Nature Connection Without “Nature”: Pedagogies of Multimodal Attention in Ruderal Environments

Nature connection is good for well-being

Nature connection improves physical, mental, and social health (Capaldi, Dopko, & Zelenski, 2014; Frumkin, 2012; Hartig, Mitchell, de Vries, & Frumkin, 2014; Ray, Franz, Jarrett, & Pickett, 2021). While some benefits appear to be more physical (Ong, Cintron, & Fuligni, 2024) or social (Arbuthnott, 2023), some seem more clearly cognitive. For example, having a plant on your desk can improve performance on an attention-demanding task (Berman et al., 2008). Why is nature good for us? I briefly cover four arguments. First, the biophilia hypothesis claims that affiliation with life is a biological drive in human beings (Kellert & Wilson, 1993; Wilson, 1984). For reasons ranging from practical (utilitarian; we depend on nature for survival), to spiritual (aesthetic, moral; nature is awe-inspiring), and even to phobic (negative, fearful, see Kahn, 1999), a strong connection to nature serves an adaptive function. Second, connection to nature is a form of connection to place. The topophilia hypothesis (Sampson, 2012) argues that humans form affective attachments to place for evolutionary advantage. Thus, connection to nature may foster well-being because it means connection to place (typically mediated through connection to people: Country et al., 2016; Country, Gordon, & Spillman, 2021; Sampson, 2012). This principle is a cornerstone of environmental, outdoor, place-based, and community-engaged education, discussed further below.

Third, nature connection provides an antidote to negative cognition and emotion arising from living in ecological collapse. Humans are experiencing increasing levels of depression, anxiety, anger, grief, and despair as a result of the climate crisis (Cunsolo et al., 2020; Duggan, Haddaway, & Badullovich, 2021; Hamilton, 2022; Hickman et al., 2021; Pihkala, 2022; Ramadan et al., 2023; Wray, 2022). These are healthy responses, but our society does not make space for experiencing them, instead encouraging us to deny and avoid these feelings (Macy, 1995; Macy & Brown, 2022). Nature connection offers ways to dwell with negative feelings (Bratman, Mehta, et al., 2024; Hamilton, 2022; Kimmerer, 2017), moving us out of paralysis and toward action.

Thus far, effects have been framed in an extractive way—nature benefits humans. But contact with nature does more than boost well-being, it starts a cycle of reconnection that leads to understanding ourselves as part of a reciprocal system, which leads to a desire for care, and a desire to act (Country et al., 2021; Greenwood, 2013; Nisbet & Zelenski, 2011; Shipley et al., 2022). This process is centered on love (see Parrill, 2024, for a synthesis) and may be particularly crucial in addressing climate grief and despair.

I have covered three arguments so far: Humans are driven to connect to nature and place for adaptive reasons, and connection to nature reawakens relationality. The fourth argument is the most central to this study: Nature connection changes how we use attention.

Attention explains some benefits of connection to nature

In cognitive science, “attention” is a set of processes, routines, and brain networks that allow us to function adaptively (see Pashler, 1999; Posner, 2004). Attention is thought to have a limited capacity (we can only attend so much at once, and we become fatigued after directing attention closely). ART argues that nature has qualities that encourage us to disengage from effortful aspects of managing attention (Berman et al., 2008; Hopman et al., 2021; Kaplan, 1995; McDonnell & Strayer, 2024; Van Hedger et al., 2019). Specifically, alerting and orienting to stimuli are not as effortful as consciously selecting stimuli for further processing and suppressing nonrelevant stimuli (McDonnell & Strayer, 2024; Ohly et al., 2016). ART argues that nature allows people to rest these dimensions of attention (sometimes also called directed attention or executive function). Features of natural spaces that allow for replenishment include “getting away,” detailed stimuli; and a sense of extent (Kaplan, 1995, p. 174). In ART paradigms, participants often perform tests designed to measure directed attention, then experience nature exposure or some other experience, then repeat the tasks to determine whether attention has been restored. To control for physical exertion while manipulating nature exposure, participants might walk in spaces with more nature or with less (Berman et al., 2008). Some work explores whether nature exposure should be scaffolded (e.g., through guided mediation, Ray et al., 2021) or whether participants are best left to experience nature as they choose (Richardson & Sheffield, 2015). The neural underpinnings of behavioral results are also of interest. Nature may cause us to engage the default mode network, a set of brain structures/circuits involved in internal mind wandering (Hopman et al., 2021). A recent study using event-related potentials (a noninvasive brain imaging technique that can be used during outdoor activities) provides some evidence that being in nature does shift brain activity to the default mode network (McDonnell & Strayer, 2024). This finding connects ART to mindfulness research.

