Science has shown nature is good for us. Nature sceptic Greg Bruce puts that science to the test.
Four years ago, I wrote an article headlined “Against the outdoors”, which included the following line: “I hate the beach, I hate the bush. All my worst experiences have been outside. Whenever I am out in nature, I dream of being out of nature.”
But, since then, I’ve become aware of a steady accumulation of research into the benefits of nature to our physical and mental wellbeing, which has led me to rethink this stance. So, when a new company called Unyoked offered me an opportunity for a two-night stay at one of their high-end, off-grid wilderness cabins, I thought it would be a great chance to test this research, and see if it held firm in the face of my many fears and prejudices toward the natural world.
It was late Monday afternoon when I arrived at the end of the gravel road, nominally on the border between Waikato and Coromandel but, more realistically, nowhere. It had clearly been raining for some time, possibly forever, and it showed no signs of stopping.
Sitting in the boot of my family wagon, I took off the Wool Runners I’d bought at Allbirds New York, put on the gumboots I’d bought at The Warehouse Mt Wellington and donned the merino jacket I’d been given at a long-ago press junket for powerful cars aimed at men in the midst of mid-life crises.
I wasn’t especially looking forward to two nights alone with my mind. Besides being predisposed to anxiety, I had recently discovered blood in my stool, which was just the latest potentially fatal malady in an ever-growing list, including recurring headaches, uncontrollable eye twitches and incipient pains in my chest and throat. One recent evening after dinner, my wife had said: “I don’t want to talk about you dying, but I do think we should prepare for it.”
I didn’t think I was going to die during my two nights alone in the bush – not really – but at the same time I understood that decision wasn’t really up to me.
Awaiting me in the parking area were what Unyoked’s customer-facing literature laughably refers to as wheelbarrows but which were, in fact, highly engineered bespoke vehicles, built low to the ground, flat, wide, all-but untippable, custom-designed to safely and cleanly carry expensive designer luggage over rugged, muddy, terrain. The use of the word “wheelbarrow” was part of an Unyoked strategy I came to think of as “rugged-washing”: making the company’s customer base of white-collar, well-moisturised residents of city suburbs feel like they’re the main character in Man Alone.
After 5-10 minutes of pushing the “barrow” more or less straight uphill I stopped, taking great, rasping breaths and looking back admiringly at how far I’d come. Because I had been led to believe this was the middle of nowhere, I was shocked to see two people standing in front of my car, wearing raincoats with the hoods up, in the style of the murderer from I Know What You Did Last Summer. They weren’t moving. Who were they? What were they doing there? Were they following me? I knew these thoughts to be irrational, but nevertheless took a photo and saved it to the cloud, and knew I was doing it for the benefit of potential future true crime podcasters.
I added this to the steadily growing list of mortal fears I was pushing deep down inside me and carried on. I crested the rise, cut back through a stand of bush and finally emerged into a clearing that revealed not just my cabin but a view that could accurately and justifiably be described as epic.
I looked down several hundred metres of steep, thickly grassed hill and bush to the rapids of the Ohinemuri River, then hundreds of metres up the bush-covered hills on the other side, and several kilometres in either direction up and down the valley. The only sounds I could hear were the distant rushing of water and some light birdsong.
From inside the cabin, the picture window at the foot of the bed framed the view in such a way as to make it resemble a painting by one of the Dutch masters. Sitting on the bed, staring at that view, I willed something positive to happen inside me, as I had assumed would happen, based on my reading of Unyoked’s promotional literature and the interviews I’d been listening to with leading nature academics. Were the benefits of nature, I wondered, accessible from bed?
My thoughts began to drift, primarily to bad places. Rather than filling with the scientifically verified benefits of nature, my mind and body instead began filling with the medically diagnosed symptoms of anxiety. I felt the next 48 hours stretching increasingly thickly before me. I started thinking about how quickly I’d die if I were required to stay on once my groceries from Farro had run out.
I reflected on the softness city life had inflicted on me. My preferred living modalities include watching television, reading on my phone and being surrounded by people I never talk to. I take great comfort in being close to supermarkets, cafes, movie theatres, $2 shops and the other baubles of civilisation, all of which serve to drape a protective membrane over the cold realities of the natural world. But out here in the wilderness, I could see the fragility of that membrane and understood the ease with which it could dissolve as the result of disaster, war or any one of the multitude of historically regularly recurring human stupidities – at which point I might be forced to return to the wilderness, but without Unyoked’s Wiltshire cutlery, luxury linens, high-end coffee-making equipment and nightly tariff of $319 weekends/$289 weeknights.
Unable to deal any longer with the noise of my mind, I picked up the solitary novel I’d brought with me: J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K. The story was immediately and deeply depressing: a boy is born with a hare lip and without a father. He is not very bright, is sent to a boarding school for messed-up kids, has a terrible time, emerges into a broken society, his mother gets sick, a civil war starts, and they escape into the countryside, with her in a wheelbarrow. Then things really start going downhill.
That was my first hour in the wilderness.
Unyoked’s masterstroke and point of difference has been to take the natural world, tamp it down, plump it up and generally make it comfortable for those of us who prefer their natural world to come with indoor plumbing, high-end cocktails and an outdoor hot tub.
But it is also much more than that. It’s a fantasy, an ideal, a reason for hope, an inspiration, the promise of a better life. It’s an idea that’s been sculpted, shaped and polished by a team of entrepreneurs and others, presumably in a series of stand-up meetings, sprints and away days, and perfectly calibrated to appeal to the wealthy, soft city-dweller with burnout, spare cash and no idea how to identify a native tree.
