The researchers, a conservation social scientist and a licensed mental health practitioner both based in Lafayette, propose that climate and ecological disruption, when experienced repeatedly across generations, becomes culturally embedded in shared community identities. They call the underexamined consequence of this embedded trauma ecological dissociation, defined as a reduced capacity for relational connection with the more-than-human world. Crucially, they argue this is not merely a matter of attitudes or beliefs. Drawing on polyvagal theory and stress physiology, they suggest that chronic survival-oriented processing narrows access to the autonomic states associated with curiosity, social engagement, and reciprocal connection, meaning trauma becomes an embodied way of being in the world, not just a shared historical narrative.

The theoretical model traces two historically distinct pathways into the same cycle. For Indigenous peoples and communities displaced by climate change or biodiversity loss, ecological disconnection emerges through the traumatic severance of reciprocal relationships with ancestral lands and place-based ways of knowing, a rupture associated in the literature with enduring disparities in depression, posttraumatic stress, and chronic disease, and potentially with epigenetic mechanisms that transmit stress adaptations across generations. For communities whose collective narratives are organized around domination, extraction, and human exceptionalism, dissociative patterns such as moral disengagement and emotional distancing reinforce the very systems that produce further harm. In both cases, the authors argue, trauma narrows physiological and psychological capacity for connection while environmental degradation simultaneously threatens health and community resilience, leaving few offramps from the loop.

Forest bathing, or Shinrin-Yoku, entered this framework as the operational intervention. Introduced in Japan in the 1980s as a preventative medicine practice, it comprises structured invitations to connect with nature primarily through sensory experience. Since its global spread, field experiments across Japanese forests and numerous reviews have documented psychological and physiological outcomes, including reduced anxiety, altered heart rate variability, and lower physiological stress. What has been missing, the authors contend, is attention to how such programs might function as community-level interventions addressing the relational dimensions of collective trauma, rather than simply aggregating individual benefits.

Acadiana Forest Bathing was built to test that proposition in place. The nine-parish Acadiana region, home to roughly 700,000 residents, is a landscape of layered collective histories: the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest river swamp in the United States, has sustained the Chitimacha, Atakapas, and Opelousas peoples since time immemorial, while colonization, the forced expulsion of French Acadiens from Nova Scotia in the mid-1700s, and two-and-a-half centuries of reliance on enslaved African labor shaped the region’s cultural narratives. Those histories now intersect with recurrent hurricanes, flooding, saltwater intrusion, extreme heat, and pollution from historical and ongoing energy extraction. The authors deliberately position the program not as a way to make individuals more resilient, but as an opportunity to build connection among self, community, and place within an already adaptive social landscape.

The program’s mechanics translate the theory into sensory practice. Free self-guided trails, each created in partnership with a local community leader, present a deliberately sequenced series of written or audio invitations. Participants begin by grounding awareness in the body, perhaps noticing the soles of the feet against the Earth, then progress through deep breathing and attention to smell, temperature, humidity, and movement on the skin. Invitations then move toward connection with specific entities, a fallen tree, a blooming flower, a perched bird, before closing with reflective prompts about how humans and nature mirror one another. The authors map each component to a theoretical disruption: grounding and sensory invitations target disconnection from the body, place-based invitations cultivate ecological belonging, free self-guided access restores choice and agency, and moments of awe and gratitude support meaning-making in the face of ecological grief.

Guided group walks, lasting from thirty minutes to two hours, extend the individual experience into a social setting. A trained guide sets a tone emphasizing participant agency and avoids prescribing outcomes, while the group moves through solo, paired, and shared activities with built-in opportunities to reflect aloud. This facilitation approach, the authors write, creates shared attention, normalization, and community connection, directly countering the social fragmentation that their model identifies as a programmatic target. Notably, they acknowledge a current gap in engaging Indigenous leaders in the initial programming and describe plans for a community advisory group spanning the Chitimacha Nation, Black and Hispanic communities, hunters and anglers, and medical practitioners across generations.

The place-based adaptations are as telling as the theory. In a landscape defined by swamps, bayous, heat, mosquitoes, and summer thunderstorms, facilitators encourage participants to notice responses to discomfort with curiosity rather than overcome them, treating changing weather as part of the sensory experience itself. The practice expands beyond forests to the region’s increasingly rare Tallgrass prairie remnants, historically logged cypress-tupelo swamps, and waterways such as Bayous Teche and Vermilion, with emerging kayak trails offering water-based pathways. The authors also describe adaptations for younger participants, incorporating play, movement, and imagination to counter rising climate anxiety, and for older adults, accommodating mobility and pace to address social isolation and sedentary lifestyles. A proposed project, Sounds of Acadiana, would explore how residents perceive and remember the region’s acoustic experience, from summer rains to evening cicadas, as research increasingly links anthropogenic noise to diminished health benefits of biodiverse soundscapes.

The authors are candid about constraints. No formal data collection has yet been applied, and the program is presented as a preliminary proof of concept rather than evidence of effectiveness. They position forest bathing not as a new discovery of relational connection but as one contemporary approach alongside longstanding Indigenous traditions, and they explicitly state it is not a substitute for addressing the structural causes of trauma. For future evaluation, they propose a multi-method design: brief pre- and post-walk surveys assessing physical and emotional health and nature-connectedness, focus groups on meaning-making, and participatory methods such as oral history and photovoice that position residents as co-authors. Validated scales for ecological identity, sense of place, and ecological grief exist, but the authors argue evaluation must move beyond whether individuals feel better to examine at a population level how, for whom, and through which pathways change occurs, potentially including partnerships with healthcare settings and community-wide trends in ecological stewardship.

What makes the case study conceptually ambitious is its reach toward collective constructs. The authors suggest holistic evaluation could eventually demonstrate collective effervescence, the shared feeling of energy and harmony across people, or collective flourishing, introduced by Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen as the fundamental relationality that generates responsibility for ecological stewardship. As Acadiana faces continued environmental change while becoming a receiving community for people displaced from elsewhere in coastal Louisiana, the authors argue that accessible, place-based nature practices could become one component of a broader community health and climate-resilience infrastructure. No single intervention can resolve the structural conditions generating collective trauma, they conclude, but forest bathing offers one practice within that larger effort: an invitation to slow down, notice, and renew a relationship with the more-than-human world of which communities are already a part.

Subject of Research: Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study

Article Title: Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study

Article References: Forest bathing as a pathway toward ecological identity: a community case study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2026.1981874

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2026.1981874

Keywords: Forest, bathing, pathway, toward, ecological, identity, community, case, scientific research