Attention impacts emotion regulation, which impacts well-being

In addition to being implicated in the benefits of nature exposure, the default mode network is also invoked to explain the benefits of activities that fall under the broad label of “mindfulness” (Tripathi, Devaney, Lazar, & Somers, 2024). Mindfulness involves attending to the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. Many scholars make a connection between nature exposure and mindfulness (Amel et al., 2009; Ray et al., 2021; Richardson & Sheffield, 2015). What seems to be common between nature connection and mindfulness is that both sets of practices improve our ability to switch between brain networks, including between the default mode network and the dorsal attention network (a set of structures/circuits involved in more effortful, “task positive” uses of attention, Hopman et al., 2021; Tripathi et al., 2024). Thus, benefits may emerge as we get better at moving between more and less directed forms of attention. Because these networks also include the amygdala (involved in emotion processing) and the prefrontal cortex (involved in decision-making, empathy, impulse control, etc.), people who engage in mindfulness practices can show enhanced ability to regulate emotion (Raugh, Berglund, & Strauss, 2025). Better emotion regulation is associated with better mental health (Guassi Moreira et al., 2024) and is one of the pathways through which nature may improve well-being (Bratman, Mehta, et al., 2024). In short, feeling more connected to nature helps us regulate attention and emotion (Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal, & Dolliver, 2009; Ray et al., 2021).

Expanding the definition of attention: Attention economies and ecologies

The claim that nature connection redeploys attention can be found in other bodies of work, including those arguing that capitalist societies have co-opted attention in ways that sever our relationship to nature (Bombaerts et al., 2024; Citton, 2019). These spaces sometimes use the phrase “attention economy” to describe the sense that our attention has been commodified (Doyle & Roda, 2019), is no longer an internal matter of choice, but a resource to be captured for profit (Chomanski, 2023). This line of thinking argues that commodified attention deliberately encourages us not to attend to ecological features of our environments, as part of longstanding efforts to separate us from the nonhuman, and encourage apathy and complicity in ecological collapse (Citton, 2019). Scholarship on attention in the classroom intersects with this argument, specifically studies on the negative effects of digital devices in classrooms (Katz & Lambert, 2016; Ravizza, Uitvlugt, & Fenn, 2017; Redner, Lang, & Brandt, 2020; Redner & Hirst, 2021). Given that many ART studies involve university students with heavy rates of digital device usage, nature connection may provide a particularly important contrast from the learning mode in which participants spend the bulk of their time.

An economic framing of attention notices not just that attention is a resource, but also that efforts to escape commodification can become revenue streams. Attending to nature can be framed as an individual wellness practice, sidestepping moral and ethical questions, in ways parallel to the ways that mindfulness practices have been commodified and separated from their full cultural complexity (Bombaerts et al., 2024). Commodification can be spotted in the “false generosity,” in Freire’s (2005, p. 44) sense, of nature meditation/mindfulness apps, “focus” settings, even “minimalist” phones, a generosity that keeps the problem alive for profit. Concern around attention economies can therefore feed this economic system (Immerwahr, 2025). The extractive impulse can also be felt in digital nature research, which often asks whether the benefits of nature can be achieved via tablet apps (Moreno, Baker, Varey, & Hinze-Pifer, 2018) or mixed reality simulations (Crossan & Salmoni, 2021; Kahn, Severson, & Ruckert, 2009; Li et al., 2021). Among other issues (see Kahn et al., 2009), this research can miss the fact that mutual benefit is at the heart of nature connection. The humanistic lens helps here because it frames attention as something much more complex and ecological (Brittan & Raz, 2024; Citton, 2017; Doyle & Roda, 2019; Patrizio, 2021). Attention ecologies conceive attention as collective, political, philosophical, historical, and as leading to mutual rather than anthropocentric benefit: Attentive nature connection keeps us in relationship with ecosystems.

