We were halfway up the mountain, and Isabel was staring off toward the lakes in the distance, when I confessed something to her.I could see this scene was beautiful in some abstract way.But I am so cut off from enjoying this sort of thing that, to me, what it looked like, if I’m honest, was a screensaver.A lovely screensaver.I felt as if I had waited too long before pushing a key on my laptop.Isabel laughed, but it was a sad laugh.Now I feel personally responsible if you feel this is a screensaver!I feel it is my mission.She says candidly that we need a lot more research into all of them, and they overlap to some degree.The thing is that we are animals.We have been invertebrate for nearly five hundred million years now.We’ve been mammals for two hundred fifty, three hundred million years.We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts, she said to me.But we still think that depression can be cured by this conceptual layer.I think [the first answer is [more]](https://rearingmotivation.blogspot.com/2021/12/nursery-management-software-packages.html) simple.Let’s fix the physiology first.I do not think that kids or adults who are not moving, and are not in nature for a certain amount of time, can be considered fully healthy animals, she says.But there must be, she says, something deeper going on than that.So what are the other factors?As we reached this part of our conversation, I realized we were at the top of the mountain.On either side, I could see sweeping vistas.Now, Isabel said, you have screen[savers] on both sides.We’re surrounded.A chipmunk was tentatively approaching us, and it walked up to a point just a few inches from my feet.On the ground, I laid down a piece of jerky I had bought in town earlier that day.There is another theory put forward by scientists about why being in the natural world seems to lift depression for many people, Isabel said to me.Almost all animals get distressed if they are deprived of the kinds of landscape that they evolved to live in.Why, Isabel wonders, would humans be the one exception to this rule?The social scientists Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen14 worked with teams all over the world, in radically different cultures, and showed them a range of pictures of very different landscapes, from the desert to the city to the savanna.There’s something about it, they conclude, that seems to be innate.This leads to another reason Isabel thinks depressed or anxious people feel better when they get out into natural landscapes.Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner of your ego, where no air from the outside can get in.It’s something larger than yourself, Isabel said, looking around her.There’s something very deeply, animally healthy in that sensation.It’s almost like a metaphor for belonging in a grander system, she says.In Oxford, she found it easy to become depressed when she was sealed away from all this.In Congo, living with the bonobos, she found she couldn’t get depressed.The chipmunk sniffed the jerky I had laid down on the ground, looked disgusted, and scampered away.The chipmunk has excellent taste, Isabel said, looking at the packaging in horror, and started to lead me back down the mountain.Because of the way the prison was built, half the prisoners’ cells looked out over rolling farmland and trees, and half looked out onto bare brick walls.It was only when I thought about this for months, and listened again and again to the audio of my mountain trek with Isabel, that I realized something.I want to cling to it.As humans, I think we have many modern forms of captivity, she told me.Don’t be in captivity.I looked on it with terror.Isabel insisted on taking my hand and leading me out there.We want to feel alive, she said.We want it, and need it, so badly.Obviously, we were facing death, but you felt alive, right?I was not depressed.Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure FutureI had noticed something else about my depression and anxiety over the years.It often made me feel, in some peculiar way, radically shortsighted.It was as if the future vanished.As I talked with many depressed or severely anxious people, I noticed that they often described a similar sensation.I wanted to understand this apparent quirk, and once I began to dig into it, it led me to some remarkable scientific research.Not long before he died, a Native American named Chief Plenty Coups1 sat in his home on the flatlands of Montana and looked out across a landscape where once his people had roamed alongside the buffalo, and now there was nothing.Many white men had stolen Native American stories and warped them, so it took a long time to build trust between these two men.But once it was there, Chief Plenty Coup began to tell this man a story.It was about the end of the world.When he was young, he explained,2 his people had ranged across the Great Plains on horseback, and their lives had always been organized around two crucial activities.They hunted, and they prepared for the wars they fought against rival Native American tribal groups in their area.Everything they did was designed to prepare them for one of these two organizing poles of life.If you cooked a meal, it was in preparation for the hunt, or for the fight.If you conducted the ceremonial Sun Dance, it was to ask for strength in the hunt, or in the fight.He described its many rules.As you traveled across the plains, you would mark out your own tribe’s territory by planting a coupstick in the ground.The most admirable thing you could do, in the Crow culture, was to plant and defend the coupsticks.These were at the core of their moral vision.3Chief Plenty Coups continued to describe the rules of his lost world in great detail.He conjured his life, the spiritual values of his people, their relationship with the buffalo and with their rival tribes.It was a world as complex as the civilizations of Europe or China or India, and as structured with rules and meaning and metaphor.But the cowboy noticed there was something strange about this story.The chief was just a teenager when the white Europeans came, and the wild buffalo were all killed, and the Crow were killed, and the survivors were penned into reservations.But the chief’s story always ended there.He had nothing to say.But in a very real sense, the world had ended, for him, and for his people.Sure, on the reservation, they could still plant coupsticks in the ground, but it made no sense.Who was going to cross them?How could they be defended?Sure, they could still perform the Sun Dance, but why bother, when there were no hunts and no battles to ask for success in?How could you show ambition, or spirit, or bravery?Even everyday activities seemed pointless.Before, meals had been preparation for the hunt or the fight.Obviously, the Crows continued to cook meals, the philosopher Jonathan Lear explained when he wrote about this.5 And if asked, they could say what they were doing.And if asked further about it, they could say that they were trying to survive, trying to hold their family together from one day to the next. But there was no larger framework of significance into which it could fit.A century later, a psychology professor named Michael Chandler6 made a discovery.Like in the United States, successive Canadian governments had for many years resolved to destroy their culture by taking their children away from them and raising them in orphanages, banning them from speaking their own languages, and preventing them from having any say over how they lived.This continued until a few decades ago.Michael had wanted to understand why.So in the 1990s he started to look at the statistics about suicides among First Nations peoples, to see where they were happening.He noticed something intriguing.What could explain the difference?Governments historically have treated indigenous people as children, and assumed some kind of loco parentis [acting as [parents]](https://www.capakaspa.info/forums-echecs/utilisateurs/creative-agencies/) control over their lives, Michael explained to me.But in the last decades, indigenous groups have fought against this kind of approach, and tried to reassemble control of their own lives. Some have been able to reclaim control of their traditional lands, revive their own languages, and get control of their own schools, health services, and police so they can elect and run them for themselves.So Michael and his colleagues spent years carefully gathering7 and studying the statistics.They developed nine ways to measure the control a tribal group had, and slowly, over time, they plotted this against the suicide statistics.Is there any relationship?Then they compiled the results.This is certainly not the only factor causing agony to First Nations peoples.But Michael had proven that lack of community control was a massive and major factor.This discovery was explosive in itself.But it then led Michael to think more deeply still.As he looked at the results from the First Nations study, Michael found himself thinking back to a study he had carried out several years before.