Why is Nature so Important for Human Wellbeing

 

Why is nature so important for human wellbeing?

This is something I’ve been passionate about my whole life, and it only began to dawn on me in this kind of university, studying psychology. There’s a term called biophilia, coined by a sociobiologist Edward O.Wilson, and he basically put numbers on the amount by which nature enhances your well being. And we are animals. We’re designed to be outside, looking at green things, and foraging, and hunting and all these things.

Whereas most of the time you’re stuck in a square, office room with public lighting, looking at a screen, sitting and we’re not supposed to be doing that. And one of the things that we do here, we have a 30 acre site full of trees. Every autumn a lot of leaves come down for a long time, and if you’re paying people to sweep up leaves, when they should be doing other things, it’s impossible.

So I ended up getting volunteers to come and help. And in our case, we’re lucky, we live near to EE the phone company, and they have 800 people in the call centre, which is a big sort of industrial shed, strip lit. They’re being monitored by their line managers for their call efficiency. It’s got to be a 750 second call is average, with two upsells, and then customer satisfaction is rated.

So they’re under pressure, and the Plympton guys are the complaints department for all of EE. So all of the complaints go to Plympton. So you’ve got 800 people, just getting complaints all day on the phone, being monitored.

And they have two volunteer days a year. And we sent out some emissaries, and we went down and pitched to them to come to the zoo and to volunteer for us. And they jumped at it. And they now, they start raking leaves for us every autumn, in teams. And they love it. They absolutely love it. They’re beaming. They’re out in the rain, raking it, because they’re doing something. They’ve achieved a thing. They’ve moved leaf litter, they’ve cleared a path. They’ve created a pile, they’ve developed a sweat, worked as a team, and nobody shouting at them at all.

And they’ve noticed that when they go back to work, their customer satisfaction rates go through the roof, and they stay through the roof for more than a month, after one visit. And so I went and did a talk to the EE senior management about this, and they upped the days. They can do three volunteer days a year, because it makes money for them to come and be in nature, because they’re all material, that people are animals. We’re all animals that need to be outside at some point in the day.

And I felt really passionate about this. I’m actually writing another book called The Hominid, which is about that. It’s about living, remembering that we’re actually just a big monkey, and to look after this big monkey, like you would look after a monkey, and we forget to do that with ourselves. And so that’s one of my absolute passions, is nature therapy effectively.

How do you see nature therapy supporting resilience?

We’ve encouraged them to have plants in their in their workspace, and that’s the thing that the plants die and wither away and the like. And it’s something that people can if they had an idea of how powerful that nature is, what an impact it has on human beings and how much we actually need it for our survival.

We do run programmes here of other corporate volunteers, but also SEND children special educational needs. And they found there are several SEND schools around here who contribute to small maintenance tasks that we do. One in particular, called the Wave Academy, and they’ve been coming for seven or eight years, and these are children with incredibly problematic backgrounds, unbelievable.

I mean, we’ve heard one of the lads who comes up who’s been misbehaving, not here, he’s been misbehaving at the school, and he’s brought here, he has to sleep with the dog. He doesn’t have a bedroom. He has to sleep in the dog basket. You know, you look at these kids and you think, this is the very best thing that ever happens to them at the moment in their lives, is being here, helping to build a new Meerkat enclosure.

And they absolutely, they respond partly, it’s partly the mentoring of the incredible staff that they have, and our guys, who we’re all mental health aware, first aid trained. And as I say, we always employ nice people who are already empathetic to this, but you can see them coming to life. It’s like tightly dependent, like a little cloud. They come out. And we’ve noticed at the end of their project, they don’t come in from their break. They don’t come for their break because they’re too busy.

It’s a really powerful thing, and this is a real privilege to work alongside them, because they look at you, and you’re one of the few safe adults they have in their life. You know, there’s teachers, and if you’re introduced by the teachers, you’re suddenly someone to be listened to and trusted, as opposed to anyone else who’s a potential danger.

And nature is part of that. They can say when they start to have a melt down, they can go, and they’re allowed to go and look at the tigers and sit and chill and come back when they’ve been refreshed. And we found that those guys have a 97% employment rate, having done the work at the zoo. Over the last seven years, we keep track of all of them, and only 3% of them are not employed. Which is way above the national average for normal school leaders, which I can’t, I don’t know what that is, less than 80% but they know what it’s like to be on the outside, and we’ve shown them how through the animals and the nature, the mentoring, that there is a positive world there that they can join into, if they do these certain things, behave a certain way, just be polite, looking in the eye, you know.

There’s no need to be disruptive. No matter how you’re feeling. And they love it. They do. They grab it with both hands, and they stay employed. And so from a workplace point of view, obviously, I would say, do some sort of volunteering outside. You know, every work, most big workplaces, do have volunteer days allocated. Make sure it’s in a park, outside, doing something outside. And if it’s just down to the individual, walk to work, walk through the park, be near a tree.

You know, I’m speaking how, from my book point of view, how does this extrapolate to central London, where I used to live, the Elephant Castle. Didn’t even notice it was autumn until you left the city. Oh, look, all the leaves have changed. Autumn is it? Okay, so leave the city or go to park. You know, have your lunch, walk to a park to have your lunch, even in Soho square, Soho is one of the most urbanised boroughs, and there is a square there with at least one tree. You can stand under that tree and you can eat your lunch, and you’ll feel significantly better than if you eat your lunch at your desk, or even go to a cafe, whatever.

Be outside and breathe like animal near a tree.

What Role Does Conservation Play in Shaping a Companya’s Long-term Vision?

Well, certainly in our case, conservation is our core subject. You know, the animals are all predominantly endangered, and we’re involved in breeding programmes to try to re-introduce them. There are things that we do have to have, like meerkats, they’re not endangered, but if you’ve not got meerkats, there’s basically a public outcry.

