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By Root 450 0

active person, being so helpless and limited is a nightmare. But the hardest thing about that injury was how it separated me from nature, whose green anthem stirs me, whose moods fascinate me, whose rocks and birds help define my sense of belonging. Even if I’m feeling low, I can always find solace in nature, a restorative when dealing with pain. Wonder heals through an alchemy of mind. But, exiled from Paradise, where could I turn? Once knitted into nature, I felt myself slowly unraveling. Standing upright may be our hallmark, and a towering success, but sometimes bone, joint, and spine can’t live up to the challenge and act subversive. A house of bones, the Elizabethans called the body. Imprisoned by my need to heal, I craved the outdoors. To heal I needed to rest, lie low, shelve things, restrict myself, be willing to sacrifice pleasure for recovery. But I only managed it with grace when I rented an electric scooter, climbed aboard, and crept out into the sunlight and among the birds and trees for an hour or so each day. I also had friends drive me out into the country. Those doses of sunlight and wildlife were my salvation. Even a small park or yard can be wilderness enough.

When I’m in a rainforest I caress it with all my senses and am grateful for the privilege, yet I also love temperate forests, scrublands, lakeshores, glaciers, even city parks. One doesn’t have to leave home to encounter the exotic. Our human habitat encompasses rolling veldts and mown lawns, remote deserts and the greater wilderness of cities—all “natural” ecosystems. Many animals inhabit the small patch of woods in my backyard, for example, from deer, raccoons, skunks, wild turkeys, garter snakes, and other large fauna down to spiders, moths, and swarming insects. I spend happy hours there watching the natural world bustle about its business. The animals all seem busy, feeding themselves and their families, running one urgent errand or another. Their behaviors remind us of our own, their triumphs teaching us about the indomitableness of life.

I’ve had the privilege of traveling the world to behold some fascinating animals and landscapes, but I know that one doesn’t need to go to the ends of the earth to find an abundance of life, or to feel connected to nature. I felt rapture recently while riding a bike along a country road just as a red-tailed hawk flew very low overhead, showing me the brown-and-white speckled bloomers of its legs and a bright red tail through which the sun shone as if through stained glass. We’re lucky to be alive at a time when whales still swim in the oceans, and hawks still fly through the skies. Alas, one day, through our negligence, they may be gone.

There are noble reasons for protecting the environment—one might argue that it’s our moral duty, as good citizens of the planet, not to destroy its natural wonders. There are also mercenary reasons: the vanishing rainforests contain pharmaceuticals we might need to survive; the Antarctic icecap holds a vast store of fresh drinking water; thick forests ensure that we’ll have oxygen to breathe. But another reason is older and less tangible, a matter of ecopsychology. We need a healthy, thriving, bustling natural world so that we can be healthy, so that we can feel whole. Our word “whole” comes from the same ancient root as “holy.” It was one of the first concepts that human beings needed to express, and it meant the healthy interrelatedness of all things (and the miracle of it all). “Mother Earth,” we often call the planet. If earth is our mother, then we have many siblings among the other animals, many rooms in our home. Most of the time we forget that simple truth, and even pretend that we could live outside nature, that nature doesn’t include us.

We really are terribly confused about our relationship with nature. On the one hand, we like to live in houses that are tidy and clean, and if nature should be rude enough to enter—in the form of a bat in the attic, or a mouse in the kitchen, or a cockroach crawling along the skirting boards—we stalk it with the blood-lust of