How can we facilitate deep nature connection experiences in urban environment
This year’s Symposium is an opportunity to engage with and contribute to innovations in outdoor health research and practice. Presentations will span Indigenous health practices, Nature-based health interventions for emerging conditions, and Outdoor health for whole populations.
As governments and policy-makers grapple with new challenges, and the Australian community adapts to new realities, Outdoor Healthcare provides promising cost-effective benefits for our physical, mental, social and cultural health.
Details
The practices of Belonging: How to find deep connection to nature and a sense of belonging even in city landscapes.
Abstract
We usually think of outdoor education and recreation as taking place outside urban boundaries, which inherently sets apart city from nature, and nature from where most of us live. Especially in these times when we are being forced to stay close to home, the importance of being able to access and facilitate states of deep nature connection, and a sense of belonging, right on our doorstep is vitally important. If we claim wild nature as that all around us and within us, then we start to bridge the gap of separation between humans and nature that is at the very root of our ecological crisis.
We’re a famously nature-loving nation, yet 86 per cent of Australians call the city home. Amid the concrete and the busyness, how can we also answer the call of the wild?
This was the enquiry I set out to explore 5 years ago when I found myself living in a city again, Melbourne, after many years in rural and regional areas. My wild-city experiment took many forms - practicing the core routines of deep nature connection in my local area, ecological literacy and practices of belonging, technologies of village culture, food and foraging, wild imagination and sensory opening, physicality and adventure, pilgrimage and tracking. My findings also incorporate taking a group of citysiders through these practices on a regular basis - with astounding results.
In this presentation, I will share some stories and findings now published within the memoir Rewilding the Urban Soul (Scribe, 2021)
About the Presenter
Claire Dunn is a writer, deep nature connection practitioner, and a passionate advocate for rewilding our inner and outer landscapes. She worked for many years as a campaigner for the Wilderness Society and now facilitates nature-based reconnection retreats and contemporary wilderness rites of passage through her business Nature's Apprentice. In 2010, Claire lived in the bush for a year as part of a wilderness survival program, an experience she wrote about in My Year Without Matches. She currently lives in Melbourne. Her second memoir, Rewilding the Urban Soul was published by Scribe in 2021.