Losing Eden

Have you ever noticed how a walk in a park can calm your mind or how a glimpse of sunlight through the trees can lift your mood? In Losing Eden, journalist and nature writer Lucy Jones argues that these moments are far more than poetic coincidences—they are evidence of our deep biological and emotional connection to the natural world. Jones contends that this connection, once instinctive and omnipresent, has been eroded by modern life, and that this growing disconnection is making us ill—psychologically, emotionally, and even physically.

Jones makes the case that our alienation from nature is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. Drawing on decades of scientific research across immunology, neuroscience, psychology, and ecology, she demonstrates how contact with the natural world supports our immune system, sharpens our cognition, and provides existential grounding. Yet, paradoxically, as urbanization spreads and climate change accelerates, we are spending less time in nature than any previous generation.

The Central Argument: Losing Eden, Losing Ourselves

Jones’s central claim is simple but profound: our physical and mental health depend on our relationship with nature. She explores what happens when that relationship is severed and how reconnecting to the living world might heal both us and our planet. Drawing from her own story of addiction and recovery, she shows how returning to natural spaces helped rebuild her sense of meaning and peace. The “Eden” of the title represents not the biblical paradise, but the biological equilibrium humans once shared with ecosystems. To lose Eden is to lose that reciprocity—and ourselves in the process.

In the early chapters, Jones revisits scientific studies on soil bacteria like Mycobacterium vaccae that boost serotonin and modulate stress responses. She explores Edward O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia—the innate human affinity for nature—and the concept of “attention restoration” proposed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, which shows that exposure to wild environments restores our ability to focus. Later chapters examine how gardening, forest bathing, and green spaces can treat depression and anxiety. Each discovery reinforces what ancient wisdom long knew: being in nature is vital for mental health.

Why This Book Matters Now

Why does all this matter? Because, as Jones reminds us, our modern lifestyles are designed to exclude nature. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. Many children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates, switch natural play for screens, and grow up unfamiliar with birds, trees, and soil. This, Jones argues, is not only a cultural loss but a biological emergency. Without everyday contact with nature—what ecologist Robert Pyle called “the extinction of experience”—we risk losing empathy for the living world and, consequently, the motivation to protect it.

Yet Losing Eden is not just a lament; it’s a manifesto for reconnection. Jones introduces scientists, psychotherapists, and community leaders who are reimagining how we think about health and happiness. She describes ecotherapists who work outdoors, doctors prescribing forest walks in the Scottish isles, and prisoners whose behavior and mood improve when exposed to greenery. In Philadelphia, entire neighborhoods become safer and calmer after vacant lots are turned into green oases. Each story reflects Jones’s conviction that nature is more than a backdrop—it’s a co-therapist, a teacher, and a mirror of our inner lives.

A Blend of Science, Story, and Soul

Jones writes with both the precision of a journalist and the lyricism of a memoirist. She weaves together hard data with deeply personal experiences—planting potatoes while recovering from postpartum depression, discovering the scent of geosmin after rain, or watching her baby play in the dirt. These scenes bring intimacy to scientific findings, transforming them from abstract theory into lived truth. She also examines the growing field of ecopsychology, which explores the emotional consequences of environmental loss, and deep ecology, a philosophy that calls for seeing humans as part of—not apart from—the web of life.

The Broader Vision

Ultimately, Losing Eden asks you to consider what kind of future you want to build. If the “Eden” we’ve lost is the living world that sustains and shapes us, then regaining it requires more than individual self-care—it demands cultural change. Jones connects the environmental crisis to social justice, showing that poorer communities, deprived of parks and green areas, bear the heaviest mental health burdens. Her concept of “equigenesis,” inspired by Richard Mitchell’s research, suggests that access to nature can reduce health inequality by buffering the stresses of poverty. Nature, in this sense, is not a luxury but a right.

By blending science, spirituality, and activism, Jones offers a hopeful vision: a society that restores its relationship with soil, animals, forests, and rivers might restore its sanity too. Across its chapters, she argues that connecting to nature is not escapism—it’s reclamation. Through stories of resilience, from Svalbard’s seed vaults to Detroit’s urban farms, she asks us to “fall back in love” with the Earth while there is still time.

