Abstract

Ageing populations call for ways of facilitating active healthy ageing. Engagements with nature can positively affect well-being and healthy ageing, but challenges remain to move beyond framing ageing as inevitable, gradual decline and disengagement, towards active and healthy engagements with nature. So far, little attention has been paid to how different ways of being in and relating to nature can facilitate active healthy ageing. Through go-alongs and interventions in the Danish Wadden Sea National Park, we explore how and why older adults relate to nature. Drawing on Heidegger’s (1927/1962) notion of ‘Dasein’ and theories of therapeutic mobilities, we discuss how older adults engage in nature, with nature, or become through nature. By re-framing these variations of engagement, the theoretical contribution represents different archetypes of engagement with nature, where active healthy ageing transpires through therapeutic mobilities that enable complex fields of relations with others and nature. For nature to contribute to active and healthy ageing requires a fundamental shift from understanding nature as static and other-to-man to evanescent versions of individuals’ subjective being. The latter acknowledges the embeddedness of walking, emotional geographies and therapeutic landscapes. Recognising that ‘nature is not just nature’ points to the insufficiency of merely promoting walking or offering access to being in nature. Instead, active healthy ageing with nature becomes a matter of setting the enabling conditions for a population of highly heterogeneous older adults to continuously engage with nature in ways that facilitate transformative experiences.

摘要

老龄化人口需要促进积极健康老龄化的方法。与自然接触可以对福祉和健康老龄化产生积极影响，但挑战仍然存在，要超越将老龄化视为不可避免、逐渐衰退和脱离接触，转向积极和健康地与自然接触。到目前为止，很少有人关注处于自然中和与自然相关的不同方式如何促进积极健康的老龄化。通过在丹麦瓦登海国家公园的随行和干预，我们探索了老年人与自然的关系以及原因。借鉴海德格尔 (1927/1962) 的“此在”概念和治疗流动性理论，我们讨论了老年人如何参与自然、与自然相处或通过自然而成为。通过重新构建这些不同的参与方式，理论贡献代表了与自然接触的不同原型，其中积极健康的老龄化通过治疗机动性发生，使与他人和自然的复杂关系领域成为可能。为了使自然有助于积极和健康的老龄化，需要从根本上转变将自然理解为静态的和对人的其他理解为个人主观存在的短暂版本。后者承认步行、情感地理和治疗景观的嵌入性。认识到“自然不仅仅是自然”表明仅仅提倡步行或提供亲近自然的途径是不够的。反而，