ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the linkages between wellbeing, landscape and environmental volunteering. Emotional geography is concerned with the association between feelings themselves and the representations and accounts of these feelings that are experienced through the body and within particular spaces. Townsend outlines the mental and social health benefits associated specifically with environmental volunteering. Therapeutic landscape literature is used to guide linkages between the volunteering landscape and the other forms of physical and emotional and wellbeing. Volunteers value the multi-sensory presence in a landscape, connecting embodied and emotional wellbeing. The motivations that individuals expressed were often centralized in the ethics that supported the volunteer work. An improvement in wellbeing has been attributed to escaping the pressures of modern living and gaining a connection to the plants and earth in the form of a very embodied interaction with the natural surroundings.
