Could trail cleaning improve our wellbeing? | Introducing the Roots to (Re)Connection Report

Photos by James Poole. Words by Sophie Lawson

Think about one of your favourite places in nature. It could be a park, a beach, your favourite tree. 

Take yourself there: 

What do you see? 

What can you hear? 

What do you smell? 

How do you feel when you’re there? 

Take a moment to appreciate this place. 

If it’s hard to imagine - let me tell you about mine. In my local park, there is a massive beech tree. She has weaving gnarly roots that create a perfect little shelf where I like to sit. I like to lean back against her trunk and look up at the branches within branches within branches. I can hear birds chirruping, distant traffic, squirrels rooting around in the leaves, someone berating their misbehaving dog. One time I even heard the “knock knock knock” of a woodpecker. The smell is earthy, the air is fresh: a little damp (I live in Scotland). As I lean back, I feel a settling in my body, a slowing of my breath, like my muscles can afford to relax a little because I am being held by something sturdy. When life is so hectic, I find great solace in the ancient stillness of trees. If I stay here a while, I start to feel not quite so caught up in my thoughts, which seem smaller and less significant compared to the hundreds of tree rings at my back. 

This is what we mean when we talk about nature connection: our intimate relationship with the more-than-human world. 

It’s not like I have to do anything to make this happen. I don’t have to open a meditation app or count my breath: it unfolds naturally. At the same time, there are things I can do to make this happen more quickly, more deeply, and that is the science of nature connectedness. This matters, because people with a strong sense of connection to nature tend to have higher wellbeing and fewer mental health struggles. And in the UK, we are experiencing more disconnection from nature and more mental health struggles than ever. 

Now, I’m going to invite you to return to your nature sanctuary, the one you have brought to your mind. Or if you like, you can take an imaginary seat at the base of my beech tree. It's pretty nice huh? Now, imagine someone has stubbed out a cigarette or dropped their empty take-away coffee cup there. How does this make you feel? Does it change your experience of that place? 

Whoever did this; they’re not a bad person. Maybe they don’t know this is a special place. Maybe they don’t feel connected to the tree in the way that I do; because when we feel connected to nature, we care for it. If they did know, I’m sure they’d say, “Gosh, I’m so sorry, you’re right. This tree is beautiful and worth taking care of. I didn’t think. I didn’t know”. 

But they’re not here. Just the remains of the discarded coffee cup. So, what are you going to do? You could ignore it. You could leave it there for the next person to see, and the next person might interpret it as a subconscious signal that ‘people don’t care for this place’. Or, you could decide to take action. You could take it with you, you could find a bin, you could take it home. How does taking action to protect a place you care about make you feel? 

78% of our volunteers say they feel more connected to places they love after cleaning them. 100% of people say they’d come back for more. Trail cleaning is often thought of as community service in a punitive sense, but what if it’s doing something good for us too, not just the places we love? What if that sense of community and action is what we need to heal the mental and environmental crises we face? What if we felt reconnected to ourselves, to each other and to the more-the-human world? And what if we were able to share this, so that people would feel more connected, feel better within themselves and more caring towards their surroundings? 

This is what our new ‘Roots to (Re)Connection Report’ is all about. It’s about understanding how trail cleaning makes us feel, the impact it has on us, and how we can enhance some of those juicy benefits. Unlike our trails, this area of research is virtually untouched. In collaboration with Edinburgh Napier University and funded by Innovate UK, this Report will create a brand new ground-breaking evidence base on the human impacts of trail cleaning, so that we can transform trail cleaning from punishment to a positive prescription for wellbeing.  

Good for us, good for nature. Win win right?! 

To find out more head to the new research section of our website.