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The Nature Fix - Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative PDF
The Nature Fix - Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative PDF
PART ONE
LOOKING FOR NATURE NEURONS
1. The Biophilia Effect
PART TWO
NEARBY NATURE: THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES
3. The Smell of Survival
4. Birdbrain
5. Box of Rain
PART THREE
FIVE HOURS A MONTH
6. You May Squat Down and Feel a Plant
7. Garden of Hedon
8. Rambling On
PART FOUR
BACKCOUNTRY BRAIN
9. Get Over Yourself: Wilderness, Creativity and the Power of Awe
PART FIVE
THE CITY IN A GARDEN
12. Nature for the Rest of Us
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
THE
Nature
Fix
INTRODUCTION
THE MOVING TRUCK pointed itself toward that anti-Arcadia that is the
nation’s capital, and we reluctantly followed. It was 104 degrees when
we arrived, and my hair shriveled up into a pile of Brillo. This surely
wasn’t the East Coast; this was Manaus with suits. I ventured out to
explore a nearby park early in the morning, and found that to get
there, I needed to sprint across a highway and bushwhack along some
bridge pilons to find the words “Pussy Fudge” waiting for me in spray
paint. Our house was near a river but also near a major airport. Jets
passed low overhead every sixty seconds. There was the noise, the
smog, the gray, the heat. (To be fair, nature as well as civilization
could wreck you here: the nonnative tiger mosquitoes as big as my
thumbnail, the nymph deer ticks smaller than freckles. Both are
capable of giving you diseases that can damage you neurologically
and for life. Washington had names for weather events I’d never
heard of or had to think about: derechos, polar vortices, level 4
hurricanes, heat-index advisories.)
I yearned for the mountains. And yearning is a devastating thing,
because it is defined by loss. As the months ticked by, I realized that
if I was going to explore what nature offers our brains, I also had to
acknowledge what its absence means. I felt disoriented, overwhelmed,
depressed. My mind had trouble focusing. I couldn’t finish thoughts. I
couldn’t make decisions and I wasn’t keen to get out of bed. I was
perhaps, at least in part, suffering from what journalist Louv calls
nature deficit disorder. (The DSM hasn’t added it, but presumably
they’d want to treat it with a pill.) Louv defines it as what happens
when people, particularly children, spend little or no time outside in
natural environments, resulting in physical and mental problems
including anxiety and distraction. He also coined the toothsome term
“nature neurons” to highlight the essential link between our nervous
systems and the natural world they evolved in. Was the breakage of
this link really happening? Is there science supporting the notion of
nature deficit disorder? If so, how much nature do we need to fix
ourselves? Do we need to move into a hemlock tree like in a Jean
Craighead George novel, or will looking out the window do?
If I was going to do more than merely survive in my new urban
habitat, the type now shared by most people on earth, I was going to
have to figure some things out. What was it about nature that people
seem to need? How could we get enough of it in our lives in order to
be our best selves? In the course of trying to answer these questions, I
came to consider the human-nature connection on a neural level.
Some weeks after we rolled into town, I left on assignment for Japan
to write about an obscure and somewhat embarrassing Japanese
practice called forest-bathing. There, I started to learn the science
behind what I was experiencing at home. The Japanese researchers
weren’t content to leave nature to the realm of haikus—they wanted
to measure its effects, document it, chart it and deliver the evidence
to policy makers and the medical community. What the Japanese
didn’t really know, though, was why nature seemed to be helpful in
alleviating so many things that ail us. And there were a lot of other
things they didn’t know: who was best helped, by what mechanisms in
the brain and body, what was the right dose, and, moreover, what
qualified as “nature”? I personally like Oscar Wilde’s broad
definition: “a place where birds fly around uncooked.”
Many scientists the world over are trying to find answers. My
exploration of these questions would send me down a river in Idaho
with a boatload of women veterans, to South Korea, where grown
firemen hold hands in the woods, to sound labs measuring stress
recovery, to treadmills in 3D virtual-reality rooms and to downtown
Edinburgh, Scotland, where I’d walk around with a brain-measuring
EEG unit wrapped around my scalp like a postmodern crown of
thorns. I’d measure black carbon and my own blood pressure, pulse
rate, cortisol and facial responses to “awe.” I would meet researchers
convinced that the secret to nature’s power lies in its geometric
fractal patterns, or its particular sound vibrations, or the aerosols
from trees. It was a sensory extravaganza.
Scientists are quantifying nature’s effects not only on mood and
well-being, but also on our ability to think—to remember things, to
plan, to create, to daydream and to focus—as well as on our social
skills. There were times when I was skeptical, and times when I
believed. I spent time with people who were trying to get well, people
who were trying to get smart, people finding the best ways to educate
young children (who are, by nature, exploratory, kinetic and full of
wonder, all qualities enhanced by time outside) and people who were
merely trying, like me, to stay sane in a frenetic world. Because of the
two years I spent researching this book, I would emerge feeling better
myself, and much more aware of the surprising science behind why I
was feeling that way. And while “well-being” may sound like vague
psychospeak, its impact is real. Enhancing it has been shown to add
years to your life span.
I’ve divided the book into five parts to help make sense of the
material, and to make it useful. The first part sets up the two
dominant theories that attempt to explain why our brains need nature
and that drive much of the research: the first chapter takes us to
Japan, where researchers are quantifying nature’s role in lowering
stress and boosting mental health using a framework based on the
biophilia hypothesis, the idea that we feel most “at home” in nature
because we evolved there. The second chapter swerves over to Utah,
where American neuroscientists are more interested in how nature
helps restore our attention-addled brains to a state of sharper
cognition. I’ve organized the rest of the book by nature dose. I
explore the immediate effects of quick bursts, or “nearby nature” on
our three main senses—smell, sound, sight. Then I look at what
happens to our brains and bodies when we hang outside a bit longer to
approximate the Finnish recommended nature dose: five hours a
month. In Part Four, I take a deeper, longer dive into the wilderness,
where really interesting things happen to our brains. This is where, in
the words of neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah,
“something profound is going on.” Finally, we’ll look at what it all
means to the way most of us live, in cities.
Throughout, there will be insights into how we can better
construct our days, lives and communities so that everyone gains.
Don’t worry; I’m not going to tell you to pitch your smartphone over
a waterfall. The world we live in is fully plugged in. But it’s
important to call out just how radically our lives have shifted indoors
—and what those changes mean for our nervous systems—so that we
may hope to ease and manage the transition.
My move to the city is a micronarrative of the demographic and
geographical shifts occurring on a global scale. Homo sapiens
officially became an urban species sometime in 2008. That’s when
the World Health Organization reported that for the first time more
people throughout the world live in urban areas than rural ones. Last
year in the United States, cities grew at a faster clip than suburban
regions for the first time in a hundred years. Looked at another way,
we are in the middle of the largest mass migration in modern times.
Yet as humans shift their activities to cities, astoundingly little
planning, resources and infrastructure go into making those spaces
meet our psychological needs.
In Istanbul in the spring of 2013, eight people died and thousands
were injured in protests stemming from the proposed paving-over of
one of the last parks in the city, Taksim Gezi. Over 2 million of the
region’s trees had already been cut down to make way for a new
airport and a new bridge over the Bosphorus Strait. The park was
slated for a new shopping mall and luxury apartments. As bulldozers
entered the park to mow down the urban forest, citizens blocked their
way. They were willing to die for the last tree. “We will not leave
until they declare the park is ours,” said one twenty-four-year-old.
(As of this writing, the trees still stand, but their fate remains
uncertain.)
Taksim Gezi became a symbol not only of the importance of
nature to city life, but to democracy itself, just as Frederick Law
Olmsted knew all along. “A sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all
times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded
by a park,” he wrote.
Yet we think of nature as a luxury, not a necessity. We don’t
recognize how much it elevates us, both personally and politically.
That, ultimately, is the aspiration of this book: to find the best science
behind our nature-primed neurons and to share it. Without this
knowledge, we may not ever fully honor our deep, cranial connection
to natural landscapes.
Not far from where I sent my lichen-rock photo into the
Mappiness ether, two mighty rivers merge: the Green and the
Colorado. It makes me happy to think of this geography because of a
story of two goofy brothers I know, who, in college, built a raft out of
inner-tubes and pallets, twisted out of their clothes, and pushed off
the bank of the Green, heading to the confluence. They had baggies of
gorp, a couple of jars of peanut butter, some water jugs. The water
was calm on this stretch, and they were living the life. Just a couple of
hours into the three-week trip, they got pulled over by a ranger.
Fortunately, this was before the days of a required permit, fire pan
and chemical toilet. But the naked boys were short one lifejacket.
They were so busted. The ranger hauled them off to a county judge,
who fined them, made them buy a lifejacket, and sent them back
down the river (always better than being sent up the river). Those two
guys are my brothers-in-law. This story has entered our sizable family
canon of misadventures-by-uncles. But it seems ages ago that such a
story would even be possible. Two college boys alone in the
wilderness, having the time of their lives, able to make it weeks
without civilization, minus a trip to a judge. Yet these two barely
have gray hair; it was only a generation ago.
The dramatic loss of nature-based exploration in our children’s
lives and in our own has happened so fast we’ve hardly noticed it,
much less remarked on it. “We evolved in nature. It’s strange we’d be
so disconnected,” said Nisbet. Most of us don’t know we’re missing
anything. We may have a pet and occasionally go to the beach, so
what’s the big deal? Well, what is the big deal? That’s what I wanted
to find out. And if something serious is missing, how do we recapture
it?
As a journalist who writes frequently about the environment, I
often end up writing about the way environment hurts our health,
from flame retardants getting into human tissue to air pollution’s
effects on the developing brain. It was both a pleasure and a
revelation to consider how, instead, our surroundings can also help
prevent physical and mental problems and align us with the World
Health Organization’s definition of health: “a complete state of
physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.” The former health minister of Scotland calls
this health-making “salutogenesis,” inspired by the mid-twentieth-
century sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who asked, if the world is so
crazy, what makes us able to keep sallying forth?
My city hair flattened to my scalp with gelatinous product,
gulping vitamin D, I decided the answers are worth pursuing.
PART ONE
There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think
that is not the moon.
—BASHO
When I pictured shinrin yoku, “forest bathing,” I conjured Sleeping
Beauty in her corpse phase, surrounded by primordial trees, twittering
birds and shafts of sunlight. You just knew she was somehow taking it
all in, and she’d awake refreshed, enlightened and ready for her hot
prince. But this was wrong on so many levels. First off, Japan doesn’t
have a lot of primeval forest left, and second, you have to work at
this, although corpselike moments are not discouraged. In Chichibu-
Tama-Kai National Park, a ninety-minute train ride from Tokyo, I
was supposed to be concentrating on the cicadas and the sound of a
flowing creek when a loud Mitsubishi van rumbled by. It was
disgorging more campers to a nearby tent village where kids were
running around with their fishing poles and pink bed pillows. This
was nature, Japan-style.
The dozen others with me on our shinrin yoku hike didn’t seem to
mind the distractions. The Japanese go crazy for this practice, which
is standard preventive medicine here. It involves cultivating your
senses to open them to the woods. It’s not about wilderness; it’s about
the nature/civilization hybrid the Japanese have cultivated for
thousands of years. You can stroll a little, write a haiku, crack open a
spicebush twig and inhale its woodsy, sassy scent. The whole notion
is predicated on an ancient bond that can be unearthed with a few
sensory tricks.
“People come out from the city and literally shower in the
greenery,” our guide, Kunio, explained to me. “This way, they are
able to become relaxed.” To help us along, Kunio—a volunteer ranger
—had us standing still on a hillside, facing the creek, with our arms at
our sides. I glanced around. We looked like earthlings transfixed by
the light of the mother ship. Weathered and jolly, Kunio told us to
breathe in for a count of seven seconds, hold for five, release.
“Concentrate on your belly,” he said.
We needed this. Most of us were urban desk jockeys. We looked
like weak, shelled soybeans, tired and pale. Standing next to me was
Ito Tatsuya, a forty-one-year-old Tokyo businessman. Like many day-
hikers in this country, he carried an inordinate amount of gear, much
of it dangling from his belt: a cell phone, a camera, a water bottle and
a set of keys. The Japanese would make great boy scouts, which is
probably why they make such great office workers, working longer
hours than anyone else in the developed world. It’s gotten to the point
where they’ve coined a term, karoshi—death from overwork. The
phenomenon was identified during the 1980s bubble economy when
workers in their prime started dropping dead, and the concept
reverberated into the future and throughout the developed world:
civilization can kill us. Ito and I breathed in the pines and then dove
into our bento boxes full of octopus and pickled root vegetables.
Kunio was moving around, showing people the astonishingly twiggy
walking-stick insect. Ito’s shoulders seemed to be unclenching by the
minute.
“When I’m out here, I don’t think about things,” he said, deftly
scooping up shards of radish while I splattered mine onto the leaf
litter.
“What’s the Japanese word for ‘stress’?” I asked.
“‘Stress,’” he said.
THE NEXT MORNING, the college boys and I took turns sitting in the
mobile lab at the trailhead. We placed hard cotton cylinders under our
tongues for two minutes, then spit them out into test tubes. That
would record our levels of cortisol, a hormone made in the adrenal
cortex. We got hooked up to probes and devices. The team was
inaugurating a brain-measuring, battery-powered, near-infrared
spectrometer that, when deployed, gave me a sensation of leeches
sticking to my forehead. We’d repeat all these measurements at the
end of the walk and again in the cityscape.
To gauge our physiological responses to these environments,
Miyazaki and Lee look at changes in blood pressure, pulse rate,
variable heart rate, salivary cortisol and, new this year, hemoglobin in
the brain’s prefrontal cortex. When aggregated, these metrics paint a
picture of our bifurcated nervous system. When we are relaxed and at
ease in our environment, our parasympathetic system—sometimes
called the “rest and digest” branch—kicks in. This is why food tastes
better in the outdoors, explains Miyazaki. But the demands and
constant stimuli of modern life tend to trigger our sympathetic
nervous system, which governs fight-or-flight behaviors. And trigger
it, and trigger it. We suffer the consequences: a long trail of research
dating back to the 1930s shows people who produce chronically high
cortisol levels and high blood pressure are more prone to heart
disease, metabolic disease, dementia and depression. More recent
research shows that the steady stress of urban living changes the brain
in ways that can increase our odds of schizophrenia, anxiety and
mood disorders.
When it was my turn to wander through the forest for fifteen
minutes, I was happy to break free from the wires. The loud pulse of
cicadas echoed through the woods. Light filtered gently through the
beeches and Japanese horse chestnuts and the earth smelled like good
damp dirt. An elderly couple ambled by, assisted by walking sticks
and a bear bell. I was briefly mesmerized by a yellow butterfly. I
could see why Juniko, a leafy network of trails and lakes, is a
candidate for the country’s next forest therapy station. Local and park
officials are seeking the designation because where there’s forest
therapy, there are tourists and their yen. Miyazaki may have a
mystical side, but what drives him is more data. It’s a convenient
arrangement.
