Reasons to be cheerful

JUST for a change, folks, this is Good News Week. For those of us lucky enough to live in the Yorkshire Dales, it is – officially – time to thank our lucky stars, as I shall explain later.

These are the findings of not one but five highly respected but very different bodies.

A widespread scientific poll commissioned by Natural England and the Forestry Commission has just shown that merely visiting the countryside is good for people’s mental health. So for us lucky lot living here, the benefits are virtually incalculable even though, from time to time, there are irritations and threats.

According to the report – cumbersomely entitled Monitoring of Engagement with the Natural Environment (MENE): Wellbeing and the natural environment – the highest levels of happiness were found in people who regularly visit the great outdoors more than once a week, as well as those who spend time gardening.

More than 3,500 people were surveyed for the study, which looked at how people use the natural environment and how often. Participants were also asked about their general feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

It found that out of those questioned, individuals who spent more time outdoors had a more positive assessment of their mental wellbeing.

“This wide-ranging survey adds to the growing body of evidence showing that the natural environment has a significant role to play in improving our mental well-being, “said Dave Stone, deputy chief scientist at Natural England. “A survey of this scale, demonstrating such a striking profile of the mental wellbeing of those using the outdoors on a regular basis, is worth taking account of.”

Now I have something of a reputation for taking many scientific studies with a barrow load of salt because many of them have an axe to grind for political or economic reasons: far too many are actually commissioned by commercial interests which makes their findings suspect.

And I suppose Natural England has a need to boost the value of the great outdoors under a Government seeking to cut costs wherever they can (that boast of being “the greenest Government ever” looks increasingly threadbare as time goes by). But this report also has the support of the National Union of Farmers, which can often be even more grumpy than me.

Yet the union has dubbed the report “reasons to be cheerful” and for once in a while I am in full agreement.

To be otherwise would be self-denying, as someone who spent his childhood in the countryside, then twenty odd years working in a highly stressful job in major cities with all their noise, traffic and filth.

Whether or not my mental health was under threat I don’t know (some readers might have doubts) but even then we always lived in the countryside and commuted.

The day we could both work and live here was one of the greatest days of our lives Those, however, are mere personal reflections, with no scientific backing. For that, I will turn to a surprising subject studied by another of my favourite charities, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) which a couple of years back launched a study into what, at first, seems to have little impact on human health: light pollution.

Working with the British Astronomical Society, CPRE drew up a national map of the worst areas of light pollution in the UK and came up with the disturbing analysis that in heavily urbanized areas – where people can rarely see a few stars and virtually none of the Milky Way – light pollution interrupted people’s sleep patterns and therefore their general health.

But what I liked best about that so-called Dark Skies survey was that one of the areas of England with the least amount of artificial light pollution – and therefore one of the best views of the Milky Way – was ...the Yorkshire Dales!

So here we have Natural England, the Forestry Commission, the National Union of Farmers, the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the British Astronomical Society all saying – indeed proving – that the countryside is the healthiest place to live.

So don’t take my words for it, we in the Dales should be thanking our lucky stars.

* Please note, the views in this column are John’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of the Craven Herald