The longer you spend in the Unyoked universe, the clearer it becomes how much thought has gone into every part of the experience: not just the design and provisions of the cabins but the website, the marketing emails, the signage, the Spotify playlists, and the quirky humour of the cabin’s guide books. The message is that this is the cure you’ve been looking for.
In other words, they are selling a feeling. But is a feeling something you can buy?
For dinner that night, I made burgers. I was just serving up when the smoke alarm went off. I was on the phone to my 9-year-old daughter at the time, and the noise was shockingly loud, so I stood on a footstool to wave the smoke away from the sensor but then the stool collapsed beneath me and I fell, screaming embarrassingly, hitting both the ranchslider and the foldout table, which collapsed, sending meat and potatoes flying all over the cabin.
As I lay there in a heap, food under and on and all around me, the alarm still screeching, I heard my daughter’s voice over speakerphone: “Daddy?” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, darling,” I said, because I didn’t want her to worry about my grazed leg.
That night, I slept poorly and had an intense dream, in which I was trying to visit my dad, who, in real life, died five years ago. I drove around for ages but couldn’t find his house.
When I woke the next morning, I went outside and tried to meditate but the wind was howling and I became fixated on it. I began to think about where it had been, and where it was going, and how it tied the world together, linking me directly and intimately to events in places that usually seemed so distant – specifically refugee camps, slums, war zones and other sites of suffering. The same wind that was blowing through my hair might soon be blowing through the hair of someone who had just been shot or diagnosed with cancer or had lost a child. The world felt suddenly and dramatically smaller and my place in it both more privileged and precarious.
As they so often do these days, my thoughts drifted to the looming catastrophe of AI, but suddenly the thought arose in me: “Who cares about AI?” Here, in the wilderness, away from all humanity, surrounded by plants, which some scientists now believe to be sentient, my great and furious interest in AI struck me, with great force, as ridiculous. I pictured the faces of all the grand and important entrepreneurs and thought leaders proclaiming the world-shaking qualities of ChatGPT and related technologies, and I saw them as absurd.
It wasn’t just AI. The longer I sat there, the more I began to find the humour in the whole human project of trying to do and make and achieve and find meaning in everything. Out here, it just seemed not to matter.
Early that afternoon, I was reading on my bed when I received a text from my wife, telling me the rain in Auckland was torrential and had been for some time. Soon after, she texted again, saying she’d received a Civil Defence warning. She asked if I was safe and I told her I was, but then she googled images of my cabin and assured me I wasn’t. I made a joke about dying. She wrote back: “Please don’t make a joke. This is a dangerous situation.”
She made me call the Unyoked people to ask if I was going to die. They said I probably wouldn’t, but that if I felt like I might, I should feel free to leave. I looked at the clay bank behind the cabin and the hill in front of it, and tried to calculate the possibility and likely outcome of a landslide, but it was beyond me. I decided to stay, mostly out of apathy.
At 2pm, the heavens opened. The rain was quickly so heavy it was coming through the shower vent. I looked out the kitchen window at the water pouring down the hill and began to imagine a rich variety of catastrophic scenarios and ways in which I might survive them.
I sat there reading my book and intermittently looking out the window, checking my surroundings, worrying about the security of the cabin’s footing, wondering if apathy had been the wrong approach. Then, after an hour or so, the rain began to ease and I texted my wife to say it looked like I was going to survive. She replied: “That’s the final nail in your coffin.”
The rain became heavy again around 7pm that night, but the cabin again held firm and I awoke on my second and final morning reasonably sure I was going to make it out of the bush with little more than a graze. But had it improved my life? Was it worth the $319 weekends/$289 weeknights the writing of this article was preventing me from having to pay for it?
As I brushed my teeth that morning, I realised for the first time that there was no mirror in the cabin. In a place where nothing has been left to chance, I knew this was significant, but what did it mean? One possibility: whoever we are or want to be, we won’t find it by repeatedly looking at ourselves.
I went for a bush walk, not because I wanted to but because I thought I should. Fearing the bush, and more specifically wētā, I anticipated not going very far but, as so often happens when we start something scary, I carried on. After a few minutes, though, the path tapered off and I began to worry about getting lost and spending several days having to drink my own urine. As so often happens when we start something scary, I gave up.
When I arrived back at the cabin, I assumed I would have a nice warm shower and a coffee, and was therefore surprised to find myself walking straight past it, heading down the hill, over some grassland and toward the river.
After a few minutes, I heard a barking screech and looked up to see a large hawk or suchlike, circling high above me. I felt ashamed and insulted that, even from such a distance, I could so easily and accurately be identified as prey, but I also felt oddly comforted by the thought I might have been put on this earth for no greater reason than to provide food for a bird.
A thick stand of bush remained between me and the river. I didn’t especially want to enter it and can’t say for sure why I did. Once in it, I thought several times about turning back, but, for some reason I can’t articulate, I didn’t, and after a few minutes, I was through to the other side.
Across a rocky outcrop, I could see the rushing river. Thrilled by its power and beauty and by the fact I had it all to myself, I clambered over the rocks and sat at the edge of the rapids. I had arrived in the very heart of nature. I was exhilarated. Here, finally, were the positive feelings that I’d been promised, that I’d been waiting and hoping for.
I sat there, taking it all in, allowing the emotions to fill my mind and body. Then, after a minute or two, the thought struck me with great force: now what?