The Myth of the Nature Cure

This is a web exclusive from our upcoming issue Why Be Healthy? In an age of health care and wellness industries and near-religious pursuit of fitness and self-optimization, this issue asks what it means to live well despite the limitations and frailties of our bodies, and what, beyond the scope of medicine, is needed for our flourishing.

I present you with three scenarios.

One. I go out for a walk in the woods hoping to blow the cobwebs from my musty head but slip and twist my ankle badly. For weeks I cannot walk at all, even around the house, without terrible pain. I cannot go back to the woods for months.

Question: Did the walk lift my mood? Did nature make me feel good?

Two. I go to the woods feeling cross and sad. Let’s say it’s a blustery spring day, the trees noisy with wind and birdsong. The world is at war, on fire, and selfishly I am hoping for the small skip of joy I get from seeing a bird I love flitting through the leaves, but instead I see a smashed nest, fallen in the storm the night before, eggs cracked. There is one bird hopping about in the branches where the nest used to be, frantic, crying with alarm and grief. I walk on and see a sick deer, blind, stumbling.

Question: Do I feel peace? Is this salve for my secondary grief?

Three. I go to the woods but the trees have burnt to cinders in a wildfire. All the green growth is ash, a choking absence of song. I go to the woods but the trees have all been felled for a train line that will never be built, or a hydroelectric dam for a city in another jurisdiction, or a factory or a mine. They have been crushed by tanks or blown to pieces by bombs or pulled up by their roots because some people did not want other people to benefit from their presence. There are bodies buried in the woods. There is blood on the leaves. If not my woods, someone’s woods. I stand in my wood and see everyone’s woods. I blink and the woods reappear. I blink and the woods disappear. I would not prescribe this to anyone.

In 2007 I moved to the English Lake District, rather accidentally. It was the first time I had lived in such a rural place for more than a couple of weeks. I had grown up in the suburbs of the Midlands city of Nottingham, then lived in East London for seven years before moving north. I fell in love with Grasmere the first night I spent there: a mild summer night with a clear sky overflowing with stars. I knew that living there would change my life, but was not prepared for how fundamentally it would change everything about what I wanted from life, and how I wanted to live.

Photograph by RossHelen / Unsplash.

I moved to the lakes for doctoral research. Application to interview to acceptance happened so quickly I hardly had time to think about what it would mean beyond the bare practicalities. I was to live at and study the museum built around the small cottage in Grasmere that William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to in 1799, and which would become famous through his poetry and her journals as a place of extraordinary creative collaboration between people and place. In 1814, William described the move as “retir[ing] to his native mountains, with the hope of being enabled to construct a literary Work that might live.” What would it mean or require for a work to live, I wondered.

My first months in Grasmere I felt physically stronger and fitter than I had in years. I had been caught in a spiral of repeating illness and temporary recovery since my mid-teens, trapped between my body’s unrecognized reality and diagnostic dead-ends which kept telling me, in different ways, that the pain and fatigue I felt were the product of my own wrong thinking or wrong behaviors.

In Grasmere I met, through William Wordsworth’s poetry, a vision of nature as a healing force. Nature not only as “anchor,” “guardian,” and “guide,” but also “nurse,” as he wrote in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”: a benign benefactor that will bring us joy and help us overcome “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief” if we love it enough. This “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her.”

In that poem, William calls himself “a worshipper of Nature.” This implies a hierarchical relationship in which humans show devotion and adoration to something greater beyond their sphere. Although it might seem positive to someto “worship” nature, it turns nature into a deity, and in doing so, makes nature into an entirely different order of being to us as humans, , and removes us from it. We become separate and subordinate to nature, and it becomes a greater power we call on to help us.

