The Unsettling Outdoors. Russell Hitchings

go to them because of a background sense that they are insufficiently safe or, returning to the less intense feelings of aversion that Bixler and Floyd point towards, insufficiently sanitised (Skår 2010). Another study has considered how we might feel more relaxed if we can see for a good distance without potential assailants seeing us – viewed in this way, being immersed in vegetation that can also conceal threats is understandably unappealing (Gatersleben and Andrews 2013).

      How to Respond?

      What should be done about this? If we accept that there is more to this issue that providing attractive urban parks, what other solutions are there? One novel response is to think about how comparable experiences and benefits could be provided indoors. Could getting people to look at greenery on screen (or experience it through virtual reality) have the same effects? Perhaps for older people in ageing societies this could be a particularly good idea when the real-world equivalents can be physically daunting for this group (Depledge, Stone, and Bird 2011)? However, such a strategy could also push those involved even further away from the outdoors by giving them everything they need from nature inside. Presenting dramatic natural environments on screen might furthermore make the local outdoor reality increasingly dull by comparison (Ballouard, Brischoux, and Bonnet 2011). Building on the idea that we need to engage with, rather than ignore, the changing ways in which people are living in cities, another suggestion is that policymakers might do better to focus on making greenspace easier for people to encounter without making active choice to go to parks and gardens. Perhaps we should focus on the ‘incidental’ interactions associated with where they already walk, work and live (Cox et al. 2017a).

In a study that suggests those Australians who go to urban parks are doing so because of their personal affinity with these places more than the proximity to their homes – what they call the tension between ‘orientation’ and ‘opportunity’ –the logical conclusion is that we should encourage the affinity (Lin et al. 2014). For these authors, that means potentially undertaking a kind of ‘nature awareness training’ for young people so that this affinity is established in these early years. The hope is that this will stand them, and wider society, in good stead as they grow up. Indeed, children have been a particular target for this kind of argument, connecting to anxieties about what others have called ‘nature deficit disorder’ (Louv 2005) – the idea that, because many modern children don’t play outdoors as previous generations apparently did, they are already suffering as a result. Soga and Gaston (2016), for example, float the suggestion that parents should perhaps be making the effort to force their children outside (once there, they’ll soon get used to it, and soon start to like it). Could that eventually turn the tide on the broader cultural turn away from greenspaces that these studies worry about? And if we succeeded, as a number have considered, then benefits may not only be accrued by the individuals involved. Indeed, there is, in fact, some evidence that the result could be a greater sense of care for the natural environment, a stronger commitment to conservation and an increased interest in the health of the planet. Staying with the focus on contemporary young people, if one of the biggest challenges relates to how attractive ‘screen time’ has become to them (Larson et al. 2018), perhaps smartphone apps could help (Dorwood et al. 2017)? Either way, the concern here is that, if many young people are increasingly cocooned from outdoor experiences, they could quite easily become unaware of what is happening in the wider environment at a range of scales (from global climate change to local biodiversity loss). And soon that could be too late to fix.

It can be tempting to see young people as the obvious focus for attempts to tackle this problem (in the hope that they will somehow escape the challenges currently faced by the rest of us when they grow up). Indeed, the whole discipline of environmental education is essentially predicated on this idea. Within it, and regardless of where wider lifestyles seem to be headed in many places, it has become quite common to buy into the suggestion of ‘getting them early’ and then hoping for the best (Collins and Hitchings 2012). Yet, it is entirely possible that today’s young people will be socialised into future societies that are even less inclined to linger in greenspaces, irrespective of our attempts to get them bitten by the greenspace bug in their relative infancy (Asah, Bengston, and Westphal 2012). Indeed, if we think life course is important, perhaps we should consider how people move through other stages that each present their own opportunities and challenges in terms of establishing an affinity with the natural world (Bell et al. 2014). Then there is the much-vexed matter of how some ethnic groups feel that public greenspaces are not really for them, partly because they often congregate in parts of the city where they are comparatively uncommon (Gentin 2011). We have also seen studies exploring how women have particular ideas about the forms of urban greenspace in which they feel sufficiently safe and comfortable (see Krenichyn 2004). Others have also considered how those living in disadvantaged areas may particularly benefit from nearby greenspace (potentially acting as a kind of buffer to dissipate the stresses of experienced financial hardship) (Ward Thompson et al. 2016), and how older people might feel that they gain as much from viewing greenery from their homes as going out into it (Day 2008).

      One recently popular way of thinking about encouraging greenspace benefits has been to speak in medical terms and to talk of the most effective ‘dose’ of nature experience to foster individual and collective health (Gladwell et al. 2013; Cox et al. 2017b). This is not without its problems in terms of downplaying variable circumstances (how groups might respond differently to their dose and face different dosing challenges) (Bell et al. 2019). Yet, for me, this is an apposite way of thinking about the issue because, when we are taking our medicine, we are doing something that we know is good for us, but which we can otherwise easily overlook. This is the essential idea that justifies the focus of this book. Within it, my aim is to consider how certain outdoor experiences that may feasibly involve beneficial encounters with plants and trees might be squeezed out of everyday life. My thinking is that we can make urban greenspaces as attractive as we like. And (without being too dramatic about it) we can extol the restorative benefits that come from spending time in these spaces until we are blue in the face. But, if many city people are being captured by certain patterns of everyday living that render them oblivious (or, perhaps more rightly, incapable of responding) to the benefits of being with trees and plants, the mounting evidence suggesting that going there could do them much good will be of little effect.

      With that suggestion in mind, this book turns to a variety of situations that may initially seem trivial (I’ll make no bones about it). It will spend time attending to how a sample of city lawyers speak about ‘stepping away from their desks’ and how some recreational runners have ended up on treadmills. It will explore why the basic idea of living plants can prove challenging for some of those who are lucky enough to own a domestic garden and how young people feel they should wash at summer music festivals. The processes at play in these situations are those to which even the people involved may give little thought. Nevertheless, my argument is that they could eventually end up having significant consequences. But I am getting ahead of myself here. The next step is to discuss how I became interested in this topic and the concepts on which this book draws to explore it.

      The Nuts and Bolts of Nature

I’m a geographer. And the reason why I became interested in this topic is partly because, in recent years, some of those working in my field have been pioneering some original ways of looking at human experience that I figured could be helpful here. My thinking was that, if we stand to benefit from a closer examination of greenspace experience in everyday life, they had something useful to say. This is because a number of my colleagues have become increasingly focused on the detail of how people and environments interact. This fits with a longstanding focus (some would say this is what defines a geographical approach) on how human societies and physical systems come together in specific contexts (and how these relationships change over time) – the kind of processes that can often end up lost in the cracks between disciplines, which have been more avowedly focused on either ‘social’ life or the ‘natural’ world. In recent times, this branch of geography has become especially interested in how exactly that ‘coming together’ happens within particular encounters in particular places. This has been an exciting time to be a geographer working on ‘nature–society relations’ as an expanding menagerie of creatures and concepts has