In the pages that follow, you’ll explore how microbes in the soil influence our mood, how green spaces transform urban life, how awe resets our nervous systems, and how grief for the planet points toward renewal. Together, these insights form a mind-body ecology—an invitation to rebuild the sacred bond between people and the planet. As Jones writes in her conclusion, “We would be happier and healthier with a richer, fuller, less destructive relationship with the rest of nature.”

Imagine a world where antidepressants grow under your fingernails as you garden. Lucy Jones begins Losing Eden with this revelation: the soil itself can lift our mood. When she moves from London’s concrete bubble to a rural home with a garden, she finds happiness blossoming alongside her radishes and squash. What feels like simple joy from fresh air and physical activity, she learns, is partly biochemical—the invisible work of microbes that humans evolved alongside.

The Antidepressant Soil Bacterium

The star of this microscopic drama is Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil bacterium first studied by oncologist Mary O’Brien in the early 2000s. O’Brien discovered that lung cancer patients who received injections of the bacterium reported improved mood, even when survival rates didn’t change. Neuroscientist Christopher Lowry later found that mice injected with M. vaccae activated serotonin-producing neurons in the brain’s dorsal raphe nucleus—the same region targeted by antidepressants. These mice were calmer, less anxious, and even enjoyed swimming in lab tests. The conclusion? Soil microbes don’t just strengthen immunity; they support emotional resilience.

This finding echoes what people instinctively know: working with soil makes us feel alive. By inhaling and touching microbial-rich earth, we interact with organisms that train our immune systems to regulate inflammation—what researchers like Graham Rook call our “old friends.” Chronic inflammation, rampant in urban life due to stress, pollution, and poor sleep, has now been linked to depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular illness. Reducing that simmering inflammation may be the biological bridge between gardening and good mental health.

The Symbiotic Human Body

Inside and on our bodies, microbial cells number at least as many as human ones. In your mouth, eyes, skin, and especially gut, these communities—your microbiome—govern digestion, immunity, and even mood through the gut-brain axis. Jones paints this as a kind of intimate ecosystem: we are walking rainforests teeming with life. But the biodiversity of this inner world has diminished as we sterilize our environments, avoid dirt, and abuse antibiotics. This loss mirrors the depletion of ecosystems outside us.

Studies comparing rural and urban populations make the link sharp. Members of agricultural or hunter-gatherer communities, like the Amish, have more diverse microbiota and lower rates of allergies, autoimmune conditions, and—likely—depression. Their children play with animals, inhale barn dust, and develop resilient immune systems. In a striking comparison, Amish children had far less asthma and inflammation than Hutterite children, whose farms are industrial and sanitized. Dirt, it turns out, is medicine.

Soil, Spores, and Spore People

Rook, one of Jones’s key interviewees, notes that a third of gut organisms form spores that survive for thousands of years in the environment. When we breathe, walk, or garden, these spores find their way back home—to our bodies. “Some of them might have colonized my gut from Julius Caesar’s time,” Rook jokes. This view reframes humanity: not as separate from nature, but as a continuum of biological exchange. What we call “health” depends on contact with the living land.

The implications stretch across generations. Reduced exposure to microbes begins at birth—through sanitized delivery wards, cesarean births, bottle-feeding, and indoor lifestyles. Studies show that babies born near green spaces or raised around animals have stronger immune regulation and fewer psychiatric problems later in life. It seems that mental health starts in the soil beneath our cribs.

Playing in the Dirt

Jones’s findings challenge modern paranoia about germs. When her baby eats handfuls of soil, she realizes that ancient instincts may be at play. Every vertebrate species “eats dirt,” Rook assures her, a behavior called geophagy. It’s not only harmless—it’s necessary to replenish microbial diversity. By contrast, our obsession with antibacterial products, polished foods, and closed spaces deprives us of the ecological interactions our minds evolved to rely on.

Ultimately, this chapter grounds Jones’s thesis—literally—in the earth. She concludes that reconnecting with soil reconnects us with ourselves. Every handful of dirt teems with allies that taught our immune systems not to overreact, soothed our inflammation, and perhaps even balanced our moods long before Prozac existed. As Jones writes after inhaling the scent of moss and peat: “I felt happy, upbeat, less stressed, and generally more positive.” Science, it turns out, has caught up with what gardeners, farmers, and children have known for centuries.