The Japanese work on physiology and the brain takes advantage of
new tools of brain science, but it builds on decades of psych-talk
about the health benefits of being in nature. Miyazaki wasn’t the first
to record physical stress recovery in nature. A young psychologist
named Roger Ulrich was curious why so many Michigan drivers
chose to go out of their way to take a tree-lined roadway to the mall.
In 1986, using the expensive and cumbersome equipment of the time,
he hooked up an electroencephalograph (EEG) unit to the heads of
healthy volunteers while they viewed slides of nature scenes or
utilitarian urban buildings. The subjects assigned to nature showed
higher alpha wave activity, a wavelength associated with relaxation,
meditation and increased serotonin. In another experiment, he
stressed out 120 students by showing them movies of bloody
accidents in a woodworking shop. He knew they were distressed
because he measured their sympathetic nervous activity—the sweat
glands on their skin, their heart rates and their blood pressure.
Afterward, some students were assigned to watch a ten-minute video
of nature scenes and some to watch videos of urban scenes, from a
pedestrian mall to cars on a road. The results were dramatic: within
five minutes, the brains-on-nature returned to baseline. The brains-
on-built-environment recovered only partway—as indicated by those
nervous system measures— even more than ten minutes later.
Despite early promise, the study of brains-on-nature went fairly
dark for a couple of decades. It was considered soft science, much of
it based on qualitative measures in a medical world dazzled by
genetics and modern chemistry and funded by pharmaceutical
companies that didn’t stand to make a profit from houseplants or
garden views. The renewed interest of late represents a convergence
of ideas and events: the relentless march of obesity, depression and
anxiety (even in affluent communities and despite more medication),
the growing recognition of the role of the environment on genes, and
the growing academic and cultural unease with our widening breach
from the outdoors.
THANKS TO THE grant money, the scientists were able to dine a few
steps up from freeze-dried hummus. The first night after Arches, they
headed to Moab’s finest (and only) Thai restaurant. Art Kramer, a
neuroscientist, had arrived from the University of Illinois, where he
directs the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
In his early sixties, he’s clearly the senior yoda of the group. He
greeted us and dove into the pad se. Smallish and solid, he’s a man
who gives the impression of intensity in all pursuits. “He talks at
squirrel speed,” one of the others had warned me. At one time or
another, nearly everyone here (except Gazzaley) studied with him or
worked in his lab. Strayer was his first doctoral student, back when
they were studying pilot error. Kramer has always been fascinated by
how humans learn skills and what makes them screw up. He’s
consulted for the military, NASA and the Federal Aviation
Administration, among others.
But what Kramer is really known for—indeed, famous for, in the
world of neuroscience—is showing how exercise protects the brain
from cognitive decline in aging. Among his dozens of influential
studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to
grow, especially in areas related to memory, executive function and
spatial perception. Before Kramer’s work, no one really believed
physical activity could lead to such clear and important effects. Now
people everywhere are routinely told that exercise is the single best
way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline. Kramer’s studies
helped change the way the profession and society think. They are
what scientists dream of.
“In 1992, the exercise/brain literature was where the nature
literature is now,” said Strayer. “My goal in the next ten years is to do
for nature what he did on exercise and cognition.”
If you draw a Venn diagram of the scientific interests of everyone
around the vinyl-draped dinner table, the circles would overlap over
one central theme: attention. Other scientists studying the effects of
nature may be interested in other things, like emotional regulation, or
stress, or the immune system. But in Team Moab’s worldview,
attention is the lingua franca from which all mental states spring. I’d
be hearing a lot more about it.
Kramer sipped a lassi and briefly checked his phone. I asked him
if he would be following Strayer’s advice and taking a three-day tech
break while in Moab. He peered at me rather severely.
“I brought four computers.” He paused. “I can do it though. I lived
in a snow cave for a month.” Several heads swiveled his direction.
“He’s a sensation-seeker,” Strayer explained.
“Definitely,” Kramer said.
“Do you still have your Harley?” someone asked.
“Yep.” Kramer pulled up a photo of a red motorcycle on his
phone.
“Still wearing leather?” asked Strayer.
“Yeah, a jacket.”
“No pants?”
“Well, I always wear pants.”
AND SO THE skeptics and the believers marched out of the Best
Western. I drove to the trailhead with Paul Atchley and Strayer. As
the strange, folded landscape revealed itself, I found myself
wondering about the significance of attention, and its role in why
nature makes us smarter, as Strayer contends. Psychologists have
been fascinated by the concept of attention for a long time, although
it’s now enjoying a resurgence in our age of distraction, or what Paul
Atchley has called “the attention economy.”
Attention is our currency, and it’s precious. William James, the
philosopher, pioneering experimental psychologist and brother of
Henry James, devoted an entire chapter of his classic The Principles
of Psychology to attention, published in 1890. In it, he writes, “Every
one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind. .
. .” and “My experience is what I agree to attend to . . . Without
selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” Notably, James
divided attention into two basic types that continue to define the way
we think about it: voluntary, active attention (such as when we attend
to tasks) and involuntary or reflex attention, as when something
demands our focus, like a noise or sound or play of light or even a
wayward thought. Decades before text alerts, philosophers were
concerned by what James refers to as the “confused, dazed, scatter-
brained state which in French is called distraction.” (Before I leave
James, I can’t resist mentioning that he suffered from depression and
experienced a transformative experience while hiking in the
Adirondacks in 1898. As he wrote to his wife, he “got into a state of
spiritual alertness of the most vital description.” Emerson was his
godfather, so perhaps he was primed to attend voluntarily to this
possibility.)
James knew that staying on task was hard, hard work, and that
without this ability, as Nass confirmed, we become dumber, at least
by certain measures (by other measures, the distractions of the digital
age may be a reasonable trade for what our brains gain in access to
more information and more memory storage). But interestingly, we’re
also limited in our ability to take in our surroundings, because
otherwise our brains would be overwhelmed by stimuli. Our field of
vision is surprisingly narrow; our hearing isn’t great either, and most
of what we hear and “see” we don’t actually process at all. We get on
in the world because our brains are pretty good at automatic triage.
“Most of the time your brain can filter things out,” said Strayer,
driving the black 4Runner over an increasingly rough dirt road. “It’s a
strategic process. If traffic is heavy, your brain literally stops
listening to NPR. Radio is a passive signal, but talking is a whole
different thing, and if you’re on the phone talking to your spouse,
that’s more difficult to shut out.” Hence your inability to respond as
quickly as you should to traffic signals, signs and pedestrians. Social
information, as all Tweeters, texters and emailers know, draws our
attention and is tough to shut out. I was reminded of a funny
automated email response sent by a scientist on vacation (which I
learned about through, of course, Twitter): “I am away from the office
and checking email intermittently. If your email is not urgent, I’ll
probably still reply. I have a problem.”
“Attention is everything,” explained Paul Atchley, pivoting
around in the front seat. “Without it, we don’t see, hear, taste. Your
brain keeps track of about four things at once. How do you prioritize
what’s important and what’s not? Through inhibition. I’ve always
found it interesting that most connections in the brain are inhibitory
functions. We have far more information than we can deal with. Most
of what the brain is doing is filtering, tuning stuff out so we can focus
in on things that are relevant.”
Because of this interplay of observation, selective attention and
inhibition, humans are able to achieve higher-order cognition, which
includes creative problem-solving, goal-following, planning and
multitasking. The problem is that all this inhibition and filtering uses
up cognitive fuel. It wallops us. As Stanford neuroscientist Daniel
Levitin points out in The Organized Mind, our brain’s processing
speed is surprisingly slow, about 120 bits per second. For perspective,
it takes 60 bits per second just to understand one person speaking to
us. Directed attention, or voluntary attention, is a limited resource.
When it flags, we make mistakes; we get irritable. Moreover, task-
switching, which is something we do an awful lot of these days, burns
up precious oxygenated glucose from the prefrontal cortex and other
areas of the brain, and this is energy we need for both cognitive and
physical performance. It’s no wonder it feels pretty good to space out
and watch a butterfly. Of course, that requires brain real estate too,
but it’s different real estate, and that’s a key point.
As we neared the trailhead, the brilliant sky contrasted
dramatically with the red cliffs through the front window. A corridor
of green creek bed emerged from a seam in the landscape. “From my
perspective,” Atchley continued, sweeping his hand across the view,
“what this environment is doing to us right now is giving us fewer
choices. And by having fewer choices, your attentional system
functions better for higher-order things. In the office environment,
you’ve got emails, alerts, sounds. That’s a lot of filtering and so it’s
harder to think deeply. Here the filtering requirements are not
demanding so you have the capacity to focus on deeper thought.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, Gazzaley mixed martinis by the rooftop fire pit. If
Kramer is the senior member of Team Moab, Gazzaley is its boy
wonder. At forty-six, his premature bright white hair belies his
youthful face. It’s so incongruous that people sometimes ask him if
he dyes his hair.
“Dye it this color?” he pointed to his head, barking a laugh.
Extroverted and optimistic, Gazzaley is refreshingly unapologetic
about his affection for technology. He believes it is not our curse but
very possibly our salvation. He employs his gadgets with ease and
fluency, from his cameras to the brain-wave monitoring machines and
85-inch high definition screens in his multimillion-dollar laboratory
at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he is designing
and testing “neurological” video games built specifically to increase
cognitive performance in adults. The games, he believes, can help
prevent dementia, treat ADHD, and even make us all better
multitaskers, and he has data to back it up. This is the world we live
in. We might as well get better at it.
Still, as a nature photographer and adventurer, he is loving the
desert. He had his vertical-panorama revelation yesterday, and he had
another spark of insight today in Hunter Canyon. “I had such a rich
experience of flow today,” he told us around the fake campfire. “I was
walking in the sandy canyon. Dave took off in front of me, and I
found myself alone taking pictures of desert flowers. I made myself
receptive to the stimuli around me. It was so bottom-up, moving
through the environment and it was all fitting together. I usually have
trouble not being top-down, but without trying to, I was picking up
things that were beautiful and salient. I realized how natural and
comfortable and smooth it felt to do photography. I’m always
thinking about top-down versus bottom-up, and I usually present it as
conflict, basically, over cognitive control, but the insight was as it
relates to flow and it’s that maybe it happens when these parts of the
brain are in perfect balance. I hadn’t felt it in years and it felt really
good.”
There was more, because his analytical top-down mode was in full
force now. Gazzaley the neuroscientist was back. He had, essentially,
experienced Kaplan’s theory about attentional restoration. The
Queens techie was drinking the Kaplan Kool-Aid, along with the
martinis: “Nature is restorative because it frees up the top-down part
of your brain in a way that allows it to recover. I don’t think you have
to be in nature for this to happen, but I think there’s something
special about nature. It’s what makes it interesting. Nature has this
not totally unique but more powerful ability to capture your attention
in a different way. Evolutionarily, nature is a powerful bottom-up
experience for us.” He paused and then laughed. “Although a lot of
people freak in nature. I’ve seen it countless times.”
Ruth Ann Atchley piped up. “I was not restored while hiking the
fins yesterday. I do not like heights.”
Lisa Fournier apologized for the route.
Strayer: “There are always going to be individual differences.”
Here I couldn’t help thinking of Woody Allen: “I love nature, I just
don’t want to get any of it on me.”
Fournier was thinking. “Nature is pretty novel in lots of ways.
You’re immersed and enriched.”
Dyre, the skeptic: “Maybe it’s the active exploration that’s
important.”
“Yes!” said Jason Watson, a young researcher and associate,
another attention scientist who’d become captivated by the nature
effect and whose shyness dissipated under the night’s half-moon. “It’s
what Kaplan calls mystery.” Watson told us about a recent study he’d
done that largely confirmed Kaplan’s mystery element. He and his
colleagues showed a couple hundred subjects images of nature scenes,
some with flat, predictable trails and some with winding or partly
obscured scenery, the kind of images that compelled the viewers to
want to peek around the corner. Even though the subjects saw the
images very briefly, just a matter of seconds, they remembered the
mysterious scenes better. In other words, there was something about
mystery that improved cognitive recall.
Ruth Ann Atchley saw a good transition point. “Okay, I have one
question: what kind of studies should we do now?”
“What I’d like to know more about is creativity. We can do
cognitive tests, but we also need biomarkers,” said Strayer.
Art Kramer had helped find a beautiful biomarker, the neural
growth factor BDNF, which spritzes the brain like Miracle-Gro during
exercise. Could nature exposure unleash some similar, visible
molecule? Until recently, it’s been hard to see inside the brain in real-
world settings or under more sophisticated lab conditions. Some
studies show a drop in hemoglobin levels (a proxy for blood and
oxygen) in the prefrontal cortex during time in nature. It’s still
debatable where the blood is going instead. At least one MRI study
(using photographs of nature) shows it’s going to parts of the brain
like the insula and the anterior cingulate that are associated with
pleasure, empathy, and unconstrained thinking. By contrast, when
those same subjects viewed urban pictures, more blood traveled to the
amygdala, which registers fear and anxiety.
Strayer would like to know what a brain looks like as it’s getting
restored. Can you see it? Does it look different in the real world
compared to in a lab that uses photographs? After some discussion,
Gazzaley proposed they use EEG—electroencephalography—to
measure brain waves, specifically one called frontal midline theta,
which his lab has found to be a reliable measure of executive-center
engagement. If it quiets down in nature, that could be evidence of
what he experienced on the trail: less top-down, and more bottom-up,
less executive network, more default network. It would indicate a rest
break for the frontal lobes.
“I love it!” Gazzaley said.
They discussed the complications: Strayer prefers field data and
not lab data. He wanted people wearing the caps in real nature, not
just looking at pictures of it in an air-conditioned room. But Kramer
and Gazzaley prefer the controlled environment of the lab. Kramer
would leave Moab with a plan to study whether creativity differed for
people walking on a lab treadmill looking at virtual-reality city
images versus nature images. I made a note to check back.
“It is messy, no doubt about it,” said Strayer of working outside.
“You can study this in the lab, but for the effects to be there, you have
to be in nature. People said we couldn’t measure the effects of driving
and distraction in the real world, because there are so many variables,
but we did it.” Strayer would leave with several experiment ideas: a
walking study in an arboretum measuring creativity, and another
using the EEG on a group in the wilderness. This I would have to see.
Gazzaley had a plan for yet another study. Nature, he saw from his
own Kaplanesque moment of “flow” out on the trail, could be useful.
It could improve not the way we enjoy nature but the way we use
technology. “My practical desire is to understand how to maximize
our brains,” he said. “If I’m going to build software to enhance
cognition, what if I routinely inserted recovery periods in virtual
nature? I’m a fitness buff. You have to rest between sets. Everyone
knows you can’t just blast your brain for hours with video games or
you get diminishing returns. Are all breaks equal? I’m going to try
nature.”
