A 2017 study on nature connectedness found that noticing, feeling, and caring about the natural world builds a stronger bond with it than being able to name what you’re looking at.
You can walk through a forest without knowing the name of a single tree. You can fail to identify a bird, know nothing about geology, and have no idea which wildflower is growing beside the path. You can simply notice the light, touch the bark, watch an insect move through the grass, or stop because something in the landscape catches your attention.
According to research by Ryan Lumber, Miles Richardson and David Sheffield, that kind of experience may matter more for developing a relationship with nature than knowing what you are looking at.
Their 2017 study, published in PLOS ONE, examined how people become connected to the natural world. Across three studies, the researchers worked with 393 participants in total: 203 people in the first study, 118 in a replication, and 72 in a walking experiment.
The researchers were interested in a question that sounds simple but has surprisingly complicated implications:
What actually makes someone feel connected to nature?
The answer wasn’t simply being outside. It wasn’t necessarily learning more about wildlife, either. Instead, the research identified five routes that stood out: contact, emotion, meaning, compassion and beauty. And when the researchers put those ideas into practice, a short walk became something quite different from an ordinary walk.
From Research to Practice
The connection between this research and FTHub’s work is continuing to grow. Ryan Lumber is now collaborating with FTHub, bringing his research on nature connectedness into the wider FTHub community and its educational work. His perspective will also become part of the conversation at the upcoming FTHub Spring School Derby, where practitioners and researchers will have an opportunity to explore how research on nature connection can inform practice. FTHub will also be interviewing Lumber in the future, creating an opportunity to look more closely at how his research has evolved and what it can tell us about the ways people develop meaningful connections with nature.
A walk isn’t necessarily a connection
There is an easy assumption that spending time outdoors automatically brings people closer to nature. The researchers tested that assumption.
In their first two studies, participants completed questionnaires designed to explore different ways of engaging with nature and how those experiences related to their sense of connection. The researchers drew their framework from the Biophilia Hypothesis, which proposes that humans have an inherent tendency to affiliate with living systems and the natural world.
What emerged was more interesting than a simple “nature is good for you” finding. Some forms of engagement were much more closely associated with nature connectedness than others. Activities centered on knowledge and identifying species did not emerge as reliable pathways in the researchers’ analysis. Instead, their results pointed toward experiences that were more personal, built through connection with nature. Nature wasn’t something participants merely needed to know about. It was something they needed to experience.
Five ways into a connection with nature
The researchers eventually translated the findings into five more accessible concepts.
- Contact is the most straightforward. It involves direct engagement with the natural environment rather than encountering nature only through pictures, screens or descriptions.
- Emotion involves noticing and exploring the feelings nature evokes.
- Meaning asks people to consider what elements of nature represent or signify to them.
- Compassion shifts the relationship away from simply appreciating nature toward caring about other living things.
- And then there is beauty, paying attention to the visual qualities of the natural world and allowing those qualities to matter.
The researchers found that these pathways were intertwined rather than operating as five completely separate switches. In particular, appreciation of nature’s beauty appeared to help explain some of the relationship between other forms of engagement and nature connectedness, and could function as a pathway toward it in its own right. That idea became the basis for their third study.
They put the theory on a walking path
The third study involved 72 participants, divided evenly into three groups of 24.
- One group walked through green spaces around the University of Derby and took part in activities designed around the pathways identified in the earlier research.
- A second group took a similar walk through nature but did not receive the structured pathway activities.
- The third group walked through the university’s built environment while taking part in comparable activities focused on their surroundings.
The nature walk itself was short, about 726 meters. The built-environment walk was about 718 meters. The sessions lasted roughly 20 minutes.
The difference was what participants were asked to do with their attention. At different points along the nature route, participants stopped for activities.
- For the emotion activity, they discussed their thoughts and feelings about the natural surroundings.
- For meaning, they considered symbolism they could find in what they were seeing.
- For compassion, they watched a video about creating habitat for wildlife.
- Beauty was woven into these activities by directing attention toward the visual qualities of the natural environment.
The researchers weren’t asking people to memorize species. They were asking them to form a relationship with what was in front of them.
The ordinary nature walk didn’t produce the same result
This is where the findings become particularly useful. Simply walking through nature did not significantly increase participants’ nature connectedness in the control group. The structured nature experience did. Participants in the pathway-activity condition showed a statistically significant increase in nature connectedness. The other two conditions, the ordinary nature walk and the built-environment walk, did not show a significant increase.
The researchers described the result as evidence that the physical act of walking wasn’t enough by itself. What appeared to matter was the way participants interacted with their surroundings.
