A(nother) time for nature? Situating non-human nature experiences within the emotional transitions of sight loss

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113867Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Disabling life course norms can exacerbate feelings of loss with sight impairment.

  • Care is needed in generalising benefits of nature through transitions of sight loss.

  • Social scaffolding and creativity can enable supportive nonhuman encounters.

  • A more inclusive identity politics is needed in nature-wellbeing policy & practice.

Abstract

Sight impairment is experienced by approximately 253 million people worldwide, including people of all generations, at all life course stages. Caught between past and present embodiments of the world, people often express feelings of loss with the onset of sight impairment. This paper examines the role of nonhuman nature encounters as a contingent resource amongst individuals navigating these emotional transitions. It responds to recent calls to attend to the life course in both critical disability studies and the growing body of work linking nonhuman nature relations to human wellbeing. The paper draws on findings from a qualitative study that combined in-depth narrative interviews with in situ go-along interviews to explore how 31 people with sight impairment in England describe and experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) with nature across their everyday lives and life trajectories. The data were analysed using inductive narrative thematic analysis. While nonhuman nature encounters were valued by many participants in promoting a sense of freedom, relatedness, pleasurable sensory immersion, opportunities for exploration and ‘skilling up’, this paper cautions against generalised or overly Romantic tropes of what nonhuman nature can ‘do’ through key sight loss junctures, and for whom. It highlights the value of providing timely and sensitive social scaffolding and nurturing creativity to open up meaningful opportunities to engage with nonhuman nature and to counter feelings of loss exacerbated by identity-limiting life course narratives and disability stereotypes. Informed by the stories shared by participants to chart and situate their experiences of sight loss, we call for a new identity politics within and beyond the growing movement to ‘connect’ people to nonhuman nature for wellbeing; a politics that affirms diverse forms of more-than-human embodiment, recognising how and why such relations may weave into – and indeed out of – people's varied, interdependent life course trajectories.

Introduction

Sight impairment is experienced by approximately 253 million people worldwide (Bourne et al., 2017), including people of all generations and at all stages of the life course. Some people are born with a sight condition. Their use (or not) of visual perception may remain relatively stable through the life course, or further changes may ensue, for example with the onset of new or progressive conditions. Other individuals experience sight impairment later in life, developing for example with age, through injury or through linked conditions such as diabetes. People experiencing these changes often express feelings of loss (Nyman et al., 2012), caught between past and present embodiments of the world (Macpherson, 2009). Such shifts require continuous and dynamic forms of adjustment (Murray et al., 2010), often entailing significant emotional ‘work’ (Marquès-Brocksopp, 2011).

In this paper, we examine the role of nonhuman nature encounters in supporting individuals through emotional transitions of sight loss. More-than-human nature settings (e.g. parks, gardens, woodlands, rivers, coastlines etc.) are politically and culturally celebrated in many Western contexts for their potential benefits to human wellbeing (Frumkin et al., 2017), including the promotion of physical activity, social interaction, cognitive restoration and emotional support (Hartig et al., 2014). Although implicit rather than explicit, ableism is embedded within much of this research (Bell, 2019a; Kafer, 2017), informed by a ‘cultural imaginary associated with self-sufficiency, autonomy and independence’ (Goodley et al., 2019, p.986). Ableism is particularly resonant within recent efforts to identify and distil an ‘optimal’ or ‘healthy dose’ of nature (Cox et al., 2017; Shanahan et al., 2016); a dose that risks standardising or ‘normalising’ people's rich and varied nonhuman nature encounters, in lieu of making space for a plurality of experiences situated within the embodied and relational priorities of people's everyday lives and life trajectories (Sumner et al., In press).

Countering these homogenising tendencies, we suggest value in understanding how and why nonhuman nature (material or imagined) can wane in and out of people's lives as relational configurations change in line with shifting embodiments, life stage norms and transitions. Focusing on people experiencing sight loss, we respond to recent calls to examine how critical junctures or turning points can influence opportunities for – and the emotional significance of – such nonhuman nature encounters through the life course (Douglas et al., 2017; Pearce, 2018). We draw on the findings of an in-depth qualitative study that examined how people with sight impairment in the UK describe and experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) with varied forms of everyday nature. Of the 31 participants who took part, 28 had experienced stages of sight loss through their lives (three participants were fully blind from birth).

We start by discussing the emotional shifts that can occur at critical junctures of sight loss, and the social, physical and embodied dimensions that contribute to these, before reflecting on the potential for nonhuman nature to support people through such shifts. We then introduce the Sensing Nature study, before examining how and why feelings of loss can unfold with the onset or progression of sight impairment, and the varying influence of nonhuman nature as a supportive resource through these transitions.

As noted by prominent disability activist, researcher and writer, Eli Clare (2017, p.252):

For many disabled and chronically ill people, there is a time before our particular bodily impairments, differences, dysfunctions existed. What we remember about our bodies is seductive. We yearn; we wish; we regret; we make deals”.

Such yearning amongst people with sight impairment may stem in part from the challenge of learning how to negotiate a sight-dominant world in ways that do not rely on sight (Saerberg, 2010), keeping a foot in each world without ‘belonging’ to either (Michalko, 1999). For many people, sight loss is not a linear journey, but rather ‘a series of changes and challenges’ (RNIB, 2015, p.5), which require constant and repeated adjustment and adaptation. A pervasive sense of fear can dominate during the early stages of sight loss (Rudman and Durdle, 2008). This may include a fear of embodied harm through not being able to ‘read’ everyday environments in non-visual ways, and a fear of ‘not being able to interact in their world in ways that supported personally valued qualities associated with one's sense of self and lifestyle’ (2008, pp.111–112).

Qualities of worldly interaction that are personally valued are often shaped by collective social norms and cultural values that reinforce sighted modes of perception as a desirable ‘standard’, with deviations from this standard framed as somehow inferior or inadequate (Bolt, 2019). Feelings of loss with the onset of sight impairment, and a reluctance to accept a ‘devalued identity of being blind’ (Nyman et al., 2012, p.975), demonstrate the ‘ontological damage done to disabled people whilst living in a society that veers from not recognising disabled people as valued members of society to conceptualising disability solely in terms of deficit and lack’ (Goodley et al., 2018, p.208). Dominant social and cultural norms can ‘affectively box people in’ (2018, p.200), internalising negative understandings of what they can be and do through life with sight impairment (Reeve, 2002). Barriers to doing include the disabling physical and social qualities of everyday contexts, as well as entrenched barriers to being; that is, barriers that foreclose or delimit perceptions of ‘a life worth living’ (Fritsch, 2015, p.51).

Biomedical models of disability typically lodge the ‘emotional distress’ of disability in individual body-minds (Clare, 2015), while social models foreground the disabling (and emotionally debilitating) role of exclusionary environments, social norms, policies and practices (Thomas, 2007). Both approaches emphasise the collective experiences of disabled people in society, albeit in different ways (Priestley, 2014). Yet there are risks in over-coding or over-simplifying this collective experience given the varied ways in which people come to be affected by impairment and by disabling societies (Priestley, 2003). Instead, there is a need to witness how ‘different personal histories come tangling into our collective one’ (Clare, 2015, p.117). In particular, to explore how shifting temporal and socio-spatial geographies of impairment onset and progression through the life course may shape experiences of disability, emotionally and practically.

Informed by linear life course norms perpetuated by the ‘unmarked human subject’, disabled lives are often deemed ‘out of time’ (Rice et al., 2017, p.216). Narratives that centralise disabled lives can ‘reclaim and redefine the concept of an ordinary life, and of normality in the life course progression’ (Priestly, 2001, p.247), foregrounding the ‘vagaries and volatilities of human lives, embodiments and relationships’ (Rice et al., 2017, p.223). They can encourage a move beyond able/disabled binaries to understand how bodily capacities are always contingent and emplaced, shaped in and through relationships forged with other people, technology, material resources, and nonhuman life (Hall and Wilton, 2017). We explore such narratives in this paper in the context of people's shifting encounters with nonhuman nature through the onset/progression of sight impairment.

The potential for time spent with nonhuman nature to promote positive emotional, psychological and physiological transitions has been the focus of cross-disciplinary research for many years (Frumkin et al., 2017). However, as noted by Brown (2017, p.307), ‘the bodies of green space users are often invoked in environment-health studies as little more than vessels for eyes that look effortlessly across outdoor spaces in ways that seem to lead to psychological wellbeing’. As such, there is growing interest in the role of more sensuous nonhuman nature encounters in nurturing positive emotional transformations, tracing new ways of feeling and emphasising the affective importance of haptic experience and the whole-body tactility of moving through diverse outdoor terrains (Spinney, 2006). For example, the sensorial pleasures of immersion whilst swimming and scuba diving (Phoenix and Orr, 2014; Straughan, 2012) have been described as a ‘daily hard reset’ from the emotional demands of everyday life (Throsby, 2013, p.15). Similarly, a ‘quest to feel’ underpinned the mobile encounters described by mountain bikers and walkers in Brown's (2017) study in Scotland. These participants discussed a sense of pleasurable renewal as the sensory hierarchies of the body shifted from visual to haptic, with the unpredictable upland and lowland terrains allowing them to ‘play’ with their kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and vestibular senses, feeling alive as they ‘feel with’ the material environment. Brown (2017, p.310) suggests the bodily jolts encountered whilst negotiating this rugged terrain both interrupt and reset detrimental bodily rhythms such as ‘the constant looping of negative thoughts’, precluding unwanted cognitive intrusion as consciousness forcibly shifts from mind to body.