The Atchleys, for their part, would also soon run an experiment to
see if group problem-solving improved among workers outside versus
workers inside.
I’d have to stay tuned. The trip had crystallized for me some
critical questions to keep in mind as I moved ahead. If nature
environments have the potential to change both our emotional brains
and our cognitive brains, how would different doses of nature affect
us? How much of the benefits of nature are really because of what’s
in nature versus simply leaving behind the bad stuff of cities and
workplaces? And, based on what I would learn about our perceptual
systems, how could we improve our normal lives back at home?
For science, I was learning, you have to be patient. But maybe you
can draw a payoff like Gazzaley’s pursuit of an American three-toed
woodpecker in Rocky Mountain National Park. Before the moon set,
he pulled up some of his photographs on his laptop and scrolled
through them for us. The bird was coy, finally poking his spectacular
black-and-white-striped head out of a hole in a tree. But Gazzaley was
ready, camera in hand.
“I had to wait six hours for this fucker,” he said.
Together and apart, the group would be looking at the puzzle of
nature and the brain from many angles. As Paul Atchley put it at the
end of the evening, no doubt inspired by the night sky, the beverages
and a new laser focus in his attentional network, “It’s many fingers
pointed at the moon. If you look at all the different fingers, eventually
you can see where the moon is even though every perspective is
different. There won’t be a single piece of evidence. Science doesn’t
work that way.”
These and other emerging studies would make up the next frontier
in understanding nature’s role in optimizing human potential, many
aided by brain imaging. With more clues about what makes our brains
happy and keeps them running smoothly, that information can be fed
into public policy decisions, urban planning and architectural design.
The research has profound implications for schools, hospitals, prisons
and public housing. Imagine bigger windows, more urban trees,
mandated lie-on-the-grass sessions, minute-long birdsong breaks. Per
Gazzaley’s quest, it might even be possible to construct doses of
nature so palatable and efficient that we hardly notice them. This
approach, of course, is classically Western. Manipulate the
environment. Feel nature without even trying.
As for me, I would be looking for a more East-meets-West
approach. I would come close to finding it in Korea. That country has
wrapped a pervasive wellness philosophy around the senses,
particularly the sense of smell that builds on the work from Japan. It’s
a good place to start the next section, which looks at the immediate
benefits of nearby nature.
FOR THREE YEARS, Park had walked mindfully in these woods every
single day. “I’m one hundred percent sure it is helping me,” said the
ranger, who is in remission. “When I was first diagnosed, I had all
kinds of fear and anxiety. I am happy now. I have zero percent
anxiety. People learn from nature that they can heal. Now it is my
duty to be a bridge between nature and people.” He said he’s grateful
to the leukemia for redirecting his life. It’s hard to say, though,
what’s really helping Park and the many who flock to these places. Is
it the exercise? Park wears a bracelet that measures his steps. He
takes 15,000 a day, about 6 miles. He also believes the forest heals
him, and the power of belief is hard to overestimate.
It also may be contagious. Park is a compelling teacher who wants
to help other people turn away from stress and toward something
more meaningful than the punishing grind of work and study. He
doesn’t force his kids to attend the pervasive after-school schools—
called hagwons—that so many kids slouch off to, forgoing sports,
play and just goofing off. His oldest son now attends a “timber
school” for high school where he learns about forest management.
Park told me he thinks Korea has entered “Peak Stress.” It’s an
interesting idea. Flying out of poverty and through a series of
dictatorships to become one of the wealthiest democracies on the
planet, the nation now boasts the fourteenth-strongest economy in the
world. An incredible 98 percent of South Koreans graduate from
junior college or university, the highest rate in the world. But the
meteoric success has come at a great cost. South Koreans work 2,193
hours per year on average, the highest figure in the OECD. More than
70 percent report their jobs make them depressed, according to a
survey by one of the country’s biggest employers, Samsung.
And the problems aren’t confined to the workforce. Ninety-six
percent of high school students reportedly do not get enough sleep. A
2011 survey found 87.9 percent of them feeling stress “in the past
week.” Teenagers in Japan, China and the United States report half
that level. South Koreans are, according to researchers at Yonsei
University, the unhappiest students in any industrialized nation. In a
country where mental illness is highly stigmatized, South Koreans
have the highest suicide rate in the world.
But now that they’ve achieved some measure of security and
material success, some are actively seeking a happier existence. South
Koreans are buying into the booming spa and cosmetics cultures, and,
increasingly, yearning for the mystical mountains and forests of the
deep Korean past. Since it arrived here in the fourth century,
Buddhism blended nicely with the peninsula’s ancient animistic
shamanism, the idea that natural objects have a spirit. In Korea, one
of the most powerful spirits is the sanshin, the mountain spirit. Trees,
too, have long been venerated as guardians of people and villages.
By the fourteenth century, though, Korean rulers would find in
China-originated Confucianism—with its teachings of regimented
status, societal obligations and an uncompromising work ethic—a
politically convenient philosophy for growing a nation state. There
now exists an uneasy and unequal détente between opposites: a
technology-touting, competitive and hierarchical system on the one
hand and the nature-affiliated spirits-are-everywhere firmament on
the other.
Euny Hong, in her irreverent cultural history of Korea, The Birth
of Korean Cool, explains an ancient proverb, “shin to bul ee,” which
means “body and soil are one.” Not soul, but soil. “It’s a concept that
predates Confucianism or any official organized belief,” she writes,
“which is why this idea seems incongruous with what Seoul looks like
today—jam-packed skyscrapers with very little open space.”
While most Koreans would be uncomfortable with the idea of
psychotherapy, they do nonetheless place great authority on
traditional shamanlike healers, called musok-in. By some estimates,
up to 80 percent of Koreans loosely adhere to shamanism in some
form, often while also identifying as Christians, Buddhists or atheists.
What it means today is that the forest trails are starting to fill up
with pale, urban weekend refugees, not so unlike Sepial and me. After
about an hour and half of leisurely walking, we circled back to the
visitors center. We gamely stuck our extremities back into the
machines for a quick physiology check. I clocked a nice little drop in
my blood pressure, from 111 over 73 to 107 over 61. So far, chalk one
up for Nature. But Sepial’s blood pressure was a few points higher,
and my heart-rate variability data didn’t show much improvement
after the 90-minute walk. Park sat down with us to go over the charts,
which were in Korean, with confounding splashes of dots strewn
across an axis. Looking at Sepial’s data, Park told her that because
she wasn’t used to exercise, the walk had actually stressed her out
physiologically. “You need to exercise more,” he said. It seemed a
logical prescription. Don’t health-care practitioners always say that?
As for me, Park said that while my overall stress levels seem
healthy, my chart indicated that the balance between my sympathetic
nervous system and my parasympathetic nervous system is out of
whack. I know how to amp my system up with exercise and activity,
but I could use more practice damping it down. In other words, Sepial
and I appeared to be opposites. “Meditation could be good for you,”
he said. In more bad news, the HRV machine mysteriously gave a
read on how thick my blood vessels are. Mine were showing some
signs of thickening, and any time the word “thickening” applies to
you, it’s not auspicious. Vessels naturally thicken with age, getting
stiffer and less flexible. They have a harder time delivering oxygen
where it needs to go and making micro adjustments to the nervous
system. “You must control your food and diet,” he said. Okay, then:
more kimchi for me.
Birdbrain
Most people never listen.
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Over the summer, I tried to find a patch of quiet. I spent some time
wearing a portable EEG device on my head in different settings,
trying to get a sense of which kind of places put me in the holy grail
of brain states, the “calm alert” zone prized by Zen masters, surfers
and poets. I was after alpha waves. When electricity in the alpha
wavelength dominates parts of the brain, it’s a sign that you are not
hassled by small distractions, problem-solving or, my peeve, meal
planning. Parenting—any kind of caretaking—is a procession of
small, endless decisions. Too often, I assume the executive function
for the whole family, and I can almost hear my mind stomping out
any rogue alpha waves. It’s the sound of brain fry.
Daily aggravations aside, environmental noise deters alphas
because we have to either pay attention to the intrusion or actively
resist paying attention to it, and that’s work too. I couldn’t quite hit
the alpha zone walking in the city parks near my house, and I couldn’t
even attain it on a leafy, rural road in Maine either, probably thanks to
nearby construction noise, which ended up pissing me off. When my
brain waves were later read by the interpreting software, it fired back
this message: “This indicates that in this state you were actively
processing information and, perhaps, that you should relax more
often!”
Even the software was yelling at me. I wanted to yell back, but
this would be a mistake. There are no alpha waves when you’re mad.
And the maddening truth is, the world is getting louder.
Can you hear it? “Noise” is unwanted sound, and levels from
human activities have been doubling about every thirty years, faster
than population growth. Traffic on roads in the United States tripled
between 1970 and 2007. According to the U.S. National Park Service,
83 percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states sits within 3,500
feet of a road, close enough to hear vehicles. For planes, the figures
are even more dramatic: The number of passenger flights has
increased 25 percent since just 2002, and 30,000 commercial aircraft
fly overhead per day. In 2012, the Federal Aviation Administration
predicted an astounding 90 percent increase in air traffic over the next
twenty years. Human activities in general increase background noise
levels by about 30 decibels. The official word for the human-made
soundscape is the anthrophone.
Stats like those above dismayed Gordon Hempton, a sound
engineer based in Washington State who decided to travel the country
in search of the few remaining quiet places. By his count, the entire
continental United States has fewer than a dozen sites where you can’t
hear human-made noise for at least fifteen minutes at dawn. That’s a
pretty ridiculously low bar. But it is still so out of reach. The quietest
place in the country, Hempton discovered, is a spot in the Hoh
Rainforest at Olympic National Park. If you want to hear the earth
without us, it’s marked by a red stone on a moss-covered log at 47-
degrees 51.959N, 123-degrees 52.221W, 678 feet above sea level. But
get there early; by midday, even there, you can hear overflights a
dozen times per hour. Noise may well be the most pervasive pollutant
in America.
I never thought much about airplane noise until I moved to D.C. I
grew up on the eleventh floor of an apartment building in New York,
where the sounds of the city were mostly muted and charismatic: a
flash of mariachi, a distant ambulance, a summer storm. Out West,
the planes were fewer and farther away. But my neighborhood now is
one of the loudest in the city thanks to flights following the Potomac
River as they roar in and out of Reagan National Airport. Jets fly
overhead at a rate of about one every two minutes starting early in the
morning, with average decibel levels between 55 and 60 but
sometimes spiking much higher (60 decibels is high enough to drown
out normal speech; over 80 can damage hearing).
I knew this moving in. Neighbors assured me I would learn to
ignore the planes. “After a year or so, you don’t hear them anymore,”
they’d said. But it’s been over two years now and I still hear the
planes. They drive me crazy. It’s hard to eat alfresco, impossible to
talk on the phone with the backdoor open. Between the planes and the
routine security surveillance choppers, I feel like I’m in a militarized
zone when I walk near the river. My gaze is drawn up, and I can read
the logo on the fuselages. Sometimes, I can even make out the theme
animal on the Frontier Airlines tail fins. There’s the mustang! It’s
wildlife-viewing, D.C.-style.
Then there are the nettlesome sounds of competitive landscaping:
the parading whines and drones of weed-whackers, lawn-mowers,
leaf-blowers and, if I’m exceedingly unlucky and under deadline,
circular saws. Such are the afflictions of close quarters, and they
aren’t necessarily new. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle didn’t
hear engines while working on his biography of Frederick the Great
from his study in London, but he was made apoplectic by chickens,
carriages and dogs. So maddened was he that he commissioned at
great expense the making of a soundproof room in his attic. It nearly
killed him. It was so airtight that when he lit up for a smoke, he
passed out, only to be saved by the maid.
As Charles Montgomery writes in his book Happy City, “Living
under the flight path of commuter jets is terrible for happiness . . . but
we do not always respond logically to environmental stimulus.”
Right. The logical thing would be to go the hell back to Colorado. My
neighbors aren’t exactly wrong. People can become habituated to
sound, at least partly. We’ve all heard stories of people who say they
can’t sleep if it’s too quiet, or they can’t work apart from a din. Some
writers have apps that replicate the sounds of a coffee shop for when
they are working at home. I know a New Yorker who now lives in the
country, but he plays himself devotionally made recordings of 14th
Street, sirens and all, to fall asleep at night.
I keep hoping this settling into noise will happen to me, that I will
become inured or even nurtured somehow by the city sounds, but it
isn’t happening. In fact, I’ve learned that full habituation is a bit of a
pipe dream. Just because you don’t notice certain noises anymore
doesn’t mean your brain is not on some level responding to them.
Scientists and regulators used to be interested in noise pollution
because of the threat of hearing loss, which is real and happening to
many of us at younger and younger ages. But even at dramatically
lower volumes, noise poses risks far beyond our ear canals. In
fascinating studies, people have been hooked up to electrocardiogram
monitors while sleeping through plane, train and traffic noise.
Whether or not they woke up, their sympathetic nervous systems
reacted dramatically to the sounds, elevating their heart rates, blood
pressure and respiration. In one study that lasted three weeks, the
subjects showed no biological signs of habituating to the noise, and in
another study that lasted for years, the biological effects only got
worse.
THESE DAYS WE might worship absolute quiet, but John Ruskin wrote,
“No air is sweet that is silent; it is only sweet when full of low
currents of under sound—triplets of birds, and murmur and chirps of
insects.” To the extent that nature sounds are soothing to most
humans, three in particular stand out: wind, water and birds. They are
the trifecta of salubrious listening (favorite music and the voices of
loved ones are perhaps the happiest of all, engaging almost every part
of the brain, according to neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin,
in This is Your Brain on Music).
Darwin devoted ten pages to birdsong and six to human music in
The Descent of Man, noting that both have their origins in sexual
selection, the desire to attract mates. As usual, he was correct. The
Brits love birds so much that BBC radio broadcasts a daily ninety-
second spot of birdsong. British Petroleum gas stations recently began
playing birdsong in the bathrooms. “The aim was to create a mental
connection with freshness,” said a newspaper report. Good luck with
that.
There appears to be something to the “freshness” idea. As British
acoustics consultant Julian Treasure put it, birds sing in the morning,
and we associate the sound with alertness and safety, a day when all is
right with the world. This is how we’ve heard birdsong throughout our
evolution. It’s when you don’t hear the birds that something is wrong.
Also, birdsong is stochastic, random and nonrepeating, so our brains
interpret it not as a language but as a kind of background soundtrack.
In fact, birdsong has some uncanny similarities to human-made
music, and its range and technical wizardry might, on some
unconscious level, stimulate our happy-music neurons. The French
avant-garde composer Olivier Messiaen incorporated birdsong into
his works and said of birds: “They are our desire for light, for stars,
for rainbows, and for jubilant song.”
