Nature Antidepressant

Bill Gates is a perfect model of this new breed of the world's hugely rich who know they will never have a material need they cannot meet, but who are reaching out for ways of satisfying other, deeper needs, longings that can only be met in some kind of contact with nature.

This need is not to be confused with mere desire or passing fancy: it is infinitely more fundamental. Ian McCallum, a South African psychiatrist, is deadly serious when he claims that wilderness is the finest antidepressant he knows. It's the best cure, he says, for some forms of chronic depression. He believes a sense of who we are is linked with a deep historical memory of landscape, and that some low-grade depression is a type of "homesickness" for these landscapes. "This isn't to say," he warns, "that wilderness is a cure for all depressions or that people who live in wild areas don't get depressed, but it does help to add another dimension to the notion of what a holiday could mean - a journey to landscapes that feed the soul."

In North America, they have found that contact with the natural world can have a profound effect on some of life's apparently most hopeless cases. Prisoners who are put to work on organic farms are statistically much more likely afterwards to make meaningful lives for themselves than those who are put in front of computers.

McCallum is not, of course, the first to have noticed that man can become ill simply because he is in an environment that is meaningless to him or that does not feed some of his essential needs. "Chief Seatle, the mythical Amerindian poet laureate, so to speak, put it another way. 'What is a man without the beasts? If all the beasts were to die, man would die of a great loneliness." This separation of man and wilderness is relatively new in our history. What we once inhabited, we have now diminished to remote islands used mainly for recreation, which we visit from time to time. This is as abnormal as it is pervasive. No wonder, then, that those who have the means are feeling an increasing sense of urgency about getting some of it for themselves. This is partly because, as Mark Twain said of land, "they aren't making any more of it", but more importantly its because increasing it contains large tracts of non-industrialised land.

Ted Turner, famous world wide for being the ex-husband of Jane Fonda, and number 47 on the Farbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, with a fortune estimated at $2-1 billion, has been buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of some of the wildest land. He is now the largest landowner in America, owning about 1-3 million acres spread across 14 ranches through five different states.

Turner intends to leave most of it in its natural, undeveloped state. Over some of it, he's putting back herds of the bison that once filled the plains, and is encouraging grizzlies and wolves on his Montana ranch. At the same time, he's increasing the habitat for elk and deer, and restocking and reclaiming trout streams.

But wilderness has also captured the imagination of the younger set. There's Zac Goldsmith, for example, giving most of his time, and one hesitates to guess how much of his money, to matters ecological, spending most of his days on his uncle Teddy Goldsmith's journal, The Ecologist. But in his spare time he races down to Devon, where he has bought land that he's turned into an organic farm and around which he's planted "thousands and thousands of indigenous English trees".

"I'm still awestruck by nature and wilderness," he says. "Their complexity is almost limitless and our understanding of them very limited. And yet we dare to tamper with them. Almost every sustainable society has tried to live their lives according to natural laws. We are the first to try to adapt the laws of nature to suit our own ends. We're busy dismantling nature's building blocks — an unprecedented arrogance -and from this all our problems stem. It's no wonder that almost all the great religions were founded by people going into wildernesses. You can't help being aware that you are part of something much, much greater than man."

The general sentiment goes something like this: “You have a nice flat, but in the end it’s like a golden cage, you feel like a parrot. You go into the wilderness for a holiday, where you feel part of something awesome. It makes you feel better about living the rest of the year as you want. Poor old George Harrison, the thinking Beatle put it this way: “ You write a few songs, make some money, and become famous. Is this all there is? The Beatle’s brush with Indian transcendentalism was an attempt to fill the gap between ‘money’ and ‘the significance of being alive’

In my own experience I have never known anybody who experiences living with wildlife, albeit on a field course with open-ended personal research projects to fulfill, who has not emerge as a changed person. Contact with nature is about being in touch, probably for the first time, with intangible values that stir the emotions. They have an intrinsic power to influence happiness and make life worth living in a grand sense. The experience is hard to define, and difficult to measure or explain. Yet they are attached to the most precious things in all our lives.

Those who live in Africa and North America have seen wilderness disappear at a terrifying rate and are horribly aware that we are so to speak in the last chance saloon. It’s this sense or urgency that imbues the matter of wilderness with such poignancy and which render it so precious. It’s this that has made it the object not only of desire, but also of passionate concern for many of those who have the means to do something about it. Sadly, experiencing the thrill of day-to-day contact with wildlife, albeit from a park bench or the Serengeti, is not available to all. It may be a luxury to sit on a park bench, or purchase thousands of acres of the African savannah, but it is also the old time necessity of human existence.