Opportunities for these experiences can shift over time as the body learns new technical skills and sensory capacities, negotiating ever more complex, multi-textured and lively terrains and rhythms (Brown, 2017; Throsby, 2013). Reflecting such layerings, Foley (2017, p.48) examines how repeated engagement in open-air swimming practices can foster an embodied and emotional ‘therapeutic accretion’. A relatively small but growing body of literature examining nonhuman nature experiences amongst people with sight impairment (Macpherson, 2008, 2009; Petty, 2016) suggests the onset of impairment may reconfigure such experiences; prompting a sense of loss and/or a potential re-layering of skills and sensory attunements as alternative sensations and meanings come to resonate in the context of altered life circumstances. On the one hand, an enhanced sense of embodied vulnerability and fear of injury can create patterns of spatio-temporal avoidance within wider moves towards physical and emotional safekeeping. This response was articulated by a visually impaired participant within Burns, Watson & Paterson's (2013, p.1067) study of disability and forest access: ‘being outside is a challenge to your confidence, it takes a brass neck to put yourself in that position’. Similarly, visually impaired participants in Griffin's (2015) study of physical activity in later life explained how obstacles such as tree branches, roots, unanticipated steps and slopes led to facial injuries, jarred backs and diminished bodily confidence, ultimately resulting in withdrawal from nature-based settings altogether. Concerns of these textural obstacles, together with stiles and uneven ground, were echoed in Macpherson's (2008, 2009) study of visually impaired walkers in the Peak and Lake Districts. Participants highlighted how visual impairment forces a heightened sensory awareness of the body in space – a necessary privileging of the haptic – as attention is directed to the placing of the feet in space rather than more relaxing forms of aesthetic landscape immersion.

On the other hand, Macpherson's study also demonstrates positive emotional transformations amongst walkers as shared sensory experiences evoked infectious affective atmospheres characterised by laughter and companionship. The humour and imagination of the group, made possible by their affective dispositions to each other and to their specific sensory worlds, transformed potentially anxiety-fuelled nature encounters into opportunities for positive intercorporeal connection (Macpherson, 2008). Building on this work, Bell (2019a, b; 2020) demonstrates how sensitive nature encounters can promote feelings of freedom from ableism amongst people with sight impairment, alongside opportunities for curiosity and exploration, for pleasurable sensory immersion, positive more-than-human relatedness, and ‘skilling up’. A shift in focus from what cannot be seen to the cultivation of new sensory knowledges, changing the details one pays attention to (Petty, 2016), can help to maintain meaningful connections with nonhuman nature in the context of sight loss, developing new strategies of perception and navigation in line with one's shifting worldly embodiments (Cella, 2017).

Although Macpherson (2009, p.1049) recognises the role of people's ‘embodied past’ in shaping their ‘embodied present’, studies in this area have yet to situate people's experiences of nonhuman nature within their sight loss (or wider life) trajectories. Recognising the importance of better attending to dis/ableist life course norms and expectations within critical disability studies (Priestley, 2001, 2003, 2014), this paper foregrounds the varying significance of nonhuman nature encounters through key life course junctures, including diverse temporalities of sight loss transition. It asks, for example, at what life course stages might nonhuman nature support or ease the emotional work involved in transitions of sight loss? When is nature's unpredictability or unevenness too daunting, overwhelming or ‘out of time’ in relation to life's wider demands and activities? Such insights are important if we are to maximise the transformative potential of nonhuman nature, moving beyond generalised ‘doses’ of nature that do not necessarily align with people's life circumstances or biographical experiences.

Section snippets

Sensing Nature: methods

This paper draws on the findings of an in-depth qualitative study, Sensing Nature, which examined how people with sight impairment in the UK describe and experience a sense of wellbeing (or otherwise) with diverse types of nature during the life course. The study was guided by four research questions: (a) What is ‘nature’ to people with diverse forms of sight impairment? (b) What types of encounters promote a sense of wellbeing and meaningful connection with nature? (c) To what extent, if at

Findings and discussion

As noted by prominent disability scholar, Alison Kafer (2017, p.218)

“Loss is a topic disabled people are typically reluctant to discuss, and for good reason. Disability is all too often read exclusively in such terms, with bitterness, pity and tragedy being the dominant registers through which contemporary US culture understands the experiences of disabled people”.

Kafer continues, calling for disability studies that ‘reckon’ with loss and limitation in and with nonhuman nature, whilst bringing

Concluding remarks

Critical disability studies encourage us ‘to start with disability but never end with it: disability is the space from which to think through a host of political, theoretical and practical issues that are relevant to all’ (Goodley, 2016, p.157). In this paper, we have started with the disabling societal norms and relations that can shape feelings of loss with the onset and progression of sight impairment (Kafer, 2017). Foregrounding the detailed narratives of three illustrative,

Author contribution

Sarah Bell: conceptualisation; methodology; analysis; investigation; writing – original and revised drafts; project administration; funding acquisition, Ronan Foley: writing – reviewing and editing.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to the brilliant study participants for sharing their time and their experiences; to the environmental and sight support sector organisations who have shaped the study; to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the Sensing Nature study through their Future Research Leaders fellowship scheme (Grant Number ES/N015851/1); to Dr Sarah Bell's fellowship mentor, Professor Catherine Leyshon for all her support throughout; and to the peer reviewers for their valuable

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