Summary of “attention” in the attention–nature connection relationship

Work on attention to nature from a cognitive-scientific perspective provides empirical support for the benefits of nature, provides neuroscientific explanations, and uses language that is comfortable for social and natural sciences. As a falsifiable scientific theory, it has necessarily focused on experimental methods that can test predictions. ART faces criticism from within psychology: The neural indices of “restoration” are unclear, as are the precise qualities of nature that produce effects, and it is not clear that attention is the only dimension of cognition involved (see Joye & Dewitte, 2018, for a critical review). There has also been something of a focus on visual attention (e.g., studies asking participants to look at pictures of nature; Berman et al., 2008), in part because visual attention is one of the best-understood brain systems in the literature on attention (Posner, 2004). Because these bodies of research typically use a reductive lens, they define nature as a place one must go to, away from human systems, ignoring the fact that humans are nature, and human systems are inescapable. And the work defines attention as individual and psychological, when it is in fact collective and cultural. In part for these reasons, ART research can have an extractive flavor (nature is a source of wellness for humans), disregarding the mutuality of human–nonhuman interactions. I turn now to the use of ruderal spaces as a means of opening a much wider conversation about nature in the attention–nature connection relationship.

The pedagogy of nature connection

In writing about multimodal attention to ruderal sites, some reference must be made to the large bodies of work on pedagogical practices taking place in nature. The observation that getting out of formal learning spaces and into nature is good for learning and well-being has deep roots in environmental education (Carter & Simmons, 2010; Gough, 2013; Hart, 2019), outdoor education (Thomas, Dyment, & Prince, 2021), place-based learning (Greenwood, 2013; Gruenewald, 2003; Hernandez Gonzalez, 2023; Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022; Wooltorton et al., 2020), community-engaged learning (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; Willness, Boakye-Danquah, & Nichols, 2023), and ecological psychology (e.g., Mace, Woody, & Berg, 2012). A summary of some disciplinary interconnections can be found in Gruenewald (2003).

Many of these lines of research share a focus on attachment to place as an explanatory mechanism for improvements in both well-being (Sampson, 2012) and learning (Boley et al., 2021; Kudryavtsev et al., 2012; Masterson et al., 2017; Shipley et al., 2022; Watts et al., 2022). Without going too far afield, at least two dimensions of this complex picture require mention. First, children form deep attachments to places (Kahn, 1997, 2002; Pyle, 2002), and these childhood relationships with nature are known to impact well-being and behavior (see Passmore et al., 2021 for a recent summary). Second, to suggest that learning happens independent of place is to adopt a cultural framework that many see as deeply problematic. This point is made particularly carefully in works that understand nature connection as part of the project of environmental justice and decolonization (Cachelin & Nicolosi, 2022; Greenwood, 2013; Gruenewald, 2003; Hernandez Gonzalez, 2023; Hernandez, Meisner, Jacobs, & Rabinowitz, 2022; Hernandez & Vogt, 2020; Thomas et al., 2021; Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022; Willness et al., 2023; Wooltorton et al., 2020). From the perspective often labeled Western science (e.g., Hernandez & Vogt, 2020), there is nothing odd about acquiring knowledge that is divorced from the history of a place; knowledge is generic and neutral. From decolonial perspectives, to accept this assumption is to accept and perpetuate a history of violence against both humans and nonhumans (Greenwood, 2013; Hernandez & Vogt, 2020; Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022; Whyte, 2018; Wooltorton et al., 2020). Instead, environmental justice and decolonial frameworks understand place to be inseparable from person (Country et al., 2021; Country et al., 2016). Such accounts, often centering Indigenous ways of knowing, understand connection to nature as relational rather than extractive and therefore as leading to a sense of obligation, love, and mutual benefit (Country et al., 2021).

