Engagements With Place: Reconciling Our Relationships With Nature in Contemporary North American Urban Landscapes

• In Event: Critical Pedagogies of Healing: Curriculum for Human Thriving in Times of Struggle

Abstract

Forest bathing or shinrin-yoku is becoming a popular way of “connecting” with nature. It originated in Japan in 1982 as a public health initiative that encouraged people to make contact with forests as a way of improving health and well-being. It is a meditative walk through a space with trees, without a particular direction. One pays attention to smells, sights, sounds, feels. A review of literature on this practice found that forest environments promote physiological responses that indicate lower stress than do city environments (Park et al., 2009). While there is authentic scientific research that supports the benefits of soil, plants and oceans to human well-being (i.e. Craig & Prescott, 2016), Western discourse of shinrin-yoku runs the risk defaulting to romantic visions of pristine forest, perpetuating the urban=bad/nature=good dichotomy, with the latter often extending to describe people who occupy or live closer to those respective places.
Those of us who live in urban spaces, especially those of us who are Black, Brown, immigrant, and/or poor are often positioned as removed from nature or unnatural. Disconnected, nature-deficient, entombed in concrete, urbanity is the antithesis of romantic visions of green landscapes untouched by humans. However, urban spaces are neither devoid of nature nor are urban denizens disconnected from nature. Rather we are attuned to a particular urban nature that is the interrelationships of the adaptations of humans, animals, plants to the dominant material structures of concrete and asphalt. These connections make up an urban nature that is chaotic and unified at once. In order for us to realize a necessarily sustainable future amidst a globally growing urbanity, we need to connect with nature in ways that are resonant with cities and value the diverse ways that people interact with the human-nonhuman-material interrelationships therein.
During the recent pandemic, we have had to find ways to cope with mass uncertainty. Not being able to leave our communities or homes, we have had to find ways to make connections that sustain our mental and physical well-being. In some popular literature, shinrin-yoku is described as “connecting with trees.” Anecdotally, a high school class I worked with in Brooklyn, NY did a study on themselves and peers walking to school along different paths—tree-lined streets versus commercial veins and found themselves less stressed with the former. Although in an urban space, these students found ways to make connections with trees that allowed them to experience and document reduced stress. This leads me to ask, what is shinrin-yoku in an urban context? In this paper, I will address this question while reflecting on my own experiences of shinrin-yoku in an urban environment during a pandemic. This allows me to take up the ontological question of urban nature and think about it in terms of environmental science teaching and learning for Black, Brown and other folks who are often positioned “outside” of nature. I describe an emergent practice of urban shinrin-yoku—ways to connect with natural elements in urban spaces in urban ways.

Author

• Jennifer Dawn Adams, University of Calgary