Professor Dr. Ulrich Gebhard, teaching Methods of Natural Sciences on the University of Hamburg was one of the speakers at the symposium for biodiversity at the TU Braunsweig last week. He explained in a very convincing way our relation with nature citing some important researchers.

We need the contact with the nature when we are young, the psychoanalist Alexander Mitscherlich said– das Kind braucht seines Gleiches. Children do need contact with other living creatures, to build up a relation with nature. Ulrich Gebhard explained this on the hand of the bean experiment at school: let a bean grow into a plant in the class and then ask the children to cut a bone in half, they will refuse first, thinking it hurts the bean. We all have this inexplicable projection of caring for other living creatures. And we all need to “cut a bean” to develop a relation with nature.

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, professors of psychology at the Univeristy of Michingan, have found that too much focused attention on anything can lead to mental fatique and such fatigue’s remedy is found in exposure to nature. Walking in nature brings us in a state of “nicht anstrengende aufmerksahmkeit” – a relaxed form of awareness which destresses.

Alexander Mitscherlich claims that nature gives us two basics for human wellbeing, continuity and discovery. Feeling part of nature brings us the feeling of continuity, of being part of a whole, and that gives us confidence; Secondly nature makes us curious and thus generates discoveries, which helps us further.

This tastes for more!