The restorative power of nature
How has your relationship with the natural world changed since 23 March 2020? As a reader of this magazine, I’m assuming a pre-existing level of interest and connection – but did you find, like so many others, that your need for nature deepened even as our access to it was curtailed?
The changes Covid-19 has wrought on our health, our society and our economy have been heartbreaking, but as someone who writes about the natural world for a living, I’ve also been inspired by the changes I’ve seen take root in so many people’s lives. You could spend half a century campaigning, write a hundred columns about the environment, make countless TV programmes about wildlife and it wouldn’t even begin to approach the quiet revolution in outlook that swept the UK within the course of just a few short weeks, as lockdown hit, and then bit down.
It seemed instinctual, a collective reaching-out for the one thing we trusted and knew that