I recognized this vision trickling down through generations of writers and thinkers into contemporary nature writing, both in its growing fixation on recovery through nature and in its view of nature as fundamentally, unequivocally genial. In my first heady summer in Grasmere, working in the museum till lunchtime, then taking my research out into the fells for long walks in the long midsummer light, I thought I was experiencing a version of a nature cure myself. Two years earlier, I had been in such pain that walking half a mile caused implausible agony. Now I was climbing mountains. With some pain, yes, with swelling joints and bruises, and still the need for extra rest, but not the kind of devastating pain or fatigue that stops you from putting your feet to the ground. I understood it no more than I had understood why or how I was so ill before, but I accepted it as a kind of gift. Inevitably, knowing no better, I connected it to my new location. I spent my time, as the Wordsworths did, with trees and rocks and water and all the voices of the living earth. I was conditioned to assume they were responsible for the change in my body, as in my heart and mind.

By the following winter the pain in my feet and legs was back, and worse. I felt like I was walking on the stubs of my bones and wearing them down as I went, shedding bone on rock, bone on pavement. Each step was excruciating. I was having strange headaches and felt weak and tired, a familiar pattern. Something must have gone wrong, but I didn’t know what. Hadn’t I been a good worshiper of nature? Hadn’t I loved nature enough? Had I failed it?

It would be another six years before I would find out why I had these symptoms, and why they had abated in that first summer I lived here: nothing to do with the place at all, but a coincidence of timing and shifts in my body.

In that six years I got more and more ill, in Grasmere, despite Grasmere, regardless of Grasmere, and through that, I learned everything I couldn’t learn through the nature writing that was available to me at that time. I learned the same things every person with an incurable illness who loves nature learns: that the nature cure is an illusion, a confusion of causation and correlation. There is no magic cure in nature. There is just nature, doing what it does. I already knew how illness and disability can keep us removed from nature: unable to go outdoors, unable to walk or run or swim or hug a tree, or do any of the things we are told should be curative if only we weren’t too ill to do them. Now I was learning through my own body very decisively how it was not lack of nature that was making me so ill, but lack of appropriate medical care.

I began to explore these ideas in my writing, asking what our relationship with nature could be if we did not expect it to solve our problems. I found one answer in the poems Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in the 1830s, during years of illness, which revisit and revise William’s vision of nature as nurse and guide in “Tintern Abbey.” In “Thoughts on My Sick-Bed” Dorothy describes herself and William as “companions of nature” in their youth, a fascinating and illuminating distinction from his “worshipper.” A companion is an equal and a friend, a partner: there is no hierarchy in this relationship.

“Tintern Abbey” is a poem written by an abled twenty-eight-year-old. When William imagines nature helping his sister overcome “solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief” in the future, it is with the best intentions, but with little knowledge of extended, relentless, overwhelming physical pain of the kind she would later live with. The lonely rooms he has at that time in his life inhabited, in which remembered nature has lifted the “heavy and the weary weight / of all this unintelligible world” are mere shadows of the confinement Dorothy would experience in the 1830s.

None of this, of course, is William’s fault. It is a young man’s poem. It is full of wishfulness. What Dorothy learned through her years of illness is that no matter how much you might love nature, it cannot heal you. She knew this before the crises of the 1830s, warning in her “Floating Island” poem of how nature may also “take away – may cease to give.” The poems she called her “sickbed consolations” grapple with a central question: How do you find joy when the things you used to rely on to give it are no longer available to you, when you cannot tread the hills or feel the moonlight or misty mountain winds? What you can hope for is ongoing companionship, if you are lucky, if you can find a way to maintain fellowship with nature.

Dorothy’s solution was threefold: to bring nature into her sickroom, to reform it into a kind of garden, and to travel beyond it in her mind, memory, and poetry. Capturing the consolations of indoor nature and internal travel in poems that could be repeated like a spell or a prayer allowed Dorothy to recreate this consolation with words when she could not find it in her room or body.

