Why connecting with nature shouldn’t mean disconnecting from science

I am a nature writer. I like to think that I have a fairly solid sort of relationship with the more-than-human world: I watch birds, I pick up frogs, I help my kids find beetles under logs. I think nature is complicated and marvellous. Sometimes I think it is beautiful. But never once in my life have I considered it sacred, and never once would it have occurred to me to consider my relationship with nature to be “spiritual”.

Current trends suggest that I am missing something.

“Nature connectedness” is a wishy-washy term, but it is supported by a sturdy (and expanding) academic substrate. The authors of a 2025 study make the troubling claim that higher levels of “nature connectedness”, or “a sense of oneness with nature”, are associated with “greater spirituality” and scepticism about “science over faith”. This is a finding that might surprise many in the natural sciences – it certainly surprises me – but the sentiment pervades recent nature writing.

Where the Druids of old worshipped nature, cultivating sacred groves of mistletoe and oak, we of the 21st century find enchantment and communion in our own sacred space: the nature section of the bookshop, somewhere between gardening and personal development. The fact is that it is in nature writing that many of us find much, if not all, of our nature connectedness. We get it at a remove, mediated, translated. We’re birdwatchers by proxy, second-hand botanists, armchair explorers. And I think that is OK. Lives are busy, and most of us live in towns or suburbs – one of the great things about being human is the fact that we can be transported to deep woods or high hills by ink marks on wood pulp.

The problem, I think, isn’t in how we connect but in what we think we are connecting with. Nature isn’t a fantasy or a parable. It exists on the same mundane earthbound plane as us – it is us – and it is still marvellous, still fascinating, still spectacular, examined through a scientific lens. It is hard to see what is gained by uncoupling science from a sincere love of nature.

It might help if we were to reconsider our enthusiasm for finding lessons in nature. Perhaps we really can learn from moss how to stick together and abide by natural laws, learn resilience from the grass and learn from fungi to accept the ends of cycles, as nature writers have recently advised. But we can also learn from the shoebill how to turn our weaker child out of the nest to starve, and from various internal parasites how to force our hosts to die by suicide. Looking to nature for advice seems about as wise as asking ChatGPT to solve our personal problems (both resources literally have all the answers). Perhaps wise humanism consists of finding our own lessons among ourselves.

Then there’s the old question of where the human sits in all this – that is, the human with the book contract. The nature writer, some argue, needs above all to learn to shut up. But the awkward truth is that all writers are fond of the sound of their own voices. We all have to find a balance between what is going on out there and how things are in here – there is huge value in each, done well, and the best nature writers report from both frontiers with clarity, expertise, sensitivity and skill. Sometimes “out there” means the non-human – the animals, plants and landscapes among which we live. I wish that more often it was allowed to mean other humans, from different backgrounds and with diverse perspectives.

I do hope nature writing keeps growing, flaws and all. I hope it only gets richer, tanglier, more multidisciplinary, more messy. It will have to, if it is to keep pace with ever-changing “nature”, whatever we mean by that – with real life, the living, breathing world, and our place in it all.

Richard Smyth is the author of An Indifference of Birds and The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell