Looking back to the future: the re-emergence of green care

Green care should be prioritised as a potential solution to the current healthcare context of high demand, cost pressures and community fragmentation. Nature-based interventions do not ‘cost the earth’, are low carbon and are socially pro gressive, and therefore sustainable (Townsend & Weerasuriya, 2010). People who engage with nature-based groups can gain much wider benefits than merely symptom reduction. It is these wider benefits that move people from the sick role, which can be hard to leave for many reasons, towards a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing. What could be a better win–win outcome than enabling those with mental illness to find the peace, well-being and sense of self-empowerment that come with being able to work with others as a community in and across green spaces? Any healthy, health-creating society will have to develop these evidenced-based, values-based interventions of natural, green or nature settings, whether this be specifically for those with mental health problems, or more likely also to involve the wider population. Mental health services across the world need to lead this rediscovery of nature-mindedness, to inspire the societies in which we live to grow and sustain the well-being of all, but especially future genera tions.