The brown thrasher can sing 2,000 songs. The cowbird has 40
different notes, and a horny chaffinch might sing half a million times
in a season. The Australian lyrebird is the world’s best mimic, and
can imitate chainsaws, car alarms and the click of a camera shutter
(none of which reflects well on its habitat). The melodic hermit
thrush most often sings on a mathematic substrate that follows
harmonic intervals in recognizable pitches. The researcher who
discovered this is named—I kid you not—Emily Doolittle, a
composer at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.
Despite the 300 million years that have passed since birds and
protomammals split from a common ancestor, our brains are
surprisingly similar to the parts of birds’ brains that hear, process and
make language. Humans share more genes governing speech with
songbirds than we do with other primates. This is because humans and
birds coevolved these language centers, both using the same ancient
neural hardware, specifically an area called the arcopalladium in birds
and the basal ganglia in humans, a region also known for regulating
emotion. It’s well recognized that music triggers emotions, but while
much has been made of the ability of Mozart to make us weep,
tremble and rejoice (largely through the release of dopamine in our
mesolimbic reward pathway), birdsong has received far less attention
from neuroscientists.
Nevertheless, our doppelgänger birdbrain neurons may help
explain our primal affiliation to chirps, trills and tweets. In both birds
and humans, the ability to respond emotionally to linguistic and
musical sounds became mission critical for mating, communication
and survival. The people who named Twitter knew what they were
doing. Psych studies using birdsong consistently show improvements
in mood and mental alertness. An experiment at an elementary school
in Liverpool found that students listening to birdsong were more
attentive after lunch than students who didn’t listen. Amsterdam’s
Schiphol Airport plays birdsong in a relaxation lounge that also
features fake trees. People love it. Treasure, the British consultant,
recommends that everyone listen to birdsong at least five minutes a
day. I’ve been playing it on an app while writing this chapter. There’s
deep snow outside my window, but the spring birds are in full force
on my phone. It does feel leavening. And my cat is certainly more
awake.
“What I’m trying to do is figure out why it makes people feel
better,” said British environmental psychologist Eleanor Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe looked more like a high school student than a scientist. She
had long red hair and wore a jean jacket that partially covered up a
tattoo of parrots on her left arm. She admitted she was more of a city
person than a nature person, but, as she put it, “one doesn’t have to be
in nature to be interested in it.” I met her last summer for tea in the
courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum, an excellent example
of a restorative urban space. She opened her laptop, where tracks of
birdsong were sandwiched between The Sopranos and a soul mix.
In her lab, she plays birdsong and asks subjects how they feel.
“The overarching thing I’m finding is that people perceive bird
sounds to be restorative, but it depends on the person, and it depends
on the bird.” Not all birds are loved equally. Many people dislike the
raspy calls of jays and the brashness of crows and vultures. Ratcliffe
launched into a disquisition the way an oenophile speaks of grapes.
“Certain acoustic sounds, quiet, high pitch, bright and smooth are
more restorative than loud and rough,” she said. “The typical
songbird, tweet tweet, the green finch or blackbird, robin, wren, have
musical high trills. They are quite complex and melodious. It might
help distract people from their troubles, but it’s balanced between
distraction and overwork. You want a bird that’s not aggressive but
submissive. Magpies are not restorative.”
RATCLIFFE BELIEVES THAT sound can be restorative, and she’s glad it’s
finally getting some attention in the research, but it’s likely not the
secret weapon of the nature cure. We’re visual creatures, after all, and
staring at a wall listening to headphones can take us only so far. Still,
the lessons of sound can be translated in useful and creative ways.
The city of Phoenix closes iconic South Park to vehicles one day a
month for Silent Sunday. When I was in Korea, I’d gone for a walk
along the Cheonggyecheon stream. “Stream” is a bit of an overreach.
It’s a stream in the way that Orange Julius comes from a tree or the
Space Needle reaches space. The Cheonggyecheon used to be a ragtag
underground ditch until it was unzipped to the world in 2005 as part
of a greening initiative launched by Seoul’s former mayor Lee
Myung-Bak. To flesh it out, water is pumped in seven miles from
another river and recirculated. Planted trees and flowering shrubs in
the stream’s canyon now attract insects and birds. The so-called
“daylighting” of canals is one way for cities to make some nature
visible again. In Seoul, though, one of its main purposes was to create
a new soundscape to compete with the existing one of heavy traffic in
the middle of the central business district.
At the entrance, a sleek waterfall drops down a generous story
from street level, creating a pleasant rushing sound. At the bottom, I
met Hong Jooyoung, a doctoral candidate in architectural acoustics
from Hanyang University who specializes in using water sounds to
obscure traffic noise. We walked along a good part of the three-mile-
long watercourse, dodging other walkers, joggers and picnickers.
Some young women were standing around looking at pigeons on the
bank. It was a good place to hang out. Among its many benefits, the
path here is six degrees cooler than the roadway above in the height of
summer. Only about 20 feet wide, the stream often flows over rocks
and through reeds. It literally burbles and whooshes, its soothing
sounds amplified by the stone walls lining the sunken ribbon of water
and path. Hong explained to me that with these new water features,
it’s the perception of traffic noise that changes. You can still hear the
noise, but you don’t notice it anymore. The traffic here is loud, above
65 decibels, but so is the water. “The creek design maximizes the
sound,” he said. “People don’t think of it as noisy because it’s a nice
noise. They rate this kind of water sound as most favorable.”
I was reminded of something the National Park Service’s Kurt
Fristrup had said, that unless we learn to make cities sound better, we
stand at risk of losing the range of this precious sense. He calls our
tendency to wear earbuds during all hours of the day “learned
deafness.” We are tuning out the real world in favor of our own
personal soundscapes. The cost is we forget how to listen. And we
lose an opportunity for true mental restoration.
“It’s this gift we are born with, to reach out and hear all these
incredible subtle sounds,” he’d said, “and it’s in danger of being lost
in a generational amnesia. Some ears will never get a chance to
develop sensitivity to those sounds.”
Although Seoul’s creek plan initially drew opposition because of
its cost—about $380 million—and the need to reroute an elevated
highway, it is now exceedingly popular, visited by thousands every
day. The mayor went on to become South Korea’s president.
Box of Rain
[When] the myopia had become stationary, change of air—a sea voyage if
possible—should be prescribed.
— HENRY EDWARD JULER, A HANDBOOK OF OPHTHALMIC SCIENCE AND
PRACTICE, 1904
She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here
are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart. Oh, Lucy!
— E. M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW
One of the serious risks of city living are other drivers. Although
our brains have long been hardwired to fear snakes and spiders, they
are remarkably less attuned to the dangers of two-ton vehicles.
Instead of dreaming about things that slither in the night, we really
should be having nightmares about Yellow Cab, but the Freudians
wouldn’t have nearly as much fun. Two years ago, my seventy-five-
year-old father was walking to work in downtown Silver Spring,
Maryland, when he was struck by a car traveling 35 miles per hour.
The accident was probably a combination of inattentive walking and
inattentive driving, although my father was found solely at fault
because he wasn’t in the crosswalk.
In the intensive care unit at Bethesda Suburban, the nurses were
shaking their heads. This was the third pedestrian accident they’d
seen that week. In D.C. alone, there are over 800 such accidents a year
and the number is rising despite more speed cameras. Dad suffered
seven broken bones and a traumatic brain injury, and nobody could
predict how well, or if, he’d recover. At first, he looked good, still tan
and strong in the starchy, space-age hospital unit as though he’d
mistakenly landed on the wrong stage set, but that soon changed. He
was in terrible pain, unable to eat, and very confused. He couldn’t
understand language and he was capable of muttering only the phrase
“condo fee” over and over. He didn’t know where he was and he kept
trying to pull his various tubes out and bolt. He was, in the
unexpected lingo of the hospital, “an elopement risk.”
I’d already lost one parent and I didn’t want to lose another. After
two weeks in the ICU, he was transferred to a rehabilitation hospital
known for achievements in neurology. Because of its high
concentration of medical researchers, facilities and experience with
everyone from returning veterans to gunshot victims, Washington,
D.C., is an excellent place to have a brain injury. The belief is that if
you rehab early and hard, you can recover much function.
This is the man who taught me to love nature, to cross rivers by
jumping on rocks, to lean my weight out while scampering down a
boulder, to tack a sunfish and to steady a canoe. This is the man who,
even in New York City, would scurry us up to the bleak, tar-covered
roof to watch the orange sun dip beyond the Hudson River. Every year
for Christmas, he made me a book about our wilderness trips the
previous summer. They were filled with grainy images of river rapids
and rock cliffs. The one from 1978 is titled “Adventurous.” In his
acknowledgments, he calls me out. “This is specially written for her.
It is printed in a limited edition with only one copy.” For a long time
these books were sort of painful in an embarrassing way for me to
read. My father’s earnestness, his sentimentality, my eye-rolling
adolescence. But reading them now, I find they are full of insight into
our divorced family and the role that the natural world played in his
mental landscape.
In 1979, I was twelve and Dad was in the midst of a difficult
relationship with a girlfriend. We spent a couple of weeks paddling
the wilderness lakes around the Canada-Minnesota border. A picture
from that trip shows us sitting on a broad boulder by the shore,
sharing a huge loaf of bread. I am wearing my new Swiss Army knife
on a lanyard around my waist. My father, deep in his Grape Nuts
phase, is tan and lithe, bearded, long-haired and shirtless. “This year
more than ever finding extraordinary solace in these odysseys with
my daughter,” he wrote that year. “Early in the trip, my head was still
full of dilemmas to be resolved. I was less accessible, more quick to
anger. Yet as the events of the trip developed, my anxieties became
less severe and I started to feel some measure of balance. I felt a
peace such as I had not known for many months. What is it about me
and water?”
Dad grew up climbing trees in Richmond, Virginia, and tending
the family’s victory garden. Blessed with good health his whole life,
he was never long without walks or other adventures in nature. Now
this had changed. There are few places farther removed from natural
landscapes than a typical hospital room. Because I was researching
this book at the time of his accident, I knew enough to request a bed
near a window for his long stay in rehab.
I had, for example, come across Florence Nightingale’s famous
nursing textbook from 155 years ago: “It is the unqualified result of
all my experience with the sick, that second only to their need of fresh
air is their need of light,” she wrote. “It is a curious thing to observe
how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly
as plants always make their way towards the light.” I’d read Oliver
Sacks’s account of recovering from a serious leg injury after he’d
fallen down a cliff in Norway while being chased by a bull (not all
writers live such exciting lives). After many weeks in the hospital he
finally went outside, where he would “fondle the living plants. Some
essential connection and communion with nature was re-established
after the horrible isolation and alienation I had known. Some part of
me came alive.” Even if my father couldn’t name the objects he could
see, the sunlight and the trees and the birdsong might somehow reach
him.
We’ve looked at smell and sound. Now it’s time to tackle our
strongest sensory system for processing the world around us: the
visual. Its impact on our emotional and physiological states can also
be immediate and powerful. One of the first people to study the health
consequences of a room with a view was psychologist and architect
Roger Ulrich, the researcher who wondered in the mid-1980s why
people went out of their way to drive on tree-lined roads and who
measured alpha brain waves in subjects looking at nature slides. After
those initial, promising results, he was curious about effects in the
real world, so he turned to a suburban hospital in Pennsylvania. Like
Sacks, he knew from personal experience that nature could play a role
in healing. As a child, he suffered recurring bouts of painful kidney
disease. During long periods at home in bed, he drew great,
inexplicable comfort from a pine tree outside his window. Later, as a
young scientist, he wanted to test his hypothesis that nature views
could reduce patient stress and lead to better clinical outcomes. He
was aware of a study from 1981 showing that prisoners in Michigan
whose cells faced rolling farmland and trees (instead of a barren
courtyard on the other side of the facility) had fewer sick-call visits
overall.
Ulrich examined the records of gallbladder-surgery patients over
half a dozen years, some of whom had been assigned to rooms with a
window view of trees and some who looked out onto a brick wall. He
found that the patients with the green views needed fewer
postoperative days in the hospital, requested less pain medication and
were described in nurses’ notes as having better attitudes. Published
in Science in 1984, the study made a splash and has been cited by
thousands of researchers. If you’ve ever noticed a nature photograph
on the ceiling or walls of your dentist’s exam room, you have Ulrich
to thank.
“YOUR GSR DID not go down,” he said, disappointed. “It stayed where it
was. Maybe that was the motion sickness. I apologize. The technology
is getting better for that, so you don’t feel like you’re watching
through someone else’s eyeballs.” I wasn’t alone, he explained. He
had to throw out 30 percent of his data because of subjects
approaching the puke zone. This has been a major hang-up in the
development and marketing of consumer VR. “The motion sickness is
due to the technology being old,” he said. “It’s being solved by better
displays that don’t have that ghosting. When you turn your head
quickly, you’ll notice edges blur.”
Yes I did. Bummer. But I was also secretly a little proud. I was
one of those remaining holdouts for whom only the authentic
experience will do. My skepticism for the virtual approach carried
over to Valtchanov’s app, called EnviroPulse, which was still in beta
testing. A bit like a magic kettle, you put an image in, such as a
window view, and watch a number come out predicting your
emotions. Can’t we predict our own responses to a particular view?
Obviously not, responded Valtchanov, although politely. If so, why
would we build such ugly cities and suburbs, schools and hospitals?
It’s not the views we mischaracterize, it’s our responses to them. We
walk right past magnificence all the time, not just because we’re
busy, or because we don’t see it, but because we don’t realize what
it’s capable of doing to our brains. Valtchanov is here to help. He
envisions a Yelp-like, crowd-powered app that can make
recommendations for the most relaxing outcrop in Central Park or the
best route to take to work. “Instead of looking for food you can look
for happiness,” he said.
Here’s how it works: You hold your phone up to a scene, or a
photograph, and the app puts it through a series of algorithms to judge
its restorative potential. Natural images contain statistics. Fractals, as
Valtchanov explained, are just one of them. Color is important, as is
saturation, shapes (humans prefer rounded contours to straight lines),
the complexity of the contours, and luminescence (we rate brighter,
more saturated colors as more pleasurable). All of these visual
properties have been studied over the years for their emotional
weight, and these data feed the algorithms. For example, it’s well
known that the colors red and orange excite or agitate people (and
make us lustful and hungry, as purveyors of fast food well know),
while blues, greens and purples tend to relax us. The human eye is
well designed to respond immediately to color. In our retinas, we
have three color-sensing types of cone cells primed to pick up reds,
blues and greens, and those cones enjoy a direct line to the brain’s
visual cortex, a spot of geography in the back of the head. Most
mammals possess only two types of cones (and can’t distinguish
between red and green), but primates, being the visual monopolists
we are, are special in this regard (we have three cones). But not overly
special. Some creatures, like birds and butterflies, have five cones,
enabling them to see technicolor infrareds and ultraviolets. The
mantis shrimp trumps us all, sporting somewhere between twelve and
sixteen cones. God knows what they see, but it must be trippy.
