A Review of “Good Nature: Why Seeing, Smelling, Hearing and Touching Plants is Good for Your Health”

Rarely does the book have a title that not only tells you the subject but also invites you to discover its contents. The book is “Good Nature: why seeing, smelling, hearing and touching plants is good for your health” by Pegasus Books New York. The author is not just another nature enthusiast who believes that plants are important to our well-being. Kathy Willis CBE is a paleoecologist Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Biology, University of Oxford. She was for 5 years the Director of Science at the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew, United Kingdom. Her goal in Good Nature is to bring together the scientific literature that has an empirical basis for plants affecting our health. Of course, all of us know that eating plants, that is, vegetables, is important to our well-being.

Good Nature assembles the empirical and medical basis for some of the effects on our almost metaphysical senses, like seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling. This is not an approach like taking an herbal pill or hanging some crystal around your neck. It is about finding whether there is consistent empirical evidence of the natural environment affecting our well-being and then what exactly the interaction is between us and the environment. The goal is to find the physical basis of our reactions, for example, brain activity, blood pressure, fMRI, heart rate, level of stress hormones, lymphocyte levels, microbiota. Good Nature says we need to take seriously these effects of nature on our well-being and then encourage research so we can understand exactly how nature affects our health. If we can have a firm understanding of this connection, there are many medical activities we might do besides just walking in the woods or fields and that we can create a better natural environment. This is a book that is not simply about ecosystem services but how our environment reaches into us for health and wellness.