Sara L. Warber, MD

Scholar Project 

Dreams of Nature, Health, and a Balanced Life: An Exploration of Women’s Art, Writing, and Living Experience

The health of humans and the health of nature are inextricably intertwined. Yet we are not necessarily motivated to act in accordance with this fundamental truth. Recent news has highlighted concerns about climate change in the wake of the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, released by the UN. Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of Working Group II, commented, “The decisions we make today are critical in ensuring a safe and sustainable world for everyone, both now and in the future. The next few years are probably the most important in our history.” In the United States, the 2018 National Climate Assessment emphasized both the economic and health consequences of climate change.

Thomas Berry writing in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future in 1999, and summarized in the Great Teaching Work of Thomas Berry (Schenck, 2015) suggests that:

We need new means of cultivating ourselves if we are to live differently on the Earth. Developing and telling the new story is one component of establishing such cultivation. … [This new story is found in] myth, ritual, and dream; liturgy, poetry, and music; in wisdom literature and renewed philosophies and theologies; in the plastic arts of all kinds – painting, sculpture, architecture.

The wisdom of women was identified by Berry as essential to the way forward in reshaping our relationship with the Earth. Women have a particular interest in health, often being the decision makers within families about how and when health care is accessed. In addition, women have often been identified with the nurturing aspect of nature, i.e., Mother Nature. And in some Native American cultures, women have a role in the protection of nature, especially water. Berry notes that “…women seem to be more prominent in active doing, especially in the immediate work of preserving a viable planet for future generations.”

As a Nova Institute Scholar, Sara L. Warber, MD is undertaking powerful work to inspire others to imagine anew our human ways of living, such that we have a template for transformative action to support an expanded view of health that includes both humans and the environment. To examine these challenges, Dr. Warber and a women’s collaborative of academics, arts professionals and forest therapists will undertake a mixed methods study of women’s textual data, visual art and lived experiences in nature. The study will include overlapping phases, with iterative integration and dissemination occurring throughout the project, culminating in an art exhibit coordinated with provocative community engagements.

The initial phase will explore and synthesize written expression of women’s perceptions of nature and health. Women artists, organizations, and groups working at the intersection of art, nature, and health will be identified.  The next phase will move the exploration of this intersection into museums with rich repositories of women’s art.

The lived experience phase will engage diverse groups of women on excursions into nature utilizing two innovative ways of connecting people and nature. Forest therapy is an intervention to promote human health through brief sensory experiences in nature. Music of Plants uses biofeedback and electronic music technology to translate plant electrochemical changes into sound. Documentation and evaluation will include in-depth interviews, expressive art, brief self-report scales on spiritual wellbeing and nature engagement, as well as photography and videography.

Themes identified through the first three phases will be used to create a curatorial vision for an art installation/exhibit with companion experiential and socially provocative community art events. The goal of the exhibit and events is to inspire and support ordinary women and men to become people ready to speak and act for the health of both humans and nature. Imagery has power to touch emotions – beyond our mind – and we need to engage more than our minds in order to act in the world.