Why does a view of trees from a hospital window speed up recovery? Why do we keep pets, plant gardens, and decorate our homes with landscapes? Edward O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia—the idea that humans have an inborn love for life—anchors much of Jones’s argument. We evolved surrounded by living systems, and our brains still crave those sensory cues of survival: water, foliage, birdsong, and open horizons.

From Evolution to Emotion

Wilson theorized that the human mind, shaped by millennia on African savannahs, still prefers environments that resemble ancestral habitats—open spaces with scattered trees and nearby water. Jones weaves this with the “prospect-refuge theory” of geographer Jay Appleton, who said we like places where we can see without being seen. Even newborns show a preference for “biological motion” over mechanical motion. In essence, being drawn to lakes, pets, or greenery isn’t cultural—it’s genetic memory.

Science Meets Scenery

The classic proof came in 1984 when environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich studied 46 gallbladder surgery patients in a Pennsylvania hospital. Those whose windows faced trees recovered faster and required fewer painkillers than those facing a brick wall. Since then, hundreds of studies have confirmed nature’s restorative effects: exposure to green or blue spaces reduces anxiety, improves mood, enhances cognitive function, and even lengthens lifespan. (This continues in work by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, whose Attention Restoration Theory argues that nature recharges concentration.)

Jones reminds readers that these are not fringe findings; they’ve shaped architecture and healthcare design worldwide. Doctors in Shetland now prescribe walks along coastal trails. Park Rx initiatives in the U.S. formally link time outdoors with reduced chronic disease risk. Nature, once considered a luxury, is emerging as a legitimate medical tool.

When Biophilia Fades

But what happens when biophilia is stifled? In a phenomenon Wilson called “the extinction of experience,” each generation encounters less wildness, leading to apathy toward conservation. Urban isolation, screen dependency, and pollution erode this affinity. Yet, as Wilson told Jones personally before his death, this trait won’t vanish easily: it’s embedded across hundreds of genes. The danger isn’t genetic loss but environmental deprivation—our surroundings no longer activate our love of life.

Biophilia, then, explains why reconnecting with nature feels like “coming home.” Jones blends science with memoir: her recovery from addiction mirrored the act of rewilding. Each birdcall and blade of grass was a step toward coherence. The human longing for nature isn’t nostalgia—it’s neurobiology reminding us where we belong.

Think of your favorite childhood memory—was it indoors or outside? For most adults, it’s climbing trees, catching frogs, or playing in the dirt. Yet studies show that modern children spend less time outdoors than prison inmates. Jones calls this “a crisis of childhood ecology”—a developmental deprivation with lifelong consequences.

Nature-Deficit Disorder

Building on Richard Louv’s “nature-deficit disorder,” Jones cites research showing that outdoor exposure improves children’s concentration, confidence, and emotional regulation. In contrast, constant indoor confinement feeds stress, obesity, and attention disorders. In the U.K., 75 percent of children spend less than an hour outdoors daily, while playground greenery is in decline. Meanwhile, screen time has doubled, shrinking imagination and resilience.

Cultural Shifts and Language Loss

Jones mourns more than physical absence; she documents a linguistic extinction as well. When the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced words like “acorn” and “kingfisher” with “broadband” and “cut and paste,” it symbolized cultural amnesia. Without names for plants, trees, and animals, emotional connection withers. Jay Griffiths calls this loss “the death of soul medicine,” and Jones agrees: language mediates love; love fosters care.

The Promise of Forest Schools

Yet she finds hope in the Forest School movement—outdoor education programs in which children learn math, teamwork, and self-confidence by engaging with nature. She observes kindergartens where toddlers build fires, whittle wood, and play in the rain. Teachers report fewer behavioral problems and greater emotional resilience. In Tower Hamlets, London, inner-city forest schools bring marginalized children into green spaces for the first time. Their fear of dirt gives way to awe, curiosity, and joy.

Jones connects these findings to social justice: green spaces are scarce in deprived neighborhoods and rare for ethnic minorities. Without equitable access, she warns, we’re breeding not only inequality but ecological illiteracy. To save both children and the environment, we must rewild education—and let the next generation touch soil again.

Why do your shoulders drop when you walk into a forest? Why does the sight of the sea bring calm? In one of her most fascinating sections, Jones explores how contact with the natural world regulates the nervous system, balances hormones, and even strengthens immune function. Our bodies, she writes, are tuned to the Earth’s rhythms—the pulse of waves, the whisper of leaves, the cycle of light and dark.