We’ve just got some baby meerkats, which is thi, like gold dust, and they are just amazingly cute, and the people who cluster around the meerkat finding ice creams are also paying for the vet care for the other leopards to be mating, and the huge costs of reintroducing an amur leopard back into the wild. And which, of course, everybody is also in favour of, but it’s not quite as compelling as you know, I didn’t see it happening. Maybe it’s a couple of people we will get to see it briefly before it’s sent overseas.

But you need to have your core value of conservation activity supported by other things, and in our cases, it’s meerkats. But we have to be very careful about our carbon footprint, which we measure, and we’re very interested in the natural capital value of the site, as opposed to just the raw value of it, is the amount that we save the health service in terms of medication.

You know, we take volunteers with depression who would have been on Prozac, and we give them a trade and put them to work. With a guy quite recently, he was literally prescribed Prozac down in Plymton, or given the option of coming here. And he chose here. He’s only 22, and we put him on a brush cutting course, basically strimming so that he got a qualification. And two weeks later, he had a job on the council streaming hedgerows. And he doesn’t need Prozac, you know, now he’s paying tax, and instead of being at home waiting for the Prozac to kick in, costing.

This site has a value in producing people who can then go back out and contribute to society. And it’s very hard for every business. I was thinking this about, you know, if you’re manufacturing photocopiers and or you’re selling photocopiers in Milton Keynes, or something, you know, how does the environment work here? But it’s little things an individual can do, it doesn’t have to be if your company doesn’t have an overlap with it. I mean, maybe think about moving to a company that does. There’s a huge shift in the power of the Green Movement, in terms of the investments

So many investors now will invest in things that don’t damage the environment. And I’ve read this this week, globally, renewable energy has overtaken coal for the first time, more than 50% for the first six months, and it’s five years, you can argue about but there it is. It can happen. It is happening. So people are increasingly investing in that area.

Even you know there is, there is an environmentally toxic way of doing something. It makes more financial sense to be leaning into the alternative, and it’s down to individuals. It’s a mindset thing, and it’s if you, one of the things I’d say as well is get a plant. I’m really bad with plants. All my life, my mom used to say, dig this, and I accidentally got wrong thing. But if I had a house plant, it would definitely die.

There’s a guy called Pedro Shojai who is, he’s a he’s written a book called The Urban Monk, and he’s got his little aphorisms of how to live a life. And I kind of looked and one of those things, just get a plant and look after it. And I thought, I can do that. I can do one plant. Surely I can do one plant. And I didn’t look at my plant. There he is. He was given to me. He was a rescue plant. And he was in the office over there, withered and dry. And I thought, you know, you just need light and water. And he was a tenth of that size, and I need to water maybe two or three days and move them around and stuff. And he’s blooing. And it feels so good. It feels so good. I feel really, you know, I’ve got a little thing. If I go away, ait’s lie ‘whose going to look after my plant, and now I make sure someone does.

And it’s that sort of sense of engagement, that brings you to to the wider world. So going back to biophilia research that I’ve done, that’s increased my efficiency. There was a fantastic study done with university students in exams, and they gave half of them pot plants on their desks, and the other half not, and the ones who had the pot plant got, like, one or 2% higher grades than the other. It’s because we’re animals, and this is soothing, and it’s engaging

What Do You Hope Audiences Take Away From Your Public Speeches.

Well, I’ve been doing this a long time now, and I noticed that my audiences do take a lot away in terms of, it’s quite a roller coaster. It’s a story of overcoming lots of obstacles, and some of which are apparently insurmountable. And this tragedy, of course, the death of my wife in the middle of it all. And often, people come up to me, and people cry sometimes, not saying it’s all bad. People laugh a lot. You know, I have to, if I haven’t made them laugh 10 times, I get worried. But people come and, you know, there’s always a queue as people want to talk to me and shake hands and exchange details and things, and they always say it puts their problems in perspective.

Because it’s almost an unimaginable scenario. LIterally nobody buys a zoo. And goes through this amount of tragedy, and then has a Hollywood movie made about them. And then that isn’t even the end, because that’s when stuff, HMRC is still coming in and, you know, all these animals. When you’ve got animals at stake, it changes the stake for everything. And people do come and say it’s made them look at their problems in a different way. It’s like, you know, I thought I had problems, but the things I’ve got now, I could just go around them or over them or through them, or just wait until that, you know, like I was doing with the zoo mainly, often just taking little bites out of all the different problems.

By the time you come back to the first one, it’s changed. And it’s that adaptive mindset, problem solving mindset, and keeping calm and using what’s available, and in my case, pretty well, the only thing that’s available was nature. Go outside and breathe, and know that you’re doing the right thing for the right reasons, and at the end of the day, we didn’t have a television by choice, but we did have tigers that were hand reared and that would lick the kids hands through the fence. And that’s amazing. You take the kids, they got holes in their shoes, we haven’t got money for that. But can we go? Can we go and see black? Can we go see black? And black is a 200 kilogramme Siberian tiger who would lick your hand. And of course, his tongue is bigger than your hand, and it’s like sandpaper. And I remember we were many times having struggle with the banks in the in the just after recession in particular, in 2008 – 2009, and the bank came up to foreclose on their overdraft. And I thought, that’s the end, if they do that. So come and meet, come and see what we’re about. And get right up against the fence and black comes over and licks the hand. And they’re like ‘oh my god this is amazing. Okay, yeah, I see I’ll give you another six months.’

And not every company can think, okay, well, I’ll just get a tiger and lick a bank manager. But you know, you’ve got to think sideways about where, you know where, what your priorities are, what your core mission is, and how you can possibly overcome the obstacle, and why is it doing it in the first place? And people come away and say, wow, it’s made them think about all of those things.