What Does Nature Mean to You? Reflections on personal (and collective) connections to nature
Author: Rossana Didonna, Junior Expert, Biodiversity and Nature-based Solutions at ICLEI Europe
Earlier this month, partners from the UNP+ project gathered in Belgrade for an in-person Urban Nature Exchange. The agenda was full of presentations, working sessions and site visits, but the day opened somewhere unexpected. Before any slides, before any data, we were asked to sit down, take out something personal that reminded us of nature, and write.
As I looked around the room, watching people carefully holding small photographs, stones, or other objects (I even saw a shell!), I felt a kind of tender anticipation settling in the space. There was something deeply human in that moment, as if we were all preparing to reveal not our professional personas, but fragments of our true selves.
For 10 minutes, we sat in silence and put pen to paper, recording the visceral, sensory, and emotional snippets of memory tied to our objects. The room became quiet in a way that felt unusual for a workshop setting. It was not the impatient silence of people waiting for a session to start, but a softer, more introspective silence, a physical manifestation of everyone’s inward turn.
What finally emerged on my page surprised me. I went into the session intending to provide the kind of carefully considered insights one might expect in a professional setting. Something along the lines of: "Nature provides essential ecosystem services that underpin human wellbeing" or "Urban green spaces are critical infrastructure for climate resilience." However, what emerged on the page was something much smaller and more intimate: a particular colour, the softness of a certain light and the sensation of being very young and completely immersed in a vast, protective and somehow living natural world.
As we began to share our stories in small groups, something shifted in the room that I struggle to fully describe. My colleagues began to tell equally personal stories I never expected to hear - a childhood garden with a precision that made it completely visible: the memory, the people around, the sound of time, the way time moved differently there. Someone else talked about a place that no longer exists, and you could hear the loss in how carefully they chose their words. With every story shared, listeners began to lean forward towards the speaker and their object the way you do when you don't want to miss a single word.
I wondered: when was the last time a work gathering asked this of me? When was the last time I was invited to bring my personal history into the room? Into my work?
This work was personal, but it was also, quietly, revealing. Mapping our feelings and memories onto the IPBES Values Typology gave shape to what had surfaced in the room: the different ways human beings relate to nature - living from it, living in it, living with it, living as it. Beneath stories that had at first seemed entirely different, patterns began to emerge. Again, the presence of place, of belonging, of landscapes carrying memory in ways that felt almost inseparable from identity itself. Despite differences in language, profession, geography, or background, there was a quiet recognition of something held in common. And with it, the suggestion that this connection to nature is not incidental to how we live and what we care about, but quietly central to both.
Towards the end of the session, the moderator shared a photograph from a previous workshop: a girl in her garden in Sarajevo after the war. During the siege, the garden had been used only to grow vegetables, purely for survival. Later, there was space for roses too. At first, it felt like a powerful image of beauty returning after devastation.
But then the moderator added something that completely changed the meaning. Years later, back in Sarajevo, she found herself admiring the beautiful hills where people now go to walk, breathe, and reconnect with nature, only to realise that during the war those exact same places had been the best spots for snipers.
Suddenly the landscape held two realities at once: beauty and violence, peace and fear, memory and healing layered onto the same physical space. It was a reminder that nature is never experienced as neutral, but is always intertwined with history, identity, freedom, and all the emotions living beings carry into places. And because of that, it deserves to be understood with much more depth and care than we often allow.
I left the workshop carrying a question I had not arrived with: whose experience of nature are we actually designing for?
I still do not know the answer. But perhaps the value lies precisely in learning how to ask the question properly, with enough openness to really hear what might come back.
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