Colors help us spot and distinguish foods and notice things out of
the ordinary. Red pops out at us because we have more cone cells
dedicated to picking up this color, and in many cultures, red was the
earliest color given a name after black and white. Since red makes us
vigilant and energized, we walk faster down red corridors than blue
ones. As the English philosopher Nicholas Humphrey has said, “If
you want to make a point, say it in red.” When Olympic boxers and
martial artists wear red, they win more often. But pink, interestingly,
has the opposite effect, weakening athletes, making prisoners less
aggressive (hence the color known as drunk tank pink) and pacifying
psychiatric patients. In a study where agitated hospital patients looked
at a blue light, their tremors subsided.
Based on the literature on sensory perception, Valtchanov’s app
gives blue the highest score of all. Predators tend not to be green or
blue. Biophilia proponents would argue we’ve learned to associate
these colors with life-giving, healthy ecosystems full of plants
(green), clean water (blue) and expansive reflection (sky azures,
ocean teals). Since we all live under that sky and drink its offerings,
these hues may instill feelings of universality and shared humanity.
Similarly, as John Berger writes in The Sense of Sight, “That we find
a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we
are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life
would lead us to believe.”
I’m drawn to the rich intersections of culture and science to be
found in color, but it’s spatial frequency that gets Valtchanov most
excited. He’s convinced it’s this—regardless of the fractal content—
that unlocks the doors to paradise. Spatial frequency captures the
complexity of contours, shadows and shapes in a scene or image. We
prefer images that are easier and faster to understand.
In the app, straight and jagged lines are rated very low on the
restoration scale compared to smooth and rounded ones. “Urban
jagged edges are not so good for you,” said Valtchanov. But like
Taylor, he believes there’s a Goldilocks sweet spot of complexity, not
too busy and not too boring. For his Ph.D., Valtchanov used an eye
tracking machine to parse how people looked at scenes. He found that
while the eyes tend to linger lazily over nature scenes, urban scenes
provoke many more rapid “fixations,” and more blinking, indicating
that the eyes—and brain—are working harder to decode them. These
places demand our attention.
From his research, Valtchanov believes easy-to-process scenes
trigger the release of natural opiates in the brain. Other studies have
shown that images we love activate a primitive part of the brain
called the ventral striatum (strongly linked to deep emotions and
rewards that motivate our behavior) as well as the opioid-rich
parahippocampus—the same region Taylor found stimulated in
subjects viewing fractals. When the poet and writer Diane Ackerman
writes of craving the “visual opium” of a sunset, she is not being as
metaphorical as she thinks. According to Valtchanov, nature makes us
happy because of a neural mechanism in our ventral visual pathway
that is tuned to a mid-level frequency range like a clear radio signal.
When it finds it, happy molecules flow.
This is the brain spot Valtchanov wants to target with his app. To
show me how it works, we pulled up a bunch of images on the
Internet. We held up the phone to the photographs and watched as a
small bar on the image moved like a thermometer from green (good)
to white (neutral) to red (stressful). The app will also give the image
an absolute score of restorativeness between 0 and 100 and code them
to these colors. Some of the ratings were predictable. Forest vale:
very green. Lake: ditto. Urban intersections: red. Simple buildings:
neutral. Shanghai skyline under blue sky: neutral. But when I pulled
up a snowy meadow flanked by a snow-covered peak, the kind you
would see on a travel brochure for the Rockies, the app went to
reddish.
“What’s up with that?” I asked.
“Well, it’s jagged and it’s white and the trees look dead, because
it’s winter.”
“But it’s beautiful,” I said. “When I’m skiing in places like this,
I’m definitely in my happy place.”
“The app isn’t taking into account your activity or endorphins or
oxygen to your brain. I’m just analyzing the face value of the
environment. According to Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, people
would react strongly to dead trees.”
“But these aren’t dead. It’s just winter. It’s pretty.”
“There’s a difference between pretty and psychologically
valuable.” He adjusted my hands in front of the image. “If you point
the camera a bit upwards to get more of the blue sky, it will rate
better.” He shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s perfect.”
Garden of Hedon
Clearings. That’s what I needed. Slowly my brain righted itself into spaces
unused for months.
— HELEN MACDONALD
In the Gaelic poem “Hallaig,” by Sorley MacLean, a man is forced to
leave his favorite grove of trees for America during the land
clearances of the nineteenth century. This poem, worshiped by so
many in Scotland, speaks directly to the national soul in its tragedy,
sentiment and land-love. “I’m finding it difficult not to cry when I
think about it, and I’m English,” an ecologist named Peter Higgins
told me. The landscape here, as in Finland, is a unifying force, rooted
in the bones of people who grew up with it. It’s also rooted in the
Gaelic language itself. There’s the word weet, to rain slightly, and
williwaw, a sudden, violent squall, and wewire, to flit about as foliage
does in wind, and that’s just the W’s. How perfect is this: crizzle, “the
sound and action of open water as it freezes”?
For all that landed pride, though, Scotland is a country divided in
ways that places like Finland and South Korea are not. It is divided
not just over the perennial question of whether to cleave from
England. The urban poor are unmoored from the land, and from
Scotland’s deep culture of resilience. Some would argue the two are
related. Consequently, the country’s attitude toward nature has a more
desperate tinge; the survival of a culture and of a people are in play.
The idea of spending more time outdoors is emerging as an important
tool for regaining health and sanity already lost.
Nowhere is the country’s social divide more evident than in
Glasgow. Upon arriving, I was immediately struck by the down-and-
out vibe just below my hotel. Edinburgh is all lovingly preserved
stone architecture, uni students rushing about, tourists buying tweed,
and Harry Potter fans taking selfies in front of the Elephant House
café, where J. K. Rowling did some scribbling. But downtown
Glasgow recalls the Bowery of the 1930s: sleeveless drunks in the
middle of the day, young people smoking sullenly on the streets,
Here, the underclass is largely white, hopped up, and pissed off.
Parts of Greater Glasgow face the lowest life expectancies in all
of the European Union. In some neighborhoods a man can expect to
live to 54, while 12 miles away he will live to 82. Sixty percent of the
city’s excess deaths are triggered by just four things—drugs, alcohol,
suicide and violence. Alcohol-related deaths increased fourfold
between 1991 and 2002. The main cause: economic disparities driven
by four generations of unemployment following the dismantling of
manufacturing and mining in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s this divide that gets Richard Mitchell, an English
epidemiologist at the University of Glasgow, up in the morning.
While the Finnish and Japanese nature studies targeted the educated
middle class, Mitchell is looking at the beaten-down poor. He’s spent
years researching effective messaging for preventing alcoholism and
obesity. Now, though, he’s turned to the environment itself. Long
fascinated by why some places breed healthy people and some places
don’t, he was intrigued by research in the Netherlands to start looking
at maps of green space. Dutch studies had shown remarkable mental
and physical health benefits of living within half a mile of green
space, including reductions in diabetes, chronic pain and even
migraines. Mitchell wondered if one of the main reasons for the
association was simply exercise.
This assumption makes sense. When we are out in nature, we are
generally self-propelled, breathing in oxygen, liberating our lungs and
our cardiac capillaries from their usual cramped, desk-hunched
configurations, and arresting, temporarily, the slow backward death
march of our telomeres. Exercise as a cure for all things has been so
drilled into the public health establishment that it crowds out
everything else, with the possible exception of quitting smoking and
washing hands.
So Mitchell read the first wave of large European studies about
the restorative effects of nature with a great deal of eye rolling. Those
studies, published in the early 2000s, linked nearby greenery to
everything from longer lives and fewer chronic diseases to higher-
birthweight babies. There were simply too many confounds, as he put
it. How could any scientist possibly attribute health to nature when
the people most likely to be near nature were already healthy, already
exercising, already relatively wealthy, and so on? Take Mitchell
himself: he grew up tromping around the moors near Exeter in the
1980s with his mum and dad. He read National Geographics in the
attic, played bass guitar and enjoyed an early form of geocaching
outdoors called letterboxing. His parents suggested he become a
scientist, so he did. It would be as preposterous to say it was the
windy fens that made him a success as it would be to credit his
favorite ham sammies.
Beyond the confounds, “It’s easier to understand exercise than
nature and trees,” he said. The neuroscience is bomb-proof on
exercise. Physical activity changes the brain to improve memory and
to slow aging; it improves mood and lowers anxiety; in children, it
increases the capacity to learn; some studies show it is as effective as
antidepressants for alleviating mild depression without the unwanted
side effects. By contrast, our collective physical inertia, credited with
1.9 million deaths worldwide annually, is new to our species and
getting worse. In preindustrial times, we expended about 1,000
kilocalories per day on physical activity; now we expend an average
of about 300.
What changed Mitchell’s mind, gradually, was reading the studies
from Japan that showed lower stress among forest walkers but not
city walkers. There were also some studies showing that people who
lived near parks and green areas were healthier, even though they
didn’t necessarily exercise in them. There was something else going
on. And that something else had the potential to make a difference in
people’s lives.
But he still didn’t discount the role of exercise. Time in nature, as
the structure of this book suggests, appears to have a dose curve. Five
minutes is good; a thirty-minute stroll is better. When you combine
exercise and nature, the effects get bigger. “Maybe it’s just additive.
But maybe it’s more than that,” he said. To show me, he invited me to
join him for some rambling, the favorite national pastime, especially
when it involves drinking whiskey.
DOWN FROM OUR ramble and back in the garret, Mitchell showed me
some bright statistical graphs. In a study that he and colleague Frank
Popham published in the Lancet, they compared early mortality and
disease (in those under age sixty-five) in England with neighborhood
green space (defined as “open, undeveloped land with natural
vegetation including parks, forests, playing fields and river
corridors”). It was a huge study, combing records of 40 million
people. “We quite like death as outcome,” quipped Mitchell. “We
know if they’re dead something is wrong with them.”
In the greener neighborhoods, death rates were lower for everyone
after adjusting for income. Notably, though, deaths were not down for
lung cancer, which is not a stress-related cancer and was correctly
predicted not to be associated with green space. Cardio deaths,
however, were down 4 to 5 percent, which is a big deal given the large
population size. But when the researchers looked specifically at death
and disease per income level, some interesting patterns emerged. The
research showed that income-related health disparities were greatest
in areas with the least green. Here, poor people were twice as likely to
die as their rich neighbors. In the greenest areas, though, poorer
people did relatively much better, starting to catch up to the longer
lives of the rich. In other words, there was something protective about
the greenery for the most deprived people, either by providing more
areas for exercise or by otherwise buffering poverty-related stress.
It’s important to issue the standard caveat here; although the study
was very large and carefully parsed, it’s a cross-sectional study, not a
case-control study, meaning it captures a moment in time, making it
hard to say with certainty that it was green space and not something
else about those neighborhoods causing these effects. So to learn
more, Mitchell later analyzed maps, neighborhood services (not just
parks but transportation, shops, cultural amenities, and so on) and
mental health data from 21,000 residents of 34 European countries,
which he published in 2015 in the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine.
“Only one neighborhood service seemed to have a link with
inequalities in mental well-being: green, recreational services,” he
said. “In fact, inequality in mental well-being among those with the
best access to recreational, green areas was about 40 percent less than
those with the worst access.” This finding would have thrilled
Olmsted; the poorest people were the most helped. Parks indeed
appeared to be a social leveler. Mitchell has his own phrases for these
green spaces: they are “equigenic,” and “disruptors of inequality.”
But a weird conundrum emerged. When Mitchell turned his
attention to Scotland, the pattern wasn’t as noticeable. The poorest of
the poor were not accessing green space at all, even when it was all
around, and Glasgow, as we’ve seen, is bloody green. Its name means
Dear Green Place. But the woodlands near public-housing estates had
been neglected, trashed and taken over by ruffians. A favorite park
pastime is wheeling in green garbage bins (not the blue ones, they
wouldn’t do), lighting them on fire and then inhaling the fumes. Not
surprisingly, these emerald areas were actually sources of stress. Jane
Jacobs anticipated this in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, in which she assailed most city parks as
places that “exaggerate the dullness, the danger, the emptiness.” Her
solution was to throw the baby out altogether, to pave over the parks.
Streets and sidewalks, not parks, were the life of the city, she argued.
(She was not able to foretell the disappearance of children from
sidewalks and the astonishing rise of obesity and chronic diseases.)
Mitchell, on the other hand, saw a failure of civic community.
Here was an opportunity for public-health experts to make a
difference. And so they are trying. The Scottish government has
newly embraced some radical policies. One is cleaning up the
woodlands to reinforce medical and mental-health treatment for
stressed populations. Another policy, the National Walking Strategy,
encourages communities to improve signed trails, organize health
walks and otherwise get people off their duffs. It can be a challenging
proposition. Consider the scene from Trainspotting in which Renton
says, “We’re colonized by wankers. We couldn’t even find a decent
race to be colonized by. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, and no
amount of fresh air is ever going to change that.” But change they’ll
try.
Government guidelines for the Dear Green Place and beyond state
that everyone should have access to safe woodlands within 500 meters
of their doorstep. Because for green space to be used, it has to be
close. To accomplish this, the country is on a tree-planting and
woodland-sprucing-up craze, aiming to increase the percentage of
Scotland covered by woodland from 17 to 25 percent. Access to
nature is a new national indicator for health in Scotland, and if you
squint your eyes and try to imagine the U.S. Congress passing such a
standard, you can appreciate just how remarkable this is.
Scotland is so committed to the idea of salvation in the woods,
walking or otherwise, that it’s underwriting a program called
Branching Out to provide mental-health care outdoors. Kevin
Lafferty, the health and recreation advisor for Forestry Commission
Scotland, invited me to come watch it in action, which is how I came
to be molding a clay face onto an oak tree with a group of ex-felons
and addicts. The science-based concept is that three hours per week
for twelve weeks in a woodland program can reduce symptoms of
depression and increase sociability, physical exercise and self-esteem.
Sometimes you meet someone who so easily wears a career, who
seems so fulfilled, so unusually capable and perfectly matched to his
work that it’s clear it’s a higher calling. Two such men are Tom Gold
and Richard Bolton. Gold works for the Forestry Commission’s
recreation department, teaching skills like shelter-building to
Branching Out participants, and Bolton is a kind of local park ranger,
employed by a massive public-housing estate called Cassiltoun
outside Glasgow. On the drive to the Cassiltoun woods, Gold kept the
windows wide open on the freeway. “Sorry, can’t quite get my head
around air-conditioning,” he’d said as we bombed down the highway.