Decolonial arguments are central to the point I wish to make about ruderal spaces. Pedagogical exercises in nature connection that, for example, take theater students to an arboretum (Dudek & Toomey Zimmerman, 2023) do important work, and are place-based. At the same time, exercises that relegate nature to botanical gardens, nature preserves, etc., may have the effect of reifying the separation between human and nature, and upholding colonial frameworks. Nature as “pristine wilderness” is a contested idea centered on purity, with roots in racist beliefs about non-White (Black/African and particularly Indigenous) peoples (Anthony, 1995; Hernandez, 2022; Mcphie & Clarke, 2021; Nadasdy, 2005). Enter ruderal systems. Ruderal systems are urban wildspace communities that arise after human disturbance (Kennedy, 2022). These landscapes are biologically diverse and fascinating spaces of human/nonhuman history and coexistence (Threlfall & Kendal, 2018; Tsing, 2012). As Stoetzer (2018) argues, “…humans and nonhumans have the capacity to create openings for new collaborations that challenge contemporary multiculturalist agendas and their invocations of nature by actually reworking the fallout from past exclusion, exploitation, or violence” (p. 313).

In my experience, learners initially approach such places from a deficit perspective, seeing only the violence (weeds, trash, graffiti). Sometimes their instinct is to fix. During exercises in such spaces, I have witnessed participants start to pick up trash, crush spotted lanternflies underfoot, and rip plants out of the earth. This deficit lens may arise from the same source as the savior mentality with which outsiders sometimes approach a human community: A paternalistic desire to help without knowing existing resources and wisdom. A slogan developed by an Aboriginal activist group in Queensland in the 1970s (often attributed to Lilla Watson, who used it when describing the work, e.g., Watson, 2004) applies here: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” When we meet a ruderal space with a mindset of mutual liberation, we are more likely to have the patience to learn about the community, to see the inherent beauty of the place, and to experience a sense of love that is at the heart of the real benefits of attentiveness.

The capacity of ruderal spaces to redirect attention

Returning to the central topic, attention: Ruderal systems can facilitate two attentional—and therefore conceptual—shifts in ways that parks and gardens may not. First, a shift from nature as a place we go to and toward nature as a community we are part of, and second, a shift away from nature connection as an extractive experience and toward an understanding that nonhuman systems benefit from human attentiveness. Stoetzer (2018) expresses this possibility as follows:

Using the space described at the beginning of this study, I suggest how this might work concretely. Visitors’ attention might first be drawn to the raised beds. Visitors might be pleased by the effort to beautify and create a community space, by which they envision human gatherings. Visitors might start thinking about adding to the project (a picnic table, a mural!). However, as they attend more deeply to plant, animal, mineral, and insect life, using auditory, olfactory, tactile, gustatory attention, they might notice a marked contrast in the biodiversity and flourishing of the spontaneous community, and the failure to thrive in the human-planned community. They might start to wonder what would happen to the birds in the thicket or the bees in the knotweed if someone decided to clean the place up. They might arrive at a realization: By abandoning space, humans have provided opportunities for nonhuman flourishing. Human participation might begin not by changing space, but by changing attentive engagement with it. This shift in attention, the logic goes, awakens a sense of ethical and moral obligation. This is no longer a place to fix, but a community to slowly, respectfully, become part of. Arresting the urge to immediately reshape avoids one pitfall, what Stoetzer (2018) calls an “…anesthetic greening that glosses over past and present racisms” (p. 307), and what Hernandez and Vogt (2020) call the “garden gaze” (p. 42). The pause allows for a realization that, while the beauty of the place awakens love, the goal is not to see the space as entirely beautiful, blinding oneself to the reality of toxicity. As Stoetzer (2018) also takes care to note, these spaces “…do not adhere to national or capitalist schemes for multicultural gardening and rehabilitating nature” (p. 309). As visitors navigate the tension between beauty and violence, a series of questions may emerge, in no particular order, and often cyclically.

