The Sensing Nature website has been launched. It will keep us up to date with the two-year ESRC funded project started in November 2016 by Dr Sarah Bell. Focussing on individuals living with visual impairment, the project will explore the sensory and emotional experiences we have in nature.
 
https://sensing-nature.com/

​In a recent blog, Dr Bell draws attention to the work of Karis Petty, an anthropologist at the University of Sussex who was taught to 'echolate' by a participant in a research project she was running. Dr Bell suggests that 'echolocation' is an activity we could all try whenever we are quiet in nature. Rather than listening with our ears we can begin to 'listen' with our whole being. 
 
https://sensing-nature.com/news/silent-spaces

​At Holt Wood we are working towards sustainable cultivation and harvest of medicinal trees and shrubs. Our project is based on a two acre site in North Devon, UK which was previously a conifer plantation.

The Woodland Trust are calling for a Charter for Trees, Woods and People. Their campaign for 2016 will start with the value to nature (Spring), then to health, mental wellbeing and fitness (Summer) and then to the economy and livelihoods (Autumn). The trust’s campaign will be a series of incremental messages, backed up with studies, reports and expert articles, increasing people’s understanding that trees are hugely valuable.
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www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/publications/2014/05/lifes-better-with-trees/

Conversations about healing trees by Colin Porter

Having been trained at Kew in the 1980’s form of scientific rationality, the more left-field ideas of natural harmony or sustainability found at places like Findhorn or the Centre for Alernative Technology in North Wales should have passed me by. The majority of people I worked with seemed to be reassured by reasoned argument and, as far as I was concerned, scientific rationality provided a reliable platform for the day job. But our day jobs were only part of the story.