A couple of years ago one of my sisters came across a cache of i-Spy nature books from the 1970s among the boxes we’d taken from my father’s house after he died. They were mine, and she popped them in the post to me: a miniature library of stapled books full of my wobbly handwriting, ticks proudly recording the plants, birds and insects I’d seen.
My siblings and I got to reminiscing by email; there are five of them, all older than me, so they all remember my childhood far more clearly than I do theirs. ‘My main memory of you,’ wrote one, ‘is of you cupping your hands around something you’d found in the garden – a pine cone, or a toad or whatever – and holding it up, going ‘Look! Look!’
I realised in that moment that I’ve carried on that childhood habit of noticing nature, recording what I find and sharing my discoveries all my adult life.
I’m a novelist and nature writer; I’ve also written nature-based story books for children and made a hit lockdown nature podcast, and now I’ve launched Encounter – a free nature journaling app. Becoming a tech entrepreneur has been a huge left turn for someone who was previously only passingly acquainted with spreadsheets, let alone anything more technical; but now that it’s out there in the wild, being used by real people, it’s clear that the app is the purest distillation of my early, childlike energy that I have so far been able to achieve.
Encounter is, in essence, an enthusiastic person showing you something incredibly interesting in the natural world, plus your own, private i-Spy book in which to jot down what you’ve seen.
I was fortunate to have grown up largely without screens and as part of the last generation to have been allowed to play outside, unsupervised: the perfect conditions for a deep connection to nature to develop. Unsurprisingly, I lost that connection in my teenage years: the ‘teenage dip’ – particularly among boys – is well studied by researchers looking into the human-nature relationship.
Distracted by all the usual things I didn’t really seek wildness out again until my mid-twenties, when, after a bad break-up, I found that it was all still there, waiting to nourish me. Despite living in central London I discovered that it was perfectly possible to live a life rich in nature: it was simply a case of teaching myself to notice again, partly through walking a dog every day, and partly through taking photos and keeping what at first was a garden notebook but soon turned into a nature journal. The effects of these new habits so transformed my experience of city life that I wanted to share my discovery: I wrote my first novel, Clay, as a way to show other urban dwellers the extraordinary secret world that lay all around them, if they would only look.
Since then, ‘nature connectedness’ has become an exciting new research area, much of it pioneered here in Britain by Professor Miles Richardson at the University of Derby’s Nature Connectedness Research Group. How connected a person is to nature can be measured, and the ways in which that connection can be boosted have been identified. Higher scores for nature connectedness correlate reliably to better mental and physical health, greater life satisfaction, and more pro-nature behaviours.
All over the world now, studies are coming in that show the same thing, something many of us already know at a bone-deep level: spending pleasurable time in natural environments, actively noticing nature, is good for us. It can even be life-changing.
We evolved outdoors: in contact with earth, rain, sea and soil, feeling the wind and the changing temperature, inhaling natural chemicals, watching the light change with the weather and seasons and in unspoken relationship with other creatures: those are the conditions that have fine-tuned our bodies and minds for millennia, not the constant temperatures and light levels and antiseptic surroundings we have in the last few moments of evolutionary time found ourselves within.
These new developments may be convenient and comforting, but at a level that can be hard to consciously detect they take something from us, and we suffer tiny losses, tiny harms, as a result. No wonder reconnecting to nature in my twenties changed my life for the better; no wonder wellbeing is so reliably and lastingly boosted by such simple interventions as Miles Richardson’s 2016 study in which participants wrote down three good things they had experienced in nature every day.
The response to The Stubborn Light of Things podcast, which went out for six months in 2020, made it clear to me how deep the need for nature ran. During the pandemic people really wanted to connect with the one thing they knew in their heart was good for them – even if they weren’t quite sure how to start. I wrote a book called Homecoming: A Guided Journal to Lead You Back to Nature, with things to discover all year round, wherever you live, birdsong to listen out for, and species to tick off: a grown-up version, I suppose, of my childhood i-Spy books.
But, like them or loathe them, our phones are now the most democratic way to reach people: I’d love everyone to buy a hardback book, but it’s not realistic to expect that they will. What’s more, creating an app will allow Encounter, over time, to target the nature information we put out to people’s location – and that’s really useful, given that not every species lives everywhere, and many things (frogspawn, for example) happen at different times across Britain and Ireland.
Creating a habit of nature noticing adjusts what your brain pays attention to and what it filters out, changing your experience of the world around you from one in which the natural world is just a backdrop, to one where you can create joyful, rich, ongoing relationships with your nearby wild; where you can be restored, and perhaps offer back the same. It’s a simple trick that changed my life, and now I want to bring that magic to other people. Here I am, not next to you but in your phone, showing you something brilliant you might want to go and discover. Look! Look!
Encounter is available for free in Britain and Ireland, and for iPhone and Android. Search ‘Encounter Nature’ wherever you get your apps. Encounter-nature.com
Melissa Harrison is a nature writer, children’s author and novelist who lives in Suffolk. A collection of her ‘Nature Notebook’ columns for The Times, The Stubborn Light of Things, was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, as was Rain: Four Walks in English Weather. She wrote and presented the hit nature podcast ‘The Stubborn Light of Things’ and has edited four anthologies of writing about the seasons in support of The Wildlife Trusts. Melissa has appeared on Springwatch, Springwatch Unsprung and Countryfile, and speaks regularly on the radio
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