It's time we 'joined the dots' with Nature, says Simon Barnes.

East Anglia has the most marvellous nature reserves in the country. The coast, the salt marshes, the brackish lagoons, the reedbeds, the fresh waters of the Broads, the woods, the heaths, the steppe country of the Brecks: we all know that we live somewhere special.

But if all these reserves are nothing more than islands in a sea of industry – of the concrete or the agricultural variety – they are doomed. What we have to do is join them up. We need to enrich the land that lies between one centre of excellence and another and by doing so, enriching all the people who come into contact with it - those that comes visiting our special places and those of us who have the luck to live here.

I look out of the half-dozen acres we own and manage for wildlife – yesterday a peregrine, today a fizzing interaction between kestrel and buzzard – and rejoice that my neighbour to the north looks after the land sympathetically. To the west is a gently-maintained grazing marsh, and on the other side, the farmland of the Raveningham estate is beautifully managed and heaving with life.

None of this stuff is in the hands of a wildlife organisation, but it's all full of life, and it's all so much better because it's all joined up. A deer can run for miles without encountering a road, a grass snake can slither the same journey without needing to cross an inch of concrete, and the birds can work a large area with out needing to commute - and so they prosper, as the crossing and recrossing of the marsh harriers always shows.

We can't leave nature to other people. That's a notion that matters if you manage any land at all, from a window-box to a National Park. We need to join up. You can do something as simple as making a gap in a garden fence, to allow hedgehogs to commute through suburbia.

So many questions about wildlife go back to farming. The hard-core old-school farming types have their minds stuck in the post-war need for self-sufficiency in food, for intensification of agriculture as a force for moral good. Asked to consider anything else, such people will tell you: 'Are we park-keepers, then?'

But that's changing. Farmers love land and what it can do, and many are farming less intensively. That's a good thing for us all: people turn to the countryside for health and healing and recreation; the brutalised fields of the 1970s are not the answer for people or for wildlife. These days, wherever there is connectivity, by means of field margins and hedgerows and watercourses, the countryside and the country are better.

Better for you and me and as well as better for deer and snakes and harriers. That's because we human have a need to join up as well. We need to ensure our own connectivity with nature. The more we lose it, the harder life gets. We do better in a softer, shaggier, untidier, wilder landscape: and everyone who has anything to do with the land - any land – has a part to play here.

Connectivity is life. It really is as simple as that. I have been in India helping with the establishment of corridors for elephants, patches of land that link one forest with another, allowing elephants to live alongside humans with less conflict. I have also seen dormouse corridors in Suffolk, again linking one wood with another. Slightly smaller beasts: precisely the same idea.

We humans also need to connect with each other; after all, that is what living means. We all seek happiness and looks for ways of dealing with our troubles: and mostly we do that by connecting with each other and with nature.

The more we cut ourselves off, from each other and from nature – as individuals, as families, as races and as nations – the more we impoverish ourselves. We need to join up with nature and the best way we can do this is to help nature join up with itself.