If you go down to the woods today - you'll feel better

Skip the shopping centre at the weekend and go to the woods instead, writes Brian Byrne. That’s the advice of a Kilcullen retired community health doctor, who believes we’re genetically programmed to appreciate and be restored by nature.

Dr Liz Cullen will be pushing this message home at a talk scheduled in Kilcullen Library on this Friday 24 May, starting at 7.30pm. Hosted by Kilcullen Community for Climate Action, the free event is designed to provide food for thought for those feeling stressed out by modern life, with its non-stop calls to consume, in algorithmic thrall to endlessly scroll on phone screens, and trying to cope with the pounding news cycle of bad happenings.

Liz Cullen is a medical doctor with a long-standing interest in the environment and the impact of the physical and social environment on health. She received a PhD in 2009 from NUIM for her work on the impacts of climate change on health in Ireland. In 2016 she was one of the recipients of the first BT Masters bursaries, for her work on how to assess environmental factors contributing to cancers. Her illustrated presentation will describe why taking time out in nature is beneficial from a physical and psychological perspective. 

“We evolved together over millions of years with every other living organism, and we’re naturally attuned to the natural world,” she told the Diary. “So from the earliest times of Stone Age man, our eyes and our ears were in tune with the sound of nature, for food and for danger. When we take time out to link back with natural things, and leave our phones and gadgets behind, it restores us. The natural world always delivers. On the other hand, going to a shopping centre, which promises so much and generally leaves us unsatisfied, is very deeply un-restorative. You never see a window in them, for instance.”

She cites recent research which shows the production of biogenic organic compounds from trees and plants, the soil and insects and other parts of the natural world, have a positive effect on humans who spend time in a nature environment. She also firmly believes that biodiversity is humanity’s ‘life support system’. "The benefits include decreasing stress and boosting our immune system, and these compounds just give us a lift."

“When I give this talk I’ll not be lecturing people on how they should live their lives,” she says. “It will be a two-way event, and I really want a discussion, what I hope will be the start of a conversation on how we can all build a better balance in life. We need to get out of the television and the mobile phone world for a bit. We need to let the forest into our lives.” 

Living in the Ballyshannon area just south of Kilcullen town, Liz Cullen is also an active member of that community’s fight against a plan by the Kilsaran Group to turn local farmland into a quarry, which she says would ‘industrialise a peaceful and tranquil area’. Which sounds like the absolute antithesis of her mission to help everyone live in a better balanced way. 

NOTE: This article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.

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