Earthfulness is the conscious experience of being connected with nature in daily life. When you practice Earthfulness, you do specific activities that increase your ability to experience nature-connectedness.
On this site, we list scientific studies that are specifically relevant to developing practices and methods that increase people's ability to feel connected to nature in daily life.
Below you can find some of the first articles that caught our attention:
van Heel, B.F.; van den Born, R.J.G.; Aarts, N. A (2024)
A study by the Center Connecting Humans and Nature at Radboud University shows, based on an Earthfhulness Challenge, that daily, short exercises in and with nature can help you feel more connected to nature - even in an urban environment.
Richardson & Sheffield (2017) found out that participants who wrote down 'three good things in nature' every day for five days, showed an increased connection to nature. They argue that if you do this every day, it can also permanently strengthen nature-connectedness.
A study by Hammond (2020) looks at the influence of feeding birds in relation to nature connection. The study learned that bird feeding as family activity did not have the same effect for parents and children. Nature-connectedness of parents/adults increased during the experiment, whilst it didn’t for children.
Mayer en collega’s (2008) found, based on three studies with students, that walking for 15 minutes in a natural environment or watching movies with a natural environment increases closeness to nature. For 'real nature' the effects are stronger than for virtual nature.
The effect of barefoot paths has been investigated by Rickard & White (2021), where people walked for ten minutes in a park and on a beach, with or without shoes. They concluded that afterwards, both in a park-like garden and on a beach, people walking barefoot have a higher connection to nature than people who have walked the path with shoes on.
Human “experience of nature” (EoN) is thought to be declining worldwide, reflecting troubling signs of human disconnection from nature, but this claim is poorly supported, according to Cazalis, Loreau & Barragan-Jason. Over the past decades, the locations where humans live have shifted away from the natural world and become more urban, while forest cover in cities has decreased.
