Book Review and Photo by Miyako Pleines
On Losing Eden by Lucy Jones
Recently, the last handful of months have been taken up by my pregnancy. Not a day goes by where I do not think about the baby that is currently growing inside my body. I wonder often about what they will be like when they are eventually born. Will they like to read? Will they like to play sports? Will they enjoy walking around in nature as much as their mother? I cannot predict the personality of my growing child, nor can I predict their likes and interests, but I can think about ways to introduce to them all the things that I and their father hold dear, and one of those things is the natural world.
In Lucy Jones recent release Losing Eden, she, too, contemplates the way nature affects her newly born baby girl. She watches as her child tries time and again to eat soil as the two frolic in the dirt, Jones gardening and her child observing. Jones wants to make sure her daughter has a connection to nature, that she doesn’t lack in the department of trees and birds and bugs. But she also recognizes that this connection to our natural world is growing more and more tenuous by the day. Currently, we live in a society that values commercial goods over natural ones. We favor quickness over the slow pace of a growing sapling or a garden snail. When we look at a landscape, too often we think, “What can I build?” instead of, “How can I preserve?” Despite it being vitally important to our survival, the natural world has taken a back burner to all the other things that make up our lives, and Jones is certain that this shift is affecting us.
Losing Eden is a book about all the ways the natural world enhances our health, whether that be mental or physical. Through a series of heavily researched chapters, Jones explores everything from the effects of working in the soil to treat depression to ways being in nature can help us process grief and our eventual deaths. She is adamant about finding ways to incorporate nature into our cities and urban environments, and she understands the importance of access to natural spaces for those in divested communities. “Is human sanity at risk in a world of depleted nature?” she wonders, and then goes on to answer her own question with a resounding “Yes.”
Jones was born in England and lives there to this day, so much of the book revolves around the various programs and studies that have been done in there. However, she does make an effort to include research from all over the world, and she occasionally touches on issues that arise in the United States. Still, if you are looking for a book that is going to go into a great deal of history about the effects of nature as they relate to humans living in the U.S., this may not be the book for you. This shouldn’t dissuade you from reading it, by any means — there is still plenty of relatable and important information provided her for non-England residents — but just know that the voice is heavily based in England.
At times, some of the studies Jones references can feel a bit thin in their reasoning and their ability to successfully create a control group to study from. For example, one study she references looked at a group of children in Britain that were predominantly of South Asian origin (58%). The rest of the children in the study were either of white British origin or another ethnicity entirely. The results of the study showed that Asian children in particular might be more affected by the quality of a so-called “greenspace” so much so that this variable “might be particularly significant in multicultural contexts.” While it’s clear to see where the data is coming from, it seems a little bit presumptuous to conclude that only multicultural children — in this case Asian children — need to experience better quality greenspace to experience better mental health, especially since the study was done predominantly on Asian children to begin with. It’s instances like these throughout Losing Eden that can often hinder rather than help Jones’s hypothesis that more time in nature is the answer to everyone’s problems.
Still, I do not disagree with her when she seeks to show how people who plant gardens report higher levels of calm and happiness. I myself feel refreshed and more alive after spending an afternoon out in the garden beds around my house. There is no doubt that the natural world has healing properties, and that these healing properties could and should be harnessed to help those dealing with all sorts of stressors, anxieties, and health issues. At one point, she talks about the artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, who kept a diary about his time tending to his garden near the end of his life. Jarman had been diagnosed with AIDS, and his garden had a great effect on his mental, and probably even physical, health.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book comes near the end when Jones begins to talk about the future of nature. She postulates that we may soon find ourselves in a world where we allow people without access to nature different ways to technologically immerse themselves in fabricated natural environments. She talks about how nature can be used as a prescriptive by doctors who are looking to help patients suffering from physical or mental health issues. And most fascinating to me, was her trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault that currently houses “hundreds of thousands of plant seed species in case of global disaster, ecocide, war, famine, and the other possible effects of climate change.” The idea is that if we have a stockpile of all the different types of seeds, we may be able to start again in the face of a catastrophic disaster. It is a hopeful idea, and I love to think about all those seeds intentionally frozen in vaults somewhere in the Arctic just waiting for their chance to save us from ourselves.
Over all, Losing Eden is a fascinating deep dive into the various types of ways nature can help to heal us and lift us up. Jones has done an incredible job compiling research and personal experience that make for an educational journey into the fight for the preservation of the natural world. If you are looking for a sign that you need more nature in your life, this book is it. I finished it with a handful of new ideas of ways I could increase the nature around my house, but most importantly, it made me realize how vital it will be to make sure my future child gets their hands muddied in the dirt right away. Nature is vital to the very core of our wellbeing, and we must do everything we can to honor it and protect it for future generations to come.
