La Gran Bretagna è una delle nazioni meno “connesse alla natura” al mondo, con il Nepal in testa

Well yes, because most of the “nature'” in this country is privately owned and not necessarily accessible, and a lot of it isn’t all that natural in the scheme of things.

I think one factor is a lot of our spiritual and religious customs that were linked to pur seasons and land were eradicated by the spread of Christianity.

Some have been assimilated by the church but we are detached from nature and seasons in our nation’s spiritual practices.

Customs such as practiced by Druids or pagans are marginalised.

On top of that we have high population density and urbanisation with little funding and investment into urban green spaces or nature.

A lack of growing space and also spaces for gardens in many towns and cities is an other factor.

Finally the Greenbelt constricts growth and protects private estates and land and increases urban density

I’m sorry but putting Ireland, Spain, and Canada in the bottom ten immediately paints this study as absolute tosh

The article does not cllearly define “nature connectedness”. Googling it suggests it is fairly meaningless, so this is all drivel.

This is because most of our land and waterways have been packaged and parcelled up and placed in private ownership. This started in 1066 and continued via various acts of Inclosure/Enclosure.

The wealthy clawed more and more of the commoners’ land over the years; land the people used as subsistence and land they used for access until only a few paths remained.

Some of these remaining paths were also removed following the implementation of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. Whilst this did give limited public Access, the process of mapping every path was too complex for the government’s surveyors so they handed it to local Authorities and ultimately Parish councils to decide which paths should be entered onto a Definitive map.

This map would legally show which paths the public had a right of way over. Except there were a lot of landowners on Parish Councils at the time, and why would you add a path crossing your own land?

Hence many that you can see on County Series maps (freely available on the National Library of Scotland maps England too) were not recorded on the Definitive map.

So we only have access to very limited countryside along these few paths, many of which are not maintained by landowners or they are purposefully blocked.

Free access to the countryside, like they have in Scotland, or many of the Nordic countries, would make people more connected to nature.

Yes but this also goes way beyond wealth and land hoarders. We’re addicted to consumerism which is wrecking the environment. We have one of the jewels of the earth with our own native orca population but we’ve never sold that. Instead, we let Thatcher pollute our seas with micoplastics so now the orca can’t breed and will be extinct within my lifetime. We kill foxes and rats seeing them as vermin, often poisoning the land as we do so. Not just culture wars, we’ve imported America’s hysteria around dogs whenever they exist in public. To have a bland yard, people put plastic down instead of glass, scalp their actual grass, or use pesticides to get rid of yet more vital creatures in our ecosystem. Labour add fuel to the fire – campaigning harder against protected newts than actual tax dodgers. Our culture is also wildly unhinged when anybody raises these issues – defending violence against Just Stop Oil who are peaceful protesters and often pensioners, but where is this energy towards the fascists now walking our streets and chanting violent hatred against asylum seekers?

We live in a 100% curated environment in the UK. We don’t have any genuine wilderness or wild places.

Our country is like a very well maintained lawn that has a few places where wild flowers grow.

The study’s methodology is deeply flawed, particularly in its ranking of Japan among the world’s least “nature-connected” nations. Japan is over 68% forested (one of the highest proportions in the developed world) and has an extensive system of national parks and satoyama landscapes integrating human life and biodiversity. Concepts like *shinrin-yoku* (forest bathing), seasonal observances such as *hanami* and *momijigari* and the animist foundations of Shintō all reflect an enduring cultural intimacy with nature. Yet, because the study relies on a handful of self-reported psychological questions about feeling “part of nature,” it misreads this cultural embeddedness as disconnection. The result reveals more about how survey instruments fail across languages and contexts than about any genuine distinction between Japanese society and the natural world.