The way Dorothy negotiates consolation – a soothing, not a healing; a coming together of distant places and times to bring enjoyment into a painful and dark time – echoes my own experience. It also echoes writing by disabled and chronically ill writers before and since, including Beatrix Potter, who a century later would write of traveling the fells from her bed: “Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.” As with Dorothy Wordsworth, remembered access to nature is a solace to her, but it does not cure her.

Unpacking the nature cure became a central mission of my book Some of Us Just Fall, in which I wanted to depict an alternative narrative that reflects reality for far more of us: we are ill, we love nature, it may bring us pleasure and companionship when we are able to be with it, but it cannot remove our illness. It is not the cause of our illness, nor is lack of it a poison. Illness is not the opposite of nature. Illness is part of nature. Viruses and bacteria and pain are part of nature, as is death. The tick is part of nature just as the red panda is. I may shudder at one and coo at the other, but nature does not class one as superior to the other. Genetic mutations such as those that cause my conditions are also part of nature. Disability is very much part of nature. How could nature remove from me what is part of it, and part of my own nature?

In the two years since Some of Us Just Fall was first published, I have had many conversations about this aspect of the book. I have found how much my own experiences are mirrored by those of others, but also how awkward it makes many abled nature-lovers to be asked to reconsider their casual belief in nature as curative. I understand. It is easier to believe we could heal ourselves by swimming in cold water than accept the terrible reality of how little of our health we, as individuals, can control. As disabled thinkers are continually reminding us, anyone is only one illness or accident away from learning this first hand.

The nature cure is only another iteration of the ways in which we exploit our environment for human gain, in which we seek to mine the hills and dredge the seas for the green gold of well-being. If we go to nature expecting it to heal us, we are not going to it for its own sake. Our relationship becomes entirely transactional. We expect medical treatment from it, not companionship. We expect medical treatment whatever the cost to nature itself. We take our ill health to it, along with our pollution, our damage, our wars, our heavy feet, our lack of mutual care. We will disturb a precious habitat for the endorphin rush of seeing a rare creature. We will burn fossil fuels for miles for a boost to our mental health. We will sacrifice one place in order to save another we deem more important for our well-being. I never want to go to the lake and expect it to fix me. I would not ask this of any friend, human or otherwise. So why would I ask this of our nonhuman neighbors I claim to love so much? I love nature for itself, not for what it gives me. To care only for what it gives me is not love.

We cannot mend ourselves or our relationship with our beleaguered world with this kind of thinking, or with this kind of relationship. We certainly cannot halt the damage we are doing, or undo the damage we have already done with this kind of thinking.

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer highlights the importance of mutual responsibility in our approach to the nonhuman, urging us to recognize our “membership in the web of reciprocity.”

We must relearn how to be good companions, not patients, not worshipers. We must relearn kinship with nature. We must think about what nature needs, as we would with any friend or loved one. What can we do to bring nature joy, or solace, or peace? What can we do to make its material circumstances better? Can we improve habitats for our nonhuman neighbors? Work to reduce pollution in our rivers and lakes? Move away from fossil fuels, in our own lives, and the sticky web of our finances? Can we lobby our leaders to change their investments? Alone we cannot do this, but together we can. We are not as powerless as we are made to feel. We can do something as approachable but important as plant native pollinators, feed birds in the cold months, make space in our buildings for birds and mammals to live alongside us. We can all more be thoughtful about our consumption, taking only what we each need. We can work with others to make this part of everyday life in our home places, and to be aware of how our everyday lives depend on others far from our sight and knowledge.

The work of my life in Grasmere has not been to make “work that might live,” but to learn how to live, to begin to learn how to be a better companion to nature, a better co-tenant of our shared habitat. To learn to seek no more from nature than its society. This is an ongoing process. I am slow and tired in everything I do. If I come away with joy, that is a bonus. If I come away with grief, that is instructive too. But most of all I want to come away with nothing but a sense of mutuality, co-presence, and caring community. To know myself part of the world, and the world part of me. I offer it the same care and respect I would to any human loved one, I offer it the same care and respect I try to extend to myself. This is companionship.