When Nature Is Medicine: Meet Our Chair, John Stevens
Ask anyone who lives around Mullumbimby why they love it here, and most people will mention the same thing. The bush. The creeks. The green hills folding into what's left of the Big Scrub. For Associate Professor John Stevens, Chair of Gondwana Rainforest Trust, that feeling isn't just a nice bonus of country living. It's medicine.
What is Lifestyle Medicine?
John co-founded the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine and leads the Master of Lifestyle Medicine at Southern Cross University. His field looks at how everyday things shape our long-term health: what we eat, how we move, how well we sleep, how we handle stress. And sitting right alongside those is something easy to overlook. Our connection to other people, to community, and to the natural world around us.
A short interview with Associate Professor John Stevens. Video: The Echo
From truck driver to nurse to nature
John didn't set out to become a health researcher. He grew up in Sydney, failed his HSC, and spent years driving trucks. A visit to a friend recovering in hospital changed everything. He trained as a nurse, then moved into research, drawn in by a pattern he couldn't unsee: too many people were reaching old age carrying illness that could have been prevented.
Associate Professor John Stevens, Chair of Gondwana Rainforest Trust.
These days, when John talks about what it takes to live well, rainforest and rivers get equal billing with diet and sleep. He spends his own downtime in the water and the bush around home, and he'll tell you that time in nature, and caring for it, is one of the most overlooked tools we have for staying well.
Why rainforest belongs in the health conversation
That's part of why John chairs the board of Gondwana Rainforest Trust. The rainforest he loves close to home is a remnant of the Big Scrub, once a vast stretch of subtropical rainforest across the Northern Rivers that was cleared for farming after European settlement, leaving only scattered pockets behind. Restoring those pockets is one of our priorities here in Northern New South Wales, alongside our work purchasing and protecting endangered rainforest ecosystems across Australia.
We usually talk about rainforest protection in terms of the species it shelters, and that matters enormously. But our mission has always been for people too, alongside wildlife, climate and the planet, and John's work reminds us why. A healthy rainforest does something for us. It gives us somewhere to walk, to breathe, to switch off. And heal.
How you can help
Every piece of rainforest that we purchase, protect and restore whether it's a Big Scrub remnant here in the Northern Rivers or a stretch of Daintree lowland rainforest in Far North Queensland, is protected because someone decided it mattered enough to act.
You can be part of that story. Help us restore rainforest here in the Northern Rivers, or support the purchase, protection and restoration of rainforest in the Daintree here.