The Science of Awe

Psychologist Dacher Keltner calls awe a “collective emotion” that makes us kinder and healthier. Experiments show that witnessing natural wonders—rainbows, mountains, rivers—reduces inflammatory markers like cytokines and boosts mood. Veterans rafting through wilderness report 30 percent reductions in PTSD symptoms. Awe shuts down the brain’s default self-focused network, dissolving ego and stress. (A similar insight appears in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, which ties presence to transcendence.)

Attention Restoration and Stress Reduction

Rachel and Stephen Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory explains why nature resets focus. Soft fascination—watching clouds, ripples, or birds—restores mental energy depleted by modern multitasking. In Japan, Shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing” lowers cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure while boosting immune cells like natural killer cells. Simply walking in a forest for two hours can improve mood and immunity for a month.

The Body’s Resonance with Nature

Biophysicist Richard Taylor found that fractal patterns—recurring natural geometries like ferns and waves—induce relaxed brainwaves. Our eyes, themselves fractal, “resonate” with organic complexity, producing alpha waves associated with calm alertness. Similarly, exposure to natural sounds (wind, birdsong) activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s “rest and digest” mode, improving cardiovascular and mental health.

Even smell and light matter: cedar’s aroma lowers heart rate; sunlight synchronizes the circadian clock, while chronic artificial light exposure correlates with depression. Cold-water immersion releases endorphins and negative ions that elevate mood—explaining the euphoria of wild swimmers across Britain’s lakes and rivers.

Jones’s message is clear: our physiology evolved for an outdoor life. Stress, anxiety, and insomnia aren’t simply psychological—they’re symptoms of ecological mismatch. To heal, she urges, step outside and let nature recalibrate your internal instruments.

If you’ve ever calmed your nerves by tending a plant, you’ve practiced what therapists now call ecotherapy. Jones traces the rise of this movement—from garden projects in mental hospitals to modern “green prescriptions.” Plants, she insists, can be allies in recovery, teachers in patience, and mirrors for resilience.

Nature as Therapy

The term “ecotherapy” was coined by pastoral psychologist Howard Clinebell in the 1990s to describe healing through environmental connection. Jones visits thriving examples across the U.K. including the charity Thrive, where people with depression, dementia, or disabilities garden weekly under horticultural therapists. Patients set small goals—planting seeds, harvesting vegetables—and reclaim agency through nurturing growth. As one participant tells Jones, “I saw it as a seed, it’s a journey… If seeds can do that, hopefully I can too.”

A Garden’s Quiet Power

Jones details how working with soil and cycles of life restores a sense of control and meaning. Gardening stimulates memory in dementia patients, supports social interaction, and gently reawakens pleasure (countering the anhedonia of depression). For those in secure psychiatric units, growing plants becomes an act of reconnection and trust. One patient tells her, “When you step into this garden, you understand the full sensory impact of being outside.”

Lessons from Plants

Beyond their beauty, plants embody lessons: patience, adaptation, death, and renewal. Jones recounts how one woman learned acceptance by watching plants thrive in harsh conditions—“they can’t move, so they adapt.” Another found healing in the metaphor of seeds sprouting after trauma. Like humans, they grow toward light. Ecotherapy, in this view, is a practice of humble belonging rather than mastery.

By reuniting psychology with ecology, Jones challenges the Cartesian split between mind and matter. Healing individuals without healing the land, she argues, is incomplete. The wisdom of plants—steadiness, interdependence, transformation—offers a model for both.

What if access to nature could narrow the gap between rich and poor? This is the daring question behind “equigenesis,” the concept Jones explores through the research of Professor Richard Mitchell at the University of Glasgow. It suggests that green spaces level the playing field by buffering stress, improving mental health, and reducing mortality—especially for disadvantaged communities.

Evidence from Chicago to Glasgow

Mitchell’s studies build on earlier work by researchers Frances Kuo and William Sullivan, who in 1990s Chicago found that residents in public housing with trees outside their windows reported better mental health, stronger social ties, and even lower crime rates. In Philadelphia, greening vacant lots led to significant drops in gun violence and depression. Nature, in these contexts, doesn’t just beautify—it transforms behavior and wellbeing.