Tall and wide in a wood-chopping-champion way, Gold had to
hunch in the sedan. It was much easier to picture him lumbering
through the hills. “My big specialty is bushcraft, the sort of art of
making the outdoors a more comfortable place without compromising
the resource,” he said. “Food, fire, shelter, there are many ways you
can achieve or acquire those things, leaving the place exactly as you
found it. It’s different from survival training, with all the camouflage,
traps, gear, weapons and a generally less healthy attitude toward the
environment. That’s obviously not what we’d do with these guys
anyway,” he said, referring to the participants, many of whom had
recently emerged from institutions. Gold has spent much of his life in
the space that intersects mental health and the environment, first
working as a leader for a young offenders program in the Arizona
wilderness and later in a secure psychiatric facility in Scotland. They
were opposite ends of the containment spectrum. In Arizona, he tried
to convince the boys that making fire with flint and steel was more
reliable than their lighters. “To demonstrate, I inhaled a cigarette and
nearly fainted dead on the spot.” He saw remarkable changes in the
boys, but many returned to gangs once they got back home. “I
challenge anyone that age not to get back into it, to resist what all
their friends are doing,” he said.
In the psychiatric hospital, “nobody was allowed to set foot
outside the fence,” said Gold. “If it was possible to make a recovery
in a nature-based program, that was not on the agenda.”
Branching Out, he hopes, can provide both the short-term benefits
of a “hoods in the woods” program with the long-term behavioral
modifications of more classical therapy. Since its inception in 2007,
Branching Out has run some 700 participants through the program,
which includes activities such as walking, bushcraft, woodland arts,
trail maintenance and birding. The idea is to help people transition
from institutions to living more independently. It’s been particularly
successful in promoting exercise and increasing well-being in the
sickest participants.
“We call it ecotherapy,” said Gold. “I prefer the term ‘adventure
therapy,’ but it makes some people nervous they’ll get eaten to death
by mosquitoes while wearing a scratchy wet jumper.” Branching Out
provides transport, Wellies and waterproofs as needed, and all
requisite snacks. It has a long waiting list.
We pulled off the highway and drove up to the old Cassiltoun
estate carriage house, where we met ranger Bolton, a small, easy-
going man with an air of unhurried competence. He explained that
Cassiltoun is home to 13,000 welfare recipients. The unemployment
rate here is 39 percent. Drug problems afflict 13 percent of residents
and mental- health disorders strike at nearly twice the national
average.
But Bolton, who has a background in ecology, thinks these woods
can help. He led us some distance into the forest. Although it was
sunny and leafy, vestiges of the woodland’s delinquent past remained.
(In this, the forest is not so different from its users, who retain an air
of recent breakage.) I’m not used to seeing tree graffiti, for example.
“You should have seen it before,” he said. In the three years he’s
worked here, he’s cleared overgrown trails and hauled out 120 tons of
trash, including a bus shelter that (along with wheelie bins) people
burn to get high. “No wonder they die younger,” he said.
To help convey a sense of safety, he often takes classes of
schoolchildren here. He’s helped organize 108 different cultural and
educational events in the past year, led evening health walks and
sponsored park worker training. Of the housing residents who have
trained with him, 70 percent went on to find permanent employment.
He is like Puck: mixing everyone up together in the forest of delights
and trusting they’ll go back home all sorted out. Like the forest
therapists in Korea, Bolton is part naturalist, part social worker, part
mythmaker. It’s a job description that didn’t used to exist, because it
didn’t need to. We once had a familiar relationship with nature; we
knew it on a first-name basis. But now we need professionals to help
us reacquaint ourselves with the woods. Soon we may need teachers
to remind us how to converse face-to-face. Like a lactation consultant
or the people who show us how to bake bread on YouTube, Bolton is a
broker in cultural salvage.
At the moment, that meant gargoyles. The small group of
depressives, petty criminals and former addicts had assembled on the
trail, and Bolton was demonstrating how to make “green men” out of
clay and paste them to a tree. The criminal and psychiatric
backgrounds of the participants were not revealed to Gold and Bolton.
Their job was to work in the present. Bolton kept up an affable
monologue as he scurried about. “Along the way I just collected a few
wee bits, leaflets; I can start pulling them off and using the shapes,
like these sycamore shapes and leaves. Oi! Here’s a holly leaf.” He
was picking them off the ground like a discerning rooster. “The good
thing about temporary art, if you don’t like it you can start again.
You’ll notice some of the leaves have quite hairy textures, some
smooth. Should I get more color?”
An older man in a yellow windbreaker said, laconically, “Yep.”
Bolton brushed past a tree dusted with shimmering confetti. “A local
nursery uses this as a faerie tree,” explained Bolton. “They get a bit
heavy-handed with the glitter. This is a lime leaf; it has a nice small
point. Woodlands can be your inspiration.”
The group gathered around to watch him make a pointy clay nose
and fern mustache. Some of the participants looked baleful, some
giddy. Their slickers hung loosely and askew against bodies that had
gone slack. For many, this would be their first time out of the house
all week. But they were obliging. They were six weeks in, halfway;
they knew the drill. One man in his early twenties, pudgy with a
mohawk, wearing a saggy blue sweatshirt, told me he goes in more
for the bush skills than the art. “I like making fires and camping,” he
told me. He used to do that with his grandfather, when he was a child.
He told me he had recently been released from a hospital, that he had
scars in the back of his neck. He was glad to be out doing things like a
regular bloke. He grabbed a fistful of pine needles and patted them
into clay for eyebrows.
Everyone seemed absorbed. It was fun. Making temporary art was
a way to be both together and in your own space without high stakes.
We admired each other’s gargoyles, offering nods and murmurs. The
participants, like the gargoyles themselves, represented a wide range
of age, color and affect. They were ready for a snack. Gold took over,
pulling out an enormous metal pot called a Kelly Kettle. We watched
as he demonstrated how to spark a small twiggy fire, first with a bow-
like implement out of Sherwood Forest, and when that didn’t work,
with flint and cotton balls. It was not, let it be said, as speedy as using
a Bic. Eventually, he scooped the burning twigs into a ring around the
kettle. It boiled the water surprisingly fast. We took tea and biscuits,
because that’s what Scots do, even in the forest. Many people pulled
out cigarettes, because that’s what Glaswegians do. They would go
home nicely tired, pleased that they’d survived a social outing
without any big miscues, looking forward to next week.
For programs like this, the social piece is a large part of it. As
Gold put it, “if you’re returning to the mainstream after a long period
of treatment for mental health, you’re not going to go to Queen Street
station to see how you get on. You’re going to do it in a group where
any problems can be examined in a gentle way by people who know
only too well where you’ve been.”
Rambling On
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of
us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The idea of solvitur ambulando (in walking it will be solved) has
been around since St. Augustine, but well before that Aristotle
thought and taught while walking the open-air parapets of the
Lyceum. It has long been believed that walking in restorative settings
could lead not only to physical vigor but to mental clarity and even
bursts of genius, inspiration (with its etymology in breathing) and
overall sanity. As French academic Frederic Gros writes in A
Philosophy of Walking, it’s simply “the best way to go more slowly
than any other method that has ever been found.” Jefferson walked to
clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to
think. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in
Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I
cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
Scotland clearly relishes its twin legacy of brains and long-
striding. On the wall of the National Museum of Scotland hangs a
quote from James Watt, inventor of the steam engine (yes, the steam
engine) in 1765: “It was in the Green of Glasgow . . . when the idea
came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush
into a vacuum. . . . I had not walked further than the Golf-house when
the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” Nikola Tesla, too,
invented a revolutionary engine while on a long walk in a Budapest
park. Little did these men know how transport engines would hasten
the demise of pedestrian life.
Anticipating the exercise/nature debate, Thoreau opined, “. . . the
walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise . . .
but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.” He also wrote, in
his essay “Walking,” “I think that I cannot preserve my health and
spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly
more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and
fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”
Walt Whitman was an even stronger evangelist on the topic,
exhorting men to be more perfect and more manly by striding around
outside. “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of
fortune, idler, the same advice,” he wrote. “Up! The world (perhaps
you now look upon it with pallid and disgusted eyes) is full of zest
and beauty for you, if you approach it in the right spirit! Out in the
morning!”
If for them nature provided mental clarity and adventure, for
Wordsworth it provided sanity itself. Nature, as he declared in
“Tintern Abbey,” was “the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my
heart.”
It’s worth taking a short perambulation to the poet’s sensibility,
not just because he was the Romantic Age’s greatest advertisement
for both Scotland and for perambulating (he is estimated to have
walked some 180,000 miles in his lifetime, composing poems as he
went), but because he wrote so often about the ways in which his own
mental health was bound to nature, and he was the first to do so in a
thoroughly modern voice. Dismissing Wordsworth as a daffodil-
gazing nature poet would be a mistake. His greatest defender of recent
times has been the late Yale scholar Geoffrey Hartman, who argued
that Wordsworth essentially invented modern poetry (with a small
assist from Coleridge), and in so doing saved the art form altogether.
I’m fascinated by how Wordsworth intuited the neuroscience in both
psychology and cognition. We forget today that poets were the
philosophers of their time, and that the good ones changed the course
of history.
Wordsworth was a child of trauma. His mother died when he was
eight and his father when he was thirteen. He was sent off to live with
unsympathetic relatives. Money was tight and the siblings lived apart.
It’s hard to overstate the stress of these events, and at a critical time
in the development of the poet’s psyche. Hartman’s own history
followed a similar trajectory. In 1939, at the age of nine, he and
dozens of other boys were plucked from a Jewish school in Frankfurt
and sent to live in an outbuilding on a country estate in England. He
remained there for six years until the war was over, when he was
finally able to reunite with his destitute mother in New York.
Hartman celebrated and summarized one of Wordsworth’s central
themes: “Nature does everything to prepare you, to make you
immune, or to gentle the shock. He doesn’t say there is no shock, or
surprise, but that nature aims at a growth of the mind which can
absorb or overcome shock.”
A few months before Hartman died in 2016, I called him up. In his
mid-eighties, he was still living in New Haven. I had taken a class
with him in Romantic poetry at Yale more than two decades before. I
wanted to see if he could once again help me through some of the
material. Mostly, though, he wanted to talk about what Wordsworth
meant to him all those lonely years ago, during his own period of
shock. “I think the comfort of nature and the comfort of enjoying
poetry and being encouraged to read, including especially
Wordsworth, certainly helped to make my exile a little bit more
tolerable,” he explained. “I hadn’t enjoyed nature before England. . . .
So going to England and reading Wordsworth reversed my sense of
things.” Perhaps it was inevitable that Hartman would be the one to
rehabilitate Wordsworth’s reputation in postwar academe.
As Hartman reminded me, Wordsworth made the perceiving self
central to perception. Nature was meaningful precisely because of
how it “interfused” with the mind, forming the basis for imagination.
This is a central theme in the first book of The Recluse, a long
autobiographic poem written in 1798. “How exquisitely the individual
Mind/. . . to the external World/Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too
—/. . . The external World is fitted to the Mind.” And sitting on the
banks of the River Wye, the poet marveled at how “an eye made quiet
by the power / Of harmony” offered relief from “the fever of the
world.” Nature had certainly offered that relief to Hartman, and I
imagine it may have in his final months as well.
Wordsworth is sometimes credited with launching the idea of
tourism, but at least equal credit should go to his sister, Dorothy, who
slogged many, many miles with him and wrote Recollections of a
Tour Made in Scotland in 1803. It’s a great read, not only because it
depicts Coleridge as wet and cranky, but because it recounts things
like eating boiled sheep’s head with its hair singed off. Wrote
Dorothy Wordsworth: “Scotland is the country above all others that I
have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve out his own
pleasures. There are so many inhabited solitudes, and the
employments of the people are so immediately connected with the
places where you find them.”
Both siblings were inveterate Romantics, reacting against the
march of industry and commerce into pastoral landscapes. While
cities had once offered excitement and revolutionary ideas to a young
William, he later came to believe that they embodied disillusionment
and stagnation, a “savage torpor.” Far from making people more
creative, the din and grime stifled their dreams, or at least his.
The Wordsworths were contemporaries of Jane Austen, whose
Pride and Prejudice appeared in 1813. The notion of walking as an
expression of good breeding and good health was in full swing, but it
also enabled an outlet of independence rare for a woman, and both
Dorothy Wordsworth and Austen’s heroines relished the act. As the
essayist Rebecca Solnit points out in Wanderlust: A History of
Walking, when Elizabeth Bennet charges out alone across the muddy
downs to help her ailing sister at Darcy’s place, she is rendered both
slightly scandalous and alluring.
By the early nineteenth century, it had become hard to disentangle
walking and its hale enthusiasts from the Enlightenment, from
Romanticism and, thanks to Thoreau and Emerson, from budding
American nationalism. Walking was a philosophical act, facilitating a
direct experience with divinity. It was a political act, mixing the
educated classes up with the poor (who had always walked, doh). And
it was an intellectual act, generating ideas and art. The ramblers of
yore embraced a kind of radical common sense.
Today, when everyone from corporate executives to distracted
“knowledge workers” are obsessed with creativity, walking is getting
a new look. Executives hold walking meetings and even walk on
treadmills at their desks (a terrible idea—go outside for a real walk!).
People everywhere obsess over their step-counting wearable devices.
They organize community walks. And if they are the sort of scientist
I’ve been writing about in this book, they also walk with portable
EEG units—or make their subjects, and inquisitive visitors like me,
go out and do it for them.
THE ABILITY TO see electrical waves inside the human brain was
pioneered by German psychiatrist Hans Berger in the 1920s. Berger,
who fell off a horse as a young soldier and was convinced his brain
then sent a telepathic message to his sister, wanted to investigate. He
also believed it should be possible to watch the brain convert energy
into blood flow, electricity and, ultimately, thoughts themselves.
What started off as a kooky quest eventually led him to invent the
electroencephalography machine, which translated signals from
electrodes placed on the head to a photographic recording device. He
referred to the contraption as a brain mirror, although that was
optimistic. It wasn’t able to read or reflect minds but it could capture
electrical signals that revealed clues about mental states. Berger
learned that alpha waves, for example, appeared during rest or
relaxation. Later, there would be other insights, such as that beta
waves indicate active thinking and alertness, that gammas dominate
during sensory processing, that delta occurs in deep sleep and so on.
Until recently, EEG was complicated to administer, requiring
tight skullcaps fitted with dozens of button-sized electrodes, each
wired to a large computer. A person wearing such a device looks like
a shriveled sea urchin. But now, thanks to wireless technology and
microprocessors, subjects can take those electrodes for a walk, as
long as they don’t throw their heads back and forth in abandon (for
this reason, we have no idea what the brain looks like while dancing).
Although EEG remains a relatively crude measure of the average
electrical output of thousands of neurons over a wide area of brain
geography, it holds an obvious allure for researchers interested in
environmental psychology.
