What if instead you tried some friendly, sophisticated persuasions? What if you took pains to stress the advantages and joys of rural life, to give rural centres like Armidale and Tamworth a seductive allure? In a moment this column will begin to bristle with some suggestions you two bullies may find helpful.

First, though, and to recap, big-city-based federal public servants are aghast at the government's determination to move departments and jobs to the bush.

The Coalition government has announced, with Nationals' leader Barnaby Joyce and Nationals' deputy leader and government minister for regional development Fiona Nash leading the bullying push, that all federal departments must justify their continued presence in Canberra and other capital cities. If they can't justify those metropolitan presences they face a forced "decentralisation" to rural or regional Australia.

This is reported to be sending chills up the spines of lots of Canberra's 57,500 public servants.

But if the government wanted to make the prospect less chilling and bullying there is a great deal it could do. It could start by persuasively warbling (as poets always have and as scientists begin to) the praises of country life. Coincidentally, with the "decentralisation" debate throbbing, your columnist has stumbled across some fine, new, research-based arguments for country life. Michael Harris employs some of those arguments in his new book Solitude. You can read an exquisite excerpt from the book just published online in The Walrus.

Big-city life is hurting us, Harris, insists. We are not by nature a city-dwelling species. For 2.5 millionyears our ancestors were outdoorsy nomads. City life is new to us.

"[But now] according to the World Health Organization, six out of every ten people will live in cities by 2030. As the urban revolution reaches a head and humans become more citified than not, 'nature deficit disorder' blooms in every apartment block.

"But what really happens when we turn [away from the countryside]? Do we really dismantle parts of our better selves?

"A growing body of research suggests exactly that. A study from the University of London, for example, found that members of the remote cattle-herding Himba tribe in Namibia, who spend their lives in the open bush, had greater attention spans and a greater sense of contentment than urbanised Britons and, when those same tribe members moved into urban centres, their attention spans and levels of contentment dropped to match their British counterparts.

"Meanwhile, at Stanford University, study participants had their brains scanned before and after walking in grassy meadows and then beside heavy car traffic. Participants walking in urban environments had markedly higher instances of 'rumination' - a brooding and self-criticism the researchers correlated with the onset of depression. And, just as parts of the brain associated with rumination lit up on urban walks, they calmed down during nature walks."

"A quick trip into the woods, known as 'forest bathing' in Japan, reduces cortisol levels and boosts the immune system. And a simple view of greenery can insulate us from stress and increase our resilience to adversity. Time in nature even boosts, in a very concrete way, our ability to smell, see, and hear. The data piles up."

Standing in Barnaby Joyce's (sturdy, elastic–sided) bucolic boots I would be harping on themes like these. The buttering-up of public servants up for a move to the bush shouldn't be that difficult.

But of course the buttering-up of Canberra public servants is given a degree of difficulty for Joyce and Nash and by the fact that Canberra, although a kind of a city, is not a crushing, teeming, vast, traffic-throttled, urban brute of a metropolis. NDD is not so chronic here. Our parrot-rich city is not chronically nature deficient.

Canberrans are hopelessly inarticulate about their vague, fuzzy fondness for Canberra. Whenever I hear someone say that they "love" Canberra I interrogate them, irritatingly, to tell me what it is that they love. But they almost never can. They gibber the usual clichés about the ease of commuting, but then struggle to explain anything else. When we love a person and/or a dog we can rattle on about their qualities in great detail and with boundless enthusiasm. It mystifies that it should be so much more difficult to rattle on about love of a city, love of Canberra...

What is going on, methinks, is a kind of hard-to-define Canberra wellbeing. Canberrans are not utterly divorced from the green, outdoorsy benefits Michael Harris points to in his thought-stoking essay. In Canberra "forest bathing" is often an everyday experience for us as we walk the dog. Harris's "simple view of greenery [that] can insulate us from stress and increase our resilience to adversity" is an everyday, taken-for-granted fact of Canberra life.

Perhaps Canberrans, with their green good luck in living in Canberra, have something in common with our contented brothers and sisters of the Himba tribe of Namibia. Perhaps the Himba, too, struggle to put into words what they love about life.