Influential Art

By my mid-20s, I’d finished my master in psychology, and I was working in Dublin as a health researcher. It was mostly data and statistics work staring at a screen. I was earning more than most of my friends, living the city life, going out at weekends. I had a good pension (养老金) and annual leave but it caused a lot of anxiety and worry.I was really unhappy.

I wanted to get back to feeling passionate about something so I started thinking about the things I used to love. As a child, I’d always been involved in the outdoors, and I used to love hiking but all that had stopped after secondary school. I decided to volunteer with a local youth group and within a month, I’d gone camping with them. I absolutely loved it. It was like switching on a lightbulb. This was what I’d been missing.

I started taking courses in mountain skills and wilderness first aid, and by August I was working my usual job in the week, and I was a climbing club leader at weekends. I loved connecting with nature, connecting with other people.

Through all this, I learnt about the whole field of nature-based therapies (疗法). It was the perfect fit to combine my psychology background with my passion for the outdoors. I began taking courses in wild therapy, forest bathing and ecopsychology. I left my government job and in July 2020 I launched my business Nature Therapy Ireland, which is booming now.

I’d thought I’d always live in a city but last year, I moved to Tipperary to live at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by nature. If I’m feeling stressed, I can step outside in my bare feet and stand on the grass to ground myself. In Dublin, the front door felt like a barrier—I had to have my keys, my phone, my jacket before I could even go out and find a green space. My life now is leading nature connection hikes and forest bathing walks. My salary has halved for the moment but I’ve adjusted. I’ve never looked back.

When fireworks are lit in celebration of the New Year, wild birds often experience lasting harmful effects. An international team of researchers tracked Arctic migratory(迁移的) geese as they traveled in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands over eight New Year periods to study the impacts of fireworks. Data from 347 geese showed that birds suddenly leave where they are sleeping on New Year’s Eve and fly farther away from where people are.

Geese’ lives were disturbed by the noise and flashes and these geese ended up resting two hours less and sometimes flying nonstop as far as 310 miles compared to the nights when there were no fireworks.

Geese spend their winter in Western Europe to escape extreme Arctic winters in their breeding grounds. Still, winters here are maybe not severely cold, but rather dark. As predators(食肉动物) are around in the dark, geese can only search for food in the light hours. During the night, they usually settle on small lakes to save energy and rest in relative safety. During New Year’s Eve, geese are heavily scared, as the fireworks sounds and flashing lights are unexpected to them and they view them as a threat to their life.

But their changed behavior didn’t end with the fireworks. The geese didn’t return to their original sleeping locations and spent more time searching for food to store energy for days after the celebrations ended.

The researchers hope that the findings will be used to improve fireworks management. They want to provide decision makers with real numbers to support their discussions. As already stated above, they suggest that some measures should be taken for geese to escape fireworks’ disturbance during New Year’s Eve—nationwide regulations regarding nature reserve areas and some centralization of fireworks displays, as well as lighting public fireworks in urban areas away from where the geese live.