In a small but intriguing 2013 pilot study, researchers asked a
dozen volunteers to walk around Edinburgh for a total of 25 minutes.
Their path took them through a busy urban thoroughfare, a city park,
and a quiet street. The walkers wore a newfangled portable EEG that
wraps just a few plastic tentacles around one’s head, made by the
California company EMOTIV. The unit has only 14 electrodes and
transmits real-time information wirelessly to a laptop. EMOTIV then
runs the frequency signals of alpha, beta, delta and theta waves
through an algorithm that translates them to short-term excitement,
frustration, “engagement,” “arousal” and “meditation level.” (This is
also the same kind of unit I wore on the lake in Maine.)
When the Scottish volunteers entered the park, their brain waves
showed evidence of lower frustration and arousal, along with higher
“meditation” levels. Encouraged that these results aligned with
Attention Restoration Theory, the researchers have now launched a
much larger study with 120 senior citizens. They are calling it the
Mobility, Mood and Place study.
The lead researcher, Jenny Roe from the University of York,
agreed to let me have a go with the EEG unit on the route through
Edinburgh. I met her neuroscience postdoc, Christopher Neale,
downtown, and after a bit of hair maneuvering and saline-solution
dabbing, he clamped on the headset. “You have a lot of hair,” he
muttered. “That’s one difference about working with older people.
They’re mostly bald.” But the device was finally transmitting, and so
with Neale leading the way about ten paces in front of me, we began
the walk.
It was a beautiful June day. We headed down Chalmers Street,
bustling and loud with students, lorries, buses and motorbikes. This
was gratifying, because I knew the noise would stress me out, and of
course I knew the study design (which does not make me an ideal
subject). Then we turned into the Meadows park, and I prepared to
calm down. But I couldn’t. The park was jam-packed with picnickers,
baby carriages, joggers. Boom boxes blared from the picnic blankets.
A park maintenance truck was backing up out of a small dirt alley. Oh
no! You people are all messing with my solitude! This is generally
my attitude while in city parks, but it was exacerbated by the pressure
to produce good brain waves. Look at the grass, I willed myself.
Listen to the damn birds. A bicyclist careened past. We exited the
park and walked up a quieter street, ending up near the National
Museum. Neale unclenched the unit from my now throbbing head and
promised to send me the results.
Months later, I got the analysis of my brain waves back from
Neale. It was a bit disappointing, if not surprising. “You can see that
when you transition into the green space, your excitement,
engagement and frustration levels all go up,” he wrote. “These results
suggest that you were more excited and engaged in the green space
when compared with the urban busy section. Interestingly, your
frustration levels go up and remain up. Perhaps this was due to the
fact that you were walking around a new city, and technically ‘at
work’ too!”
More likely, I was just, like Wordsworth, pissed off by the
crowds.
In any case, I was, as Neale put it, “non-typical. Early results
using the raw EEG data in our newer study in older people are
promising and more in line with our hypothesis, i.e., that walking in a
green setting is restorative.” Something Ruth Ann Atchley said in
Moab came back to me, about how she thinks different people have
different tolerances for doses of “nature.” Someone who lives in a
city might be overjoyed and calmed down by a single tree, but others
of us require a bigger hit. “If you’re used to Colorado, you’re going to
want quiet and big views,” she’d predicted. Nature was like caffeine,
or heroin. You keep wanting more.
I was, it seems, spoiled.
DAVID STRAYER HAD been having better luck with his post-Moab
experiments than Kramer. He conducted his own walking study
outside, per his style. “We know the field is messy,” he told me.
“There’s wind and rain. But being in the lab strips away a lot of the
interesting stuff, so I’ve learned to grin and bear it and accept the
consequences.”
Strayer decided to make use of the Red Butte arboretum near the
University of Utah campus. He wanted to look at the effects of being
in nature on walkers’ memory, and he also—because he is David
Strayer, Distracted Driving Man—wanted to look at how technology
use might mess with memory. For the experiment, Strayer and
doctoral student Rachel Hopman set up three groups of about twenty
people each: one group would hand over their cell phones, walk for
thirty minutes in the arboretum and then take a recognition memory
task. A second group would take the same walk and test, but during
the walk, they were told to make a long phone call. Moms were happy
that day. The third group was the control. They took the memory test
before the walk. The first group, walking with no phone, averaged 80
percent in their postwalk memory test. The group that talked on the
phone scored only 30 percent, and the control group scored about the
same.
Strayer was delighted to see both that nature walking boosted
cognition and that the addition of evil technology totally wiped out
the gains. “What we find is consistent with the other literature that
working memory improves,” he said. And, he explained, it is also
consistent with the Kaplans’ Attention Restoration Theory. The quiet
hikers were able to access the Kaplans’ magic recipe of feeling
“away,” of being open to soft fascination in their environment, of
having a sense of compatibility with the landscape and feeling as if
they are in a vast, restful space. The phone talkers, by contrast, may
have been relaxed by being outside in the fresh air, but they were not
as liberated from daily cares. They weren’t truly resting their top-
down attentional networks. They were multitasking, walking, looking,
listening and most importantly, speaking, which uses up a lot of
attentional bandwidth. Note to self: leave the cell phone at home, or at
least deep in your pocket, when in need of a cognitive reboot.
About the same time Strayer was running his experiment, yet
another Stanford team designed a walking-in-nature study (it’s
interesting to note that the campus most known for changing our
relationship to technology—by incubating it—is now becoming
known for helping us ditch it). As sometimes happens, neither team
was familiar with the other’s work, but there was some nice
complementarity. Working with ecosystem services expert Gretchen
Daily and emotional-regulation-psych guru James Gross, doctoral
student Greg Bratman randomly sent sixty volunteers on either a
fifty-minute walk through a busy street in Palo Alto or on trails
around the iconic local green space known as the Stanford Dish.
Before and after, he measured their moods, anxiety and rumination,
and also gave them a series of punishing cognitive tests. Results? The
subjects performed significantly better on a test measuring memory
and attention—and they also reported feeling happier—after walking
in nature.
Bratman and his colleagues had a theory about why, and they
wanted to test it. His coinvestigator, Gross, is an expert on
rumination. This is something cows do literally, but our minds do it
too: chew on an unpleasant memory to create, as the study authors put
it, “a maladaptive pattern of self-referential thought.” We might
replay an unpleasant exchange or bad feeling over and over until we
drive ourselves batty. Rumination, as Gross and others have shown, is
linked to depression and anxiety. When people ruminate, they activate
a portion of their brains called the subgenual prefrontal cortex, a
region also linked to sadness, withdrawal and general grumpiness,
according to Bratman.
For the next experiment, they sent 38 healthy (not depressed) city
dwellers on a pretty big walk—90 minutes this time—either back to
the green Dish or along traffic-heavy El Camino Real, and scanned
their brains before and after. They also had them fill out rumination-
measuring questionnaires. On the scans, the nature brains showed a
significant, sizable reduction of blood flow to the subgenual region,
while the urban brains showed none. The questionnaires also revealed
less broody feelings in the postwalk Dishers but not in the roadway
walkers. The results were exciting for Bratman, because they point to
a possible causal mechanism for how certain landscapes might be
boosting our moods, basically, by quieting some brain circuitry
governing self-wallowing. The world is bigger than you, nature says.
Get over yourself. At the very least, nature distracts us the way a
parent might distract a whining toddler, by waving a favorite stuffed
animal. As Bratman put it, “The results suggest that nature experience
is impacting rumination in a way that is markedly different from
urban experience.”
CLEARLY, IT WAS time for me to get walking. I was, despite trying for
nearly two years, still feeling unhappy in D.C. The city sounds
jangled me. We were hemorrhaging our savings. My husband had a
fulfilling job saving nature, but we had to leave wild landscapes for
him to do it, which still rankled. What about saving us? I was grateful
to spend more time with my father, who continued his impressive
recovery from his brain trauma. Together, we took increasingly
longer walks in an arboretum near his place or along the canal near
mine. He was happier and mellower after his accident, and, walking,
he often brought up pleasant reminiscences (as opposed to
ruminescences) and some pretty sappy sentiments. I haven’t seen any
studies on nature and sentimentality (hear that, Bratman?), but the
connection wouldn’t surprise me. One day, as we returned to my front
steps, Dad thanked me. “You are the light of my life,” he said.
“Wait a minute!” protested his wife, Galina. He laughed.
“You both are.” We had a group hug, reminding me that nature is,
truly, best shared.
To motivate myself to get out walking more, I found a study I
could join, a big, old-fashioned study with questionnaires.
I learned that Lisa Nisbet at Trent University was sending over
9,000 people out into the verdure for the May-long “30 x 30 nature
challenge”—30 minutes a day of walking, for 30 days in a row). I
signed on. My first task was to answer a fairly long questionnaire
designed to ascertain our general mood state, vitality, activities and
“subjective connection with nature.” That done, I set out for my
walks, generally down to my usual path along the C & O Canal, but in
one case along a park in the late evening in downtown Helsinki, where
a man stood in a clearing and waved his penis around.
When we are determined to hobnob with greenery every day, most
of us will, inevitably, encounter setbacks. Over the course of writing
this book, I was jumped by numerous rogue and grimy dogs and
splattered with mud by bicyclists. I broke a finger when my own dog
lunged for another dog on a crowded park trail, wrenching her leash
around my hand. I was stung by four bees, three in D.C. One morning
I was seized by an unstoppable urge to go to the bathroom and
hurriedly plunged into the dark creekside thickets of my
neighborhood park (please don’t tell the listserve). I consequently
contracted poison ivy. The Lyme disease came later, from Maine.
It’s not easy being outside everyday. Either a lot of people in
Nesbit’s study decided they preferred the air-conditioning, or they
simply didn’t respond to the follow-up questionnaire. Of the 2,500
who stuck it out, most were just like me: women in their mid-forties.
Researchers love us because we do, sigh, follow through on our
commitments, and we are conditioned to be helpful. But there were
rewards: I spoke to Nisbet months later, after she’d sorted the data.
“The more time participants spent in nature, the greater well-being
they reported,” she said. One of the most interesting findings was that
we seemed to like being in nature so much, we doubled our weekly
green time by the end of the month, from five hours to ten. As the
month progressed, we also reduced our time in vehicles, texting and
emailing. Progress! All this temporal rearrangement appeared to be
good for us. We reported significant increases in all measures of well-
being, including in mood and mental calm, and also decreases in
stress and negativity. We slept slightly better, and also reported
feeling slightly more connected to nature.
This was all true for me. The more I made myself get outside, the
better I slept and felt, except when my bee-stung arm turned into
armzilla. But the discomfort was temporary. Despite the planes and
all the people, my nearby parks were invariably cooler, breezier and
better-smelling than anywhere else in the city. I watched the buds turn
to leaves and I made a point of trying to identify a few birds by sound
and of looking for fractals. I often walked to look at the Potomac
River, just to take the currents in and let the water (always the
highest-rated nature feature in surveys) work its magic on my tired
neurons. The required thirty minutes often turned into many more.
Still, it felt a little contrived. Pull out the stopwatch. Try to feel
connected. I wanted to find people who were spending even more
intensive time in nature, real nature, and, frankly, I wanted it myself,
now that I was all connected.
It was time to head for the backcountry.
PART FOUR
BACKCOUNTRY BRAIN
9
LATER, WHILE HIS enchilada pies were baking in their cast-iron Dutch
ovens, I asked Strayer what he thought of the fractal/visual theory of
brain restoration, the idea that when our visual cortex finds a sweet
spot of information, it can trigger our pleasure centers and help relax
us. He wasn’t overly enthused. What he’s getting at, he explained, is a
change in mind-set that occurs over hours and days. The kind he and
his students have just experienced, with their mild sunburns, loosened
limbs, easy laughter and fresh insights.
“If it’s just the visual cortex,” he asked, “why can’t I watch
National Geographic videos and get this sensation? I don’t feel this
and I couldn’t watch four days of it, and those are amazing videos.”
“But a few minutes out a window can improve your mood and
drop your blood pressure,” I said, citing studies as Strayer lifted a
heavy lid to check on dinner.
“What I’m interested in isn’t that. That’s not what I and Abbey
and Muir and Thoreau are talking about. It’s something much deeper,
more cutting close to our soul. Frankly, it’s the essence of who we are
and getting away from the rat race, across the litany of literature.”
Satisfied with the progress of cheese meltage on his enchiladas, he
pulled off his oven mitt. “If I was a betting man, I’d be betting on the
fact that the prefrontal cortex is not in overload in nature.”
Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.
— JOHN MUIR
The first American veteran on Idaho’s main stem of the Salmon
River was Captain William Clark. He and Lewis had split up to search
for a route to the Pacific, but this one was not panning out. The rapids
were too rough for the expedition’s 1,000-pound dugout canoes, and
the canyons proved too steep to portage around the whitewater. After
exploring the upper reaches in moccasins, Clark complained, “I
Sliped & bruised my leg very much on a rock.” With that, he etched
his name in a pine tree and got the heck out of there. That was in
1805.
Eventually, other explorers, fortune-seekers and recluses
followed, braving the rough terrain to stake mining claims
downstream. True to its cognomen as the River of No Return, the
river accommodated one-way traffic only. The miners built huge
wooden boats laden with supplies and ventured down the rapids. If
man and boat survived the passage, the boat would get cannibalized
for a cabin and the miner would lay in for a long, long while.
The steep country that hemmed in the river was never ideal for
human habitation. In 1980, Congress made the isolation official,
designating the river and its surrounding mountains the largest chunk
of the wilderness system in the Lower 48. The Frank Church–River of
No Return Wilderness, sometimes just called “the Frank,” stretches
across 2.3 million acres in the part of Idaho that starts to get skinny.
The river running through it carves a long, forested gorge deeper than
the Grand Canyon.
It was through that gorge that another group of American veterans
—all women, all scarred emotionally and physically by their service
—descended in the summer of 2014. Like Clark, they were also on a
voyage of discovery in the American wilds. I wanted to witness it. If
one minute of gazing up at a eucalyptus tree makes people more
generous, and three days makes them more socially connected, calm
and inspired, what could a week unleash? Were the inverse-PTSD
effects of awe real and if so, would they show up in the brains that
needed them most?
YOU HAVE TO be brave to venture down the Salmon, and a little bit
addled. This group of women, sponsored by an Idaho-based nonprofit
called Higher Ground, was both. Participants had to be former or
current members of the military who suffer from PTSD,
posttraumatic stress disorder. When I learned the organization was
willing to invite a journalist, I signed on.
This was Higher Ground’s first all-women’s river trip. The plan
was to float eighty-one miles of the river, try our skills at kayaking,
rowing, and paddleboarding (nonmandatory), participate in
“processing” groups and team-building activities (mandatory), eat
together, collapse into tents, and then do it all over again the next day.
