For his most recent Sunday Book Review, Mark shows his readers his Aurelian side.No, not the sad, Berlin-bound Aurelian as depicted in Nabokov’s short story of that name; the joyous Aurelian, as in the great tradition of butterfly enthusiasts.
Earlier this month, Mark took Professor Dieter Helm’s new “Green and Prosperous Land; a Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside” as the subject for his Sunday book review.
I remember – I doubt in fact I shall ever forget – my first visit to the Simon Aspinall Wildlife Education Centre at Cley; it rendered me speechless. As an American, I am perpetually in awe of the astonishing wildlife reserves I have the privilege to visit in the UK, but this one truly was like nothing I had seen before, even among all the other jewels of the British wildlife reserves.
“It is increasingly widely recognised that nature is good for us. Most of us instinctively know this to be true and the science is gradually getting to grips with how this works; the biochemistry of a visit to the local woods and its impacts on our health and well-being. Science is slowly unravelling the mechanisms by which stress hormone levels drop, beneficial neurotransmitter levels rise and our immune system gets a nudge in the right direction.”