Summary of “nature” in the attention–nature connection relationship

It seems clear that connection to nature benefits humans, but our prototype for nature is a pristine wildspace, far removed from the spaces many of us regularly occupy. That prototype is created by histories of displacement and concepts of preservation and conservation that are not culturally neutral. Thus, while invoking decolonial frameworks may strike some readers as unnecessarily political, I argue (after the scholars cited above) that understanding place–human relationships, and the special properties of ruderal sites, cannot be done in an apolitical way. Indeed, these frameworks expand our thinking in ways that are theoretically and methodologically valuable.

Limitations

Above, I have suggested that visitors might experience and learn a range of things, drawing on observations and student reflections collected in an ecopsychology course and during nature connection exercises focused on multimodal, ecological attention to ruderal spaces (Parrill, 2025). These claims can be tested using existing measures and frameworks, as I will describe below, but this study is speculative and thus limited. A second limitation is the lack of attention to individual differences in learners. Reactions and learning are as diverse as participant experiences and backgrounds, and many bodies of work point out that age and life stage (e.g., Humberstone, Cooper, & Collins, 2025; Kahn, 1997), race/ethnicity (e.g., Naiman, Stedman, & Schuldt, 2023), degree of exposure to nature (e.g., Passmore et al., 2021) all impact learning.

Future directions

Expanding how we think about both attention and nature generates a series of research questions that can be tested using ART frameworks in combination with the many self-report measures developed in ecological psychology. These questions may lead to understandings of nature connection and place attachment that are more ecologically valid and culturally grounded. To begin with, it is likely that prototypical nature (parks, gardens, forests) is more restorative than urban wildspaces. Certain features are either not present in the latter (such as “getting away”, Kaplan, 1995, p. 174) or are in conflict with research on what humans like in landscapes, such as disturbance (Tveit, Ode, & Fry, 2006) and naturalness (Dale, Powell, Stern, & Garst, 2020). One criticism of ART is the lack of precision about these features (Joye & Dewitte, 2018), and while experimental control presents massive methodological obstacles, these are testable questions. The urban walks that serve as experimental controls in some ART studies are likely full of nature, and as Kahn and Weiss (2017) point out, experience calibrates features like getting away and naturalness. Scaffolding that increases attentive engagement with urban nature might close the gap between the benefits observed in different sites. Similarly, to what extent is auditory attention involved in restoration? For example, does a botanical garden with loud traffic noise lead to less restoration of directed attention compared to a quiet urban wildspace? Can scaffolding related to gustatory and olfactory attention compensate in spaces where visual and auditory attention do not provide features thought to maximize restorativeness?

In addition, a vast array of self-report measures is in use to help us understand how individual variation shapes experience. Measures include place attachment (Boley et al., 2021), climate anxiety (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020), inclusion of self in nature (Aron, Aron, & Smollan, 1992), nature connectedness (Capaldi et al., 2014), experience with nature (Hague, Brough, Buckley, Burton, & Spedding, 2025), and many others. Without diminishing the issues with self-report measures (Neumann, Chan, Boyle, Wang, & Westbury, 2016), such instruments can be used in pre-/postexperience paradigms to assess change. For example, do differences in experience with nature predict the restoration of directed attention after visiting a ruderal site? More quantitative approaches are sometimes at odds with humanistic, ecologically valid pedagogy, but compromises are possible that generate valuable data (and existing studies provide many examples).