Increased Environmental Consciousness

Nature Connection as Spirituality, Wellbeing Practice, and Subjective Activism

Nature connection is promoted as a way to increase personal wellbeing and as a solution to the ecological crisis. At the same time, however, the practice may be characterized as a new way of consuming nature and of training to become more skilled consumers of natural landscapes. The practices consist to a large degree of exercises of sensory attention and of ritual-like activities that enhance and redirect practitioners’ attention to the landscape, which lead to an experience of being a subject among other subjects. In this article, I will analyse what I heuristically refer to as the nature connection movement as a practice at the junction between personal wellbeing and social activism and ask how its practice alters practitioners’ experience of nature and what the social implications of that alteration may be. Against the backdrop of what has been called the subjective turn, a turn towards inner experience as the main point of reference, we may also speak of subjective activism, i.e., activism with an inward direction but with social ambitions.

Nature Connection as Spirituality, Wellbeing Practice, and Subjective Activism

Ohlsson, HenrikSödertörn University, School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, The Study of Religions. ORCID iD: 0000-0002-2335-0471 2022 (English) In: New Spiritualties and the Cultures of Well-being / [ed] Géraldine Mossière, Cham: Springer Nature, 2022, p. 153-168