Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

In her cover story for the magazine’s summer issue, Lucy Jones writes about “a renaissance of love for nature” that took place during the pandemic in the midst of so much isolation and death. Why is it, exactly, that going into nature is so therapeutic? Jones’s new book, Losing Eden, examines the wealth of scientific literature on the psychological effects of nature, from neurons to the whole nervous system. She joins us on the podcast to talk about her research into what we lose when we lose contact with nature.Go beyond the episode:Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and SoulRead her Summer 2021 cover story, “Rewilding Our Minds” and an essay in Emergence on “The Druid Renaissance”A 2020 instance of a white woman calling the police on a Black birdwatcher sparked new studies and stories on the problems minorities face in parks and other public spaces, but racism in outdoor pursuits is nothing new. Groups like Outdoor Afro aim to make nature more w