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Paper Short Abstract

This paper explores the adoption of 'nature-based' health promotion initiatives on the Scottish islands of Skye and Raasay. I examine the therapeutic use of the natural environment, situating my analysis within broader conceptual and historical debates concerning the use and value of nature.

Paper Abstract

In Scotland, significant attention has been afforded to the so-called ‘natural’ environment as a way to mitigate health inequalities. Initiatives like ‘Our Natural Health Service’ draw upon an ever-expanding body of research documenting the salutogenic effects of exposure to green space (Hartig et al., 2014). Taking a critical biosocial approach, I explore what is meant by ‘nature’ and how such meanings shape healing practices (Yates-Doerr, 2020)? Why is it that ‘nature’ - framed simultaneously as an anxiolytic aesthetic resource (Ulrich, 1993) and a space of sensorial enrichment (Janssen et al., 2018) - is imagined to exert such radical effects on individual bodies and populations? In this paper, I consider the adoption of nature walks and ‘forest bathing’ - sensory immersion in a wooded environment (Hansen et al., 2017) - as health promotion initiatives on the Hebridean islands of Skye and Raasay. I ask, how is ‘nature’ defined and understood in such practices, and how is the environment incorporated through acts of emplaced movement and interspecies interaction (Ingold, 2000)? I intend to complexify public health frames concerning access to green space and its resulting effects on the body by deconstructing the discursive practices by which nature is transformed into a healing instrument. Furthermore, I invoke the Gaelic concept of dùthchas (Ní Mhathúna, 2019) to examine the diverse means by which histories of dispossession, imperial entanglement, and more-than-human ecologies come to shape both the textures of local landscapes and the means by which these are apprehended somatically.