That distinction is easy to miss. If someone walks through a woodland while thinking about an upcoming meeting, checking messages or talking about dinner, they are physically surrounded by nature. But their attention may be somewhere else entirely. That is why the study suggests that presence and relationship are not the same thing.
You don’t need a wilderness
There is another useful detail in the research: the intervention took place around a university campus. This wasn’t a remote mountain landscape or an untouched forest. The researchers found that nature connectedness could increase through structured engagement even within an urban environment.
That matters because access is often treated as a major barrier to nature experiences. You might not live beside a national park. You might not have a garden. You might have only a small patch of green space nearby. The findings suggest that the quality of the interaction may be more important than finding the most spectacular landscape.
A tree outside a university building can become the object of attention. A pond can prompt curiosity. A patch of grass can raise questions about the other species using it. A view can evoke a memory.
Nature connection, in other words, doesn’t necessarily require an impressive destination.
Knowledge still has a place, but it isn’t the whole experience
None of this means learning about nature is pointless.
Knowing the difference between an oak and a beech can make a walk more interesting. Recognizing a bird call can open up an entirely new layer of the landscape. Understanding an ecosystem can make its complexity easier to appreciate.
But the study challenges the idea that information alone is enough. You can know the names of dozens of species and remain emotionally detached from the place where they live. Conversely, you can know almost nothing about a landscape and still feel protective of it.
The researchers argue that organizations trying to engage people with nature should therefore look beyond approaches centered primarily on knowledge and identification. Their findings point toward experiences involving feeling, attention, personal significance, care and appreciation. That is close to the reasoning behind guided sessions such as a Forest Bathing walk, where a trained guide directs attention rather than delivering a specific lecture.
The beauty finding is more complicated than it looks
Beauty produced one of the more intriguing results. In the first two studies, aesthetic appreciation did not consistently emerge as a straightforward independent predictor of nature connectedness. Instead, the researchers found evidence that beauty could act as a mediator, helping explain how some other forms of engagement were related to feeling connected to nature.
That makes the role of beauty less superficial than it might initially sound. A beautiful landscape may not automatically make someone feel connected to nature. But stopping to appreciate it may change the way another experience is felt.
A person who notices the color of autumn leaves may begin thinking about seasonal change. Someone watching an animal may feel concern for its wellbeing. A familiar landscape might trigger memories or associations. Beauty can become an opening rather than the destination.
There is an important catch
The study is encouraging, but it doesn’t establish that these five pathways will work in exactly the same way for everyone. The authors themselves point to several limitations.
Participants across the three studies were predominantly female. The third study was also relatively small, with only 72 people, and the researchers note that they did not measure participants’ individual preferences for natural aesthetics. They also say that future research should investigate whether the effects persist over longer periods and whether each pathway works independently or whether the combination is responsible for the effect.
The study therefore isn’t a prescription for a particular kind of walk. It is better understood as evidence for a different way of thinking about nature connection. Readers who want the underlying literature behind claims like these can find further citations on the science page.
Stop trying to get something from the landscape
Perhaps the most useful implication is also the simplest. A walk in nature doesn’t have to become a lesson. It doesn’t have to involve identifying every plant. It doesn’t have to be a fitness session, a photography expedition or a search for the perfect viewpoint. Instead, try asking different questions: What am I feeling? What catches my attention? Does this place remind me of anything? What do I find beautiful? What might this landscape mean to me?
Those questions turn a landscape from scenery into something you are actually engaging with. That distinction sits at the heart of Lumber, Richardson and Sheffield’s research. Their study found that the strongest route to feeling connected to nature wasn’t simply putting people outside. It was giving them reasons to notice, feel, interpret and care.
The forest doesn’t require you to know its vocabulary before you enter. But you may need to pay attention before it starts to feel like somewhere you belong.
Act now, enrolling in our Forest Bathing Guide Training and Forest Therapy Practitioner Training. Grow together, equipping you with essential skills to lead transformative experiences in nature.
FAQ
Do you need to know the names of trees and plants to feel connected to nature?
No. A 2017 study found that identifying species wasn’t a reliable route to nature connectedness. Personal, felt experience, through contact, emotion, meaning, compassion and beauty, mattered more than knowledge.
What are the five pathways to nature connectedness identified by researchers?
Ryan Lumber, Miles Richardson and David Sheffield identified contact, emotion, meaning, compassion and beauty as the routes most closely linked to feeling connected to nature.
Does simply walking outdoors increase nature connectedness?
Not on its own, according to the study. An unstructured nature walk in the control group did not produce a significant increase. Only the walk paired with structured pathway activities did.
Can you build a connection to nature without access to wilderness?
Yes. The study’s walking experiment took place on a university campus, and structured attention increased nature connectedness there just as it could in a more dramatic landscape.