Mitchell’s landmark study, using U.K. mortality records, found that income-related health inequalities were far smaller in greener neighborhoods. The greener the area, the less pronounced the link between poverty and disease. Access to parks and woodlands acted as a social equalizer, offering restorative conditions otherwise reserved for the wealthy.

Green Access and Environmental Justice

Jones underscores that environmental inequality often mirrors social inequality. Poorer neighborhoods have fewer parks, less tree canopy, and higher pollution—denying residents the health benefits of nature. Communities of color in the U.S. and U.K. experience systemic exclusion from green spaces, compounded by fears of discrimination. This makes “nature connection” both a public health and civil rights issue.

Jones visits projects like Inspero in Basingstoke, where community gardens bring children and adults from low-income backgrounds together to grow food, share stories, and regain confidence. These spaces reconnect people not only with soil but with each other, revealing nature’s capacity to knit fragmented societies back together.

If, as Mitchell’s data implies, nature truly is equigenic, then green policy is social policy. Parks, trees, and gardens are not luxuries—they are instruments of justice. Jones concludes that access to nature should be recognized as a fundamental human right, essential for both planetary and personal wellbeing.

What happens to our minds when the natural world we love disappears? Jones calls this “ecological grief”—the sorrow of witnessing environmental destruction in real time. She travels from Sheffield, where residents fight to save beloved street trees, to Poland’s Białowieża Forest, where ancient woodlands fall to chainsaws. Each story echoes a global trauma: watching the living Earth unravel.

Grieving the Living World

Inspired by biologist Glenn Albrecht’s word “solastalgia”—the pain of environmental loss at home—Jones shows how deforestation, extinction, and climate change harm mental health. Activists report rage and despair, while communities suffer identity loss when landscapes vanish. Inuit elders, she notes, feel existential displacement as Arctic ice melts: “If there is no more sea ice, how can we be people of the sea ice?”

From Despair to Action

Jones argues that grief, though painful, can be transformative. Like personal bereavement, collective mourning can spark protection and restoration. She draws hope from environmental movements—Extinction Rebellion, youth climate strikes—that channel anguish into activism. Healing, she suggests, comes not from denial but from acknowledgment and care.

Ecological grief is, paradoxically, a sign of empathy intact. To feel sorrow for a disappearing species or a felled tree is to reaffirm our bond with life itself. “What’s disordered,” Jones writes, “is not the grief but the world causing it.” By re-engaging rather than retreating, we turn pain into purpose.

In her final chapters, Jones dares to imagine a rebalanced future—a “new dyad” where humans and nature coexist within mutual healing. She begins in Svalbard, where the Global Seed Vault stores millions of plant species in the permafrost as insurance against catastrophe. For her, this vault symbolizes both human foresight and tragedy: the need to freeze nature rather than protect it in situ. It is a monument to our separation—and a plea for reconnection.

Technonature and Its Limits

Jones examines our growing reliance on virtual substitutes for nature—VR forests, holographic landscapes, robotic gardens. Studies show these may reduce stress temporarily but cannot match the sensory and microbial richness of real ecosystems. “Technonature,” she warns, risks becoming a placebo that dulls our longing for the living world.

Biophilic Cities and Wild Law

Yet innovation can coexist with restoration. She highlights biophilic urban design—seen in Detroit’s urban farms or Singapore’s tree-filled hospital, Khoo Teck Puat—where integration of foliage, water, and light fosters community and wellbeing. She also explores “Wild Law,” a legal movement granting rights of personhood to natural entities like New Zealand’s Whanganui River and Bolivia’s “Mother Earth.” Recognizing nature as a legal subject, not an object, reframes humans as guardians rather than owners.

A New Moral Ecology

To achieve this shift, Jones calls for redefining “public interest” away from economic growth toward planetary health. Fresh air, she insists, should be a human right. She envisions cities filled with rooftop gardens, communal orchards, and laws protecting silence, pollinators, and ancient trees. The future of mental health lies in ecological harmony.

Ultimately, Jones’s closing image is intimate: a grandmother and granddaughter watching swifts return to the sky—symbols of resilience and renewal. The message is clear: reconnecting with nature heals not only our bodies and communities but our lineage and imagination. By “falling back in love” with the Earth, we may yet find our way home to Eden.