Rewilding Ourselves: How Modern Life Disconnected the UK from Nature - and How to Find Our Way Back
🌿 Why the UK Needs to Reconnect with Nature
In a world that moves faster every year, our relationship with nature has quietly faded into the background. Yet as rates of burnout, anxiety, and environmental loss rise, one truth grows clearer: our wellbeing is inseparable from the health of the natural world.
So it’s deeply concerning that the UK consistently ranks among the lowest in the world for “nature connectedness” — a measure of how emotionally close people feel to the living world around them. Despite our love of the countryside and our high membership in environmental organisations, the data reveals a sobering picture: Britain is now one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth, having lost around 98% of its native woodland.
🍃 What Is Nature Connectedness?
“Nature connectedness” is a psychological concept describing the closeness of an individual’s relationship with other species — not how often we visit nature, but how connected we feel when we do.
Studies show that people with stronger connections to nature:
Enjoy better wellbeing and lower anxiety
Are more likely to act in environmentally responsible ways
Experience greater meaning, empathy, and belonging
Conversely, low nature connectedness has been identified as one of three major underlying causes of biodiversity loss, alongside inequality and the prioritisation of individual, material gain.
🌍 The Paradox of Progress: Business vs. the Earth
Interestingly, research from the University of Derby and People and Nature found that the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” index — a measure of how business-friendly a country is — correlates with lower levels of nature connection.
It suggests a quiet tension between the way we build our economies and the way we relate to the Earth. As Miles Richardson, Professor of Nature Connectedness at the University of Derby, explains:
“We’ve become a more rational, economic and scientific society. That’s obviously brought some fantastic benefits, but it’s how we balance them with the unforeseen problems. How do we reintegrate natural thinking in our very technological world? It’s about mainstreaming the value of nature — making it integral to our wellbeing, so it becomes respected and almost sacred.”
Despite Britain’s impressive number of environmental memberships, this pro-nature indicator appears to have little real impact on emotional closeness to nature. Other measurable factors — such as urbanisation, income, and internet use — seem to erode that connection even more directly.
🌱 Beyond Business as Usual: Putting Nature first
Richardson and his colleagues argue that fostering nature connectedness requires a systemic shift — bringing nature into our healthcare, governance, and business decisions. Ideas include:
Using natural environments in NHS wellbeing treatments
Embedding “rights of nature” in law
Requiring biodiversity net gain in business and planning
Treating nature as a stakeholder, not just a resource
“We still need a functioning economy,” Richardson notes. “But there are ways we can rethink how we do business — bringing nature into the boardroom and decision-making. That can start to shift the system.”
🌸 The Enwild Perspective: Returning to the Living World
For most of us, the first step isn’t policy — it’s presence. Reconnection begins with the smallest acts: noticing birdsong, touching the bark of an old tree, breathing in the scent of rain on soil.
At Enwild Retreat, we see how immersive practices such as forest bathing, yoga, wild swimming, and meditation can help people rediscover what was never truly lost — our innate sense of belonging in the natural world.
Our retreats are not about escape; they’re about return — to rhythm, to stillness, to our place within the wider web of life.
🌾 A Call to Reconnection
The UK’s story of disconnection is not fixed; it’s an invitation. If we can rebuild our relationship with nature — in how we live, work, and make decisions — we can begin to restore both human wellbeing and ecological balance.
Nature is not separate from us, nor a luxury to visit. It is, and has always been, home.