Increasingly, people are becoming less likely to have direct contact with nature (natural environments and their associated wildlife) in their everyday lives. Over 20 years ago, Robert M Pyle termed this ongoing alienation the “extinction of experience”, but the phenomenon has continued to receive surprisingly limited attention. Here, we present current understanding of the extinction of experience, with particular emphasis on its causes and consequences, and suggest future research directions. Our review illustrates that the loss of interaction with nature not only diminishes a wide range of benefits relating to health and well‐being, but also discourages positive emotions, attitudes, and behavior with regard to the environment, implying a cycle of disaffection toward nature. Such serious implications highlight the importance of reconnecting people with nature, as well as focusing research and public policy on addressing and improving awareness of the extinction of experience.

With ongoing environmental degradation at local, regional, and global scales, people's accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered. In the absence of past information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today's global environmental issues. Yet our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete. We provide an overview of the nature and extent of SBS and propose a conceptual framework for understanding its causes, consequences, and implications. We suggest that there are several self‐reinforcing feedback loops that allow the consequences of SBS to further accelerate SBS through progressive environmental degradation. Such negative implications highlight the urgent need to dedicate considerable effort to preventing and ultimately reversing SBS.

There is increasing evidence that gardening provides substantial human health benefits. However, no formal statistical assessment has been conducted to test this assertion. Here, we present the results of a meta-analysis of research examining the effects of gardening, including horticultural therapy, on health. We performed a literature search to collect studies that compared health outcomes in control (before participating in gardening or non-gardeners) and treatment groups (after participating in gardening or gardeners) in January 2016. The mean difference in health outcomes between the two groups was calculated for each study, and then the weighted effect size determined both across all and sets of subgroup studies. Twenty-two case studies (published after 2001) were included in the meta-analysis, which comprised 76 comparisons between control and treatment groups. Most studies came from the United States, followed by Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Studies reported a wide range of health outcomes, such as reductions in depression, anxiety, and body mass index, as well as increases in life satisfaction, quality of life, and sense of community. Meta-analytic estimates showed a significant positive effect of gardening on the health outcomes both for all and sets of subgroup studies, whilst effect sizes differed among eight subgroups. Although Egger's test indicated the presence of publication bias, significant positive effects of gardening remained after adjusting for this using trim and fill analysis. This study has provided robust evidence for the positive effects of gardening on health. A regular dose of gardening can improve public health.

The COVID‐19 pandemic and its global response have resulted in unprecedented and rapid changes to most people’s day‐to‐day lives. To slow the spread of the virus, governments have implemented the practice of physical distancing (“social distancing”), which includes isolation within the home with limited time spent outdoors. During this extraordinary time, nature around the home may play a key role in mitigating against adverse mental health outcomes due to the pandemic and the measures taken to address it. To assess whether this is the case, we conducted an online questionnaire survey (n = 3,000) in Tokyo, Japan, to quantify the association between five mental health outcomes (depression, life satisfaction, subjective happiness, self‐esteem, and loneliness) and two measures of nature experiences (frequency of greenspace use and green view through windows from home). Accounting for sociodemographic and lifestyle variables, we found that the frequency of greenspace use and the existence of green window views from within the home was associated with increased levels of self‐esteem, life satisfaction, and subjective happiness and decreased levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Our findings suggest that a regular dose of nature can contribute to the improvement of a wide range of mental health outcomes. With the recent escalation in the prevalence of mental health disorders, and the possible negative impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on public mental health, our findings have major implications for policy, suggesting that urban nature has great potential to be used as a “nature‐based solution” for improved public health.

The direct interactions between people and nature are critically important in many ways, with growing attention particularly on their impacts on human health and wellbeing (both positive and negative), on people's attitudes and behaviour towards nature, and on the benefits and hazards to wildlife. A growing evidence base is accelerating the understanding of different forms that these direct human–nature interactions take, novel analyses are revealing the importance of the opportunity and orientation of individual people as key drivers of these interactions, and methodological developments are increasingly making apparent their spatial, temporal and socio-economic dynamics. Here, we provide a roadmap of these advances and identify key, often interdisciplinary, research challenges that remain to be met. We identified several key challenges, including the need to characterize individual people's nature interactions through their life course, to determine in a comparable fashion how these interactions vary across much more diverse geographical, cultural and socio-economic contexts that have been explored to date, and to quantify how the relative contributions of people's opportunity and orientation vary in shaping their nature interactions. A robust research effort, guided by a focus on such unanswered questions, has the potential to yield high-impact insights into the fundamental nature of human–nature interactions and contribute to developing strategies for their appropriate management.

With an ever-increasing urban population, promoting public health and well-being in towns and cities is a major challenge. Previous research has suggested that participating in allotment gardening delivers a wide range of health benefits. However, evidence from quantitative analyses is still scarce. Here, we quantify the effects, if any, of participating in allotment gardening on physical, psychological and social health. A questionnaire survey of 332 people was performed in Tokyo, Japan. We compared five self-reported health outcomes between allotment gardeners and non-gardener controls: perceived general health, subjective health complaints, body mass index (BMI), mental health and social cohesion. Accounting for socio-demographic and lifestyle variables, regression models revealed that allotment gardeners, compared to non-gardeners, reported better perceived general health, subjective health complaints, mental health and social cohesion. BMI did not differ between gardeners and non-gardeners. Neither frequency nor duration of gardening significantly influenced reported health outcomes. Our results highlight that regular gardening on allotment sites is associated with improved physical, psychological and social health. With the recent escalation in the prevalence of chronic diseases, and associated healthcare costs, this study has a major implication for policy, as it suggests that urban allotments have great potential for preventative healthcare.