Exploring the fosterage of individuals’ resonances with nature through a 5-week-long ritual: findings, limits and outlook of a feasibility study for sustainability transformations

Abstract Humanity’s reaction to the social-ecological crisis has been very diverse to date. While psychologists report on increasing affective disorders such as climate anxiety, many individuals remain immobile due to supposedly lacking resonance sensitivities and dispositions towards nature—such as being open for her needs and her own intrinsic value. Yet, fostering people’s resonances with nature is seen as a positive solution for sustainability transformations. Contrary to solely calls to change people’s behavior, experiential interventions, such as Indigenous rituals, enter into people’s daily life and based on this affect-laden physicalness, they can play a pivotal role for overcoming immobile and mute human-nature relationships. Against this background, this paper presents a feasibility study in which we piloted a 5-week-long ritual intervention aimed at fostering individual human-nature resonances over five stages. For doing so, our interdisciplinary panel-study combined relational theories from sustainability science with a strong psychological experimental study design including a control group. Due to diminished nature experiences in cities, it took place in an urban setting. Given the pilot character of the study, the results do not provide confirming evidence, yet, our insights into this field stress the relational capability of emotional self-regulation in order to respond towards nature and to commit to her in the long term. Furthermore, we offer recommendations for adjusted interventions, such as considering more strongly the societal context and individual health conditions, that might influence resonance dispositions, and specified hypotheses for confirmatory studies in larger samples.