Reconnecting to nature will help us heal. No doubt. Certainly works for me! Good article by Shepherd Bliss who will also have an essay in the soon to be published Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.
...snips:
Connecting to the land and seeing beauty can help alleviate anxiety and restore a damaged soul. Farming and gardening can be effective therapy for the slings and arrows of bad fortune that befall people.
Plus, instead of paying for therapy, one can have meaningful work, produce an income and feed one's self and family.
The national group Farms Not Arms ...and the related Farmers-Veterans Coalition, seek farms where returning veterans can find meaningful work and recover from the ravages of war. Various groups use the biblical concept "from swords to ploughshares."
Living on or visiting farms puts people in direct contact with plants, animals, the elements and nature in ways that can improve mental health.
... end of snips
Ecopsychology seems to be an emerging field: "Ecotherapy is the reinvention of psychotherapy as if nature mattered. It takes into account the latest scientific understandings of our universe and the deepest indigenous wisdom. This perspective reveals the critical fact that people are intimately connected with, embedded in and inseparable from the rest of nature, which shifts our understanding of how to heal the human psyche and the currently dysfunctional human-nature relationship. It becomes clear that what happens to nature for good or ill impacts people and vice versa, leading to new methods of individual and community psychotherapeutic diagnosis and treatment." -- Linda Buzzell
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