Nature, nurture, (Neo-)nostalgia? Back-casting for a more socially and environmentally sustainable post-COVID future

Abstract

Commentaries on lived experiences of COVID-19-induced ‘lockdown’ have simultaneously directed public imaginations backwards to draw inspiration and fortitude from historical periods of national and global challenge, and forwards into futures characterised by greater environmental sensitivity and community resilience. In this article, we argue that individuals’ and households’ practical coping strategies from different phases of lockdown within the UK offer clues as to how adaptive embodiments of close connection–to nature and community–both inform contemporary practices of everyday resilience and signpost towards enablers of a more socially compassionate and environmentally sustainable future. Our novel approach to conceptualising post-COVID recovery draws on ‘back-casting’–an approach which envisages pathways towards alternative, ‘better’ futures–to work back from the notion of sustainable lifestyles, through participants’ narratives of coping in/with lockdown, to the forms of adaptation that provided solace and encouragement. We highlight how these embodied and emotional adaptations constitute a form of nascent ‘neo-nostalgia’ capable of reaching beyond the enabling of coping mechanisms in the present to inform long-lasting capacity for individual and community resilience in the face of future socio-environmental crises.