recovery of biodiversity (see Nature & Wellbeing Act Green Paper 2015). This research has the capacity to add a vital new element to multi-institutional campaigning capable of deepening public understandings of nature-wellbeing connections and involving the public in discussions about the Act. Public impact will be ensured through digital and social media outreach (Nature and Wellbeing Library, blog, Twitter, The Wildlife Trusts' site) and articles in The Wildlife Trusts' magazine. Findings will be shared with local and national media in targeted press releases.

Impact will be captured through:
- feedback forms at Forums; Google Forms questionnaire on blog and in emails;
- level of engagement with the Nature and Wellbeing Library (amount of entries, variety of submissions);
- blog views, measured through Wordpress analytics, including word search and region;
- collaborator's and policymakers' direct use of research, including citations and references to the project and use of literary/cultural sources in nature and wellbeing communications and reporting;
- press and media mentions, monitored through Google alerts;
- evidence of longer-term impact on Forum participants and the WT gathered at project-end through Google Forms questionnaire.