On the sixth day, we’d leave the river, flying home off a dirt strip in
small planes. Unlike the miners, we’d be returning to civilization,
hopefully a little bit changed.
The night before launching our boats at the end of a dirt road, I
met up with the women, gathered on a restaurant patio for pizza in the
no-traffic-light town of Stanley, rimmed by the vaulting, aptly named
Sawtooth Mountains. This clearly was not your usual river-rat crowd.
These women were on the whole younger, more ethnically diverse and
less able-bodied. The nine former service members carried an
assortment of cigarettes, butch hairstyles, tattoos, piercings and
physical supports that included a cane, orthopedic tape and an arm
splint. Collectively, they brought a small pharmacy’s worth of
antianxiety drugs, antidepressants, antiseizure meds, painkillers,
digestive aids and sleeping pills. One service dog, Major, a yellow lab
mix, wore a bib that read DO NOT PET. The warning could have
applied to anyone. Heavy-lidded and surly after a long day of travel,
they were not about to smile for a bunch of cowtown selfies.
The recreation therapists, Brenna Partridge and Kirstin Webster,
handed out matching black fleece jackets emblazoned with the unique
crest of this “unit”—HG-714-RA, which stood for Higher Ground,
July 14, Rafting. (Other Higher Ground units, typically coed or all-
male, might spend a week fly fishing or skiing or doing lake sports.)
Partridge smiled and asked us to introduce ourselves and talk
about why we wanted to be on the trip. Marsha Anderson (some
names, including hers, have been changed) described being
medevaced out of Afghanistan on a stretcher, convinced for a while
that she was already dead. It took her thirteen months to relearn to
walk. Now she felt angry, misunderstood by her family, and cheated
of the sports she loved like surfing and cycling. She was hoping to
find some new ones, along with new friends who had been through
what she’d been through.
Carla Garcia, thirty-five, described how she’d volunteered for the
first Iraq invasion in 2003 and then returned as a vehicle commander
running fuel convoys across the war zone from Al Taqaddum. In
2005, her truck hit a roadside bomb and she was blasted from it,
landing on her head. Her driver died. During her third tour, in Mosul,
another bomb exploded, crashing her head against the vehicle roof
and pelting her with shrapnel. Garcia pulled her ailing driver from the
smoking wreckage and fought off insurgents with her M-16 until she
passed out (she received both a combat action badge and a Purple
Heart, I found out later). Doctors induced a week-long coma to relieve
pressure in her brain. Afterward, she had to learn how to talk. In
addition to chronic pain, she suffers seizures, headaches, mood
swings, and nightmares. She can’t walk far, won’t drive, and can
barely stand being in any kind of vehicle. “I don’t like crowds and I
don’t like people,” she said. “This will be hard.”
After dinner, we grouped for the processing talk, our first one, to
articulate goals for the trip. That’s when Kate Day, a Navy vet in her
fifties from Las Vegas, mentioned her three-year stint of
homelessness, a stay in a mental institution and her near-inability to
leave her house. Two other women chimed in that they too had been
institutionalized. One said she was still so depressed she didn’t want
to keep living. Another said her anger and misery had alienated her
whole family. Another, sitting expressionless, said in a flat voice that
she wanted some time to “be in the moment and not zone out.” A
skinny blonde wearing a sparkly blue sundress and pink sunglasses,
whom I’ll call Pam Hana, showed the opposite affect: maniacally
chatty, never still. She woke up scared and crying because she hated
airplanes and had successfully avoided them for years until this trip.
Tania Herrera, wearing a Gilliganesque fishing hat under dark,
cropped hair, talked about being limited by her body. First struck by
shrapnel near Fallujah, then catapulted by a car bomb along her
convoy route and finally struck by pieces of a collapsing mosque hit
by a grenade, the former Army gunner now had one working arm, a
bad leg and a brain that didn’t work too fast. Thirty-four years old,
she rarely left her house near Fort Bragg. “It sucks to think that’s the
way life is going to be, stuck in a rut,” she said. “It seems like a life
sentence.”
Petite with smooth skin, and a friendly, wide mouth, Herrera also
told us that she now had trouble making friends, and on top of that,
she had some serious hair issues. “I used to have long hair but can’t
figure out how to do it with one arm,” she said. “I used to sit on my
hair like Medea. I’m not that girly, but to have it stripped away from
you is hard. I don’t want to go to family weddings because I can’t
look pretty.”
Partridge, the group leader, gave Herrera her marching orders:
“Find someone to bond with. This is your unit now.”
In the days following, more details of their battered lives would
come out during processing, in one-on-one talks or in small groups.
As a general rule, the younger women had seen combat, even though
technically they weren’t supposed to be in combat roles at the time.
That was a central irony of serving in recent wars, and yet, because
they were women, it was often harder for them than for men to get
diagnosed as having combat-related PTSD. Many of the older women
were here because they suffered military sexual trauma (MST). One
was gang-raped by eight men, including her commanding officers,
while stationed in Okinawa; another was attacked in the Navy by her
master-at-arms. Another was assaulted by a civilian while on leave in
Europe. In only one instance did the perpetrators meet justice, and
that was the civilian.
In both types of PTSD, the consequences are similar: life-altering
social, professional and psychological impairments.
EVERY BIG WAR has its signature wounds. If the Civil War didn’t kill
you, you were likely to end up with amputations. Surgeons in World
War I advanced the art of facial plastic surgery (mustard gas liquified
facial tissue). Gulf War veterans barely saw combat, but many suffer
from mysterious symptoms believed to be linked to nerve agents.
PTSD was common after most of these wars—even Homer wrote
about it—but it went by different names: shell shock, soldier’s heart,
combat fatigue. Frederick Law Olmsted, from whom I have a quote in
just about every chapter (because, as well as being a badass nature
guru, he was, like Zelig, witness to just about every significant beat of
the nineteenth century, from plantation slavery to the gold rush to the
invention of suburbia), described the Union soldiers after the Battle of
Manassas as a “disintegrated herd. . . . They start and turn pale at the
breaking of a stick or the crack of a percussion cap— . . . It is a
terrific disease.” PTSD wasn’t officially named and recognized by the
Veterans Administration until 1980.
In the general population, about 8 percent of us will experience
PTSD. Among veterans, that figure is about 18 percent, but a recent
examination of the data for over a million veterans of the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq found a 27 percent rate (with over 70 percent of
that coexisting with depression). The fingerprints of the recent wars
are so far clear: PTSD, traumatic brain injury (TBI) from explosives,
and sexual assault.
Some studies suggest that women experience PTSD at slightly
higher rates than men, or they may just more readily admit to having
it. According to the latest iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, symptoms of PTSD cluster around four
subgroups: reexperiencing (flashbacks, nightmares), avoidance and
withdrawal, bad moods and depression, and hyperarousal, such as
jumpiness, vigilance, aggression and sleep problems. Women, who
now make up about 15 percent of the military, express some
symptoms differently, experiencing higher rates of anxiety and eating
disorders. They are two to four times more likely than other women to
be homeless; men have more problems with violent aggression and
substance abuse, but plenty of women experience these also.
By all indications, the women on our trip were like Tania Herrera,
who’d been an eager, straight-A high school student from North
Philly: highly competent, enthusiastic recruits when they started out.
Their intelligence and toughness were still in evidence. But pieces of
them had crumpled. They no longer felt whole, or secure, or capable.
Now they were grieving their lost selves. As Herrera put it during one
group session, “I never thought I’d be thirty-four and unable to take
care of myself. When I went to war, I thought either you die or you
make it out. I didn’t factor in what if you came out different than
when you went in.”
The women described daily lives involving constant physical pain.
They couldn’t concentrate well. They were sometimes jumpy,
depressed. They didn’t like being with people, but they didn’t like
being alone all the time. The wars had taken away their ability to
sleep well.
IT WAS TIME for the women to get out of their lives and into the river.
The first named rapid, called Killum, came up fast. I was paddling
one of the four inflatable kayaks, and I saw the kayak in front of me
meet a short wall of water and flip. I hit the same cold sideways wave,
my paddle dove, and I flipped too. Happily, the Class II and III rapids
in this stretch are more wave than rock, and they are short,
interspersed with deep, calm stretches. I managed to claw back into
my boat. The six women paddling the raft cheered me and the other
kayakers on.
Many rapids followed before camp, and I was alternately
exhilarated, nervous, cold and determined in that I’m-committed-now
kind of way. Entering a rapid, your vision narrows and so does your
focus. Your heart rate picks up, your breath quickens, and your skin
temperature rises. Your gut begins to tighten. In small doses like this,
the adrenaline rush is fun. You feel present; the B roll of your mind
falls away, and there’s a heady release of endorphins when you’re
safely through. Kayakers sometimes call paddling big water “combat
boating,” and when hard-shell boaters roll their overturned kayaks
back upright while still strapped in, it’s called a combat roll.
I saw the basic inanity of this metaphor while surrounded by these
very real veterans. In war combat, the stress response isn’t small or
ephemeral. It’s big. And it lasts for days, sometimes weeks or
months. It lasts so long that the brain changes—more in some people
than in others. Blame evolution. Our nervous systems are naturally
hardwired for fear, telling us what to avoid and how to stay safe.
Some psychologists argue that fear is our oldest emotion, existing in
the earliest planetary life forms and predating even the drive to
reproduce. It starts deep in our brainstem, in the Milk Dud–sized
amygdala.
When fear alone rules us, we lack the smarts to do much of
anything creative, or interpersonal, or spatially demanding. Part of
what makes us human is that our brains evolved a neocortex, the place
where we plan and puzzle and tell ourselves we’re being drama
queens. A fright causes a neurological tug of war between the old and
new brains. In the deep clutch of fear, our primitive brainstem
overrides our problem-solving neocortex, and we become stupid.
With PTSD, the brain stays locked into amygdala hyperdrive. Failing
to bounce back to baseline, it loses the ability to distinguish between
a real and a perceived threat. That’s why soldiers with PTSD often
cannot tolerate driving or shopping or loud noises even in safe places
when they return home.
But there’s a reason we feel fear. It may have given us the gift of
memory. The very reason we remember anything may be that we
must remember near-misses, narrowly avoided dangers, and attacks
from predators and enemies. Thanks to fear, we enjoy the smell of
madeleines and the writers who write about them.
At its root, PTSD is a memory disorder. Brain scans of people
suffering PTSD show cellular and volume changes in the
hippocampus, a region that helps process memories and sits very
close to the amygdala. In frightened lab animals, the fear hormones—
glucocorticoids like cortisol, norepinephrine or adrenaline—flood
receptors on the hippocampus and impair memory. It appears that
persistent trauma memories shrink the hippocampus, and it’s well
established that PTSD leads to emotional as well as cognitive
problems, such as poor focus and short-term memory deficits.
Physiologically, chronic, heightened stress looks like this: higher
blood pressure, cellular inflammation, and a higher risk for cardiac
disease. Longitudinal studies show that veterans with PTSD are
sicker, in more pain, and die younger than their non-PTSD peers.
They are also 4.5 times more likely to have substance abuse issues.
Veterans are twice as likely to be divorced, and female veterans
commit suicide at nearly six times the rate of other women.
Groups like Higher Ground—and there are many, from those
offering surfing and fly-fishing programs for vets to a hospital in Los
Angeles that promotes bonding between humans and abused parrots
with symptoms resembling PTSD—believe that engaging with nature
or wildlife can reduce trauma symptoms. Adventure sports like
kayaking provide a laser focus for an unfocused mind, as well as a
welcome distraction from unwelcome thoughts. The physical exertion
often leads to better sleep, and, as we’ve seen in previous chapters,
the sensory elements of nature can calm the nervous system.
Even knowing all this, I couldn’t help but worry a bit about these
women in such an uncontrolled environment. What if they got pinned
on a rock or had a bad swim? One of the kayakers was Marsha
Anderson, who’d been a ski racer in her youth in Wyoming. Now she
had nerve damage in an arm and a leg from an explosion in
Afghanistan in 2009, and she hurt all the time. After her injury, she
couldn’t walk for a year. She seemed fragile. When a rapid spat
Anderson out of her inflatable boat in midafternoon, I held her boat
next to mine and helped haul her back in. Then Herrera, riding in a
double kayak, her right arm bearing her high-tech brace with a GoPro
camera attached to it, went over. I wondered how she would get back
in the high, slippery boat with one working arm; but her partner, a
Higher Ground staffer, stayed in the river and heaved her over the
gunnels.
If these women came expecting a relaxing repose on the beach-
lined river, this wasn’t it. We weren’t even allowed cocktails. Could
they handle this sort of extreme adventure? These women lived in a
constant playback of memories and anxieties. Maybe they should be
home snuggling with their service dogs and using a rowing machine?
Or maybe not. Anderson, a Korean American in her early thirties
with short hair, sat smiling while she ate an eggroll that evening. “I
never thought I’d go by myself down a river,” she said. “I’m
exhausted from the adrenaline.” She recalled the words of a yoga
instructor: “Anxiety is just excitement without breath.” The river was
teaching her to breathe. “I wasn’t sure I was going to go back in and
keep kayaking,” she continued, “but I did, and I was trying to breathe
in every rapid.” She clearly liked being a badass. Who doesn’t?
As for Herrera, who was still relearning how to take basic care of
herself, paddling a kayak was a revelation. She didn’t seem to mind
the unplanned swim at all. She found that she could tape her bad hand
around the paddle shaft and use the other arm for most of the power.
Seeing her in the boat, I was reminded of another one-armed veteran
who made a similar river voyage 145 years ago, Major John Wesley
Powell. Wounded during the Civil War and commissioned to survey
the frothy Colorado, he seemed to relish every minute of it: “We have
an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore.
What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we
known not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.”
When Herrera flipped, she even had the presence of mind to
salvage her combat-medal-bedecked Gilligan hat. “I was really happy
that I was able to contribute and not have everyone do work for me,”
she said. “It was neat to do something physical. At home, I can barely
get my own mail.”
The rafters, too, had a good day. Anjah Mason, the expressionless
Army vet who had told us she wanted to stop zoning out, described
almost having a panic attack on the boat, but then talking herself
through it. She’d learned how to adapt to a wholly new situation, and
she was pleased.
Everyone was hungry. No one stayed up late. Manic Pam Hana
finished a cigarette and then fell asleep in front of her tent under the
still-bright northern Rockies sky at 8 P.M.
I began the next day with my signature outdoor ailment, a bee
sting. Catalina Lopez administered rubbing alcohol and Benadryl and
told me to keep tabs on the swelling. A former Army nurse, she had
served for fifteen years in the Balkans, Somalia and Iraq, and was
haunted by recurring dreams of blood and severed body parts. Once,
while I was eating lunch, she had described watching an unconscious
guard’s brain swell and swell in the hospital. She told me normal
intracranial pressure was 10, but this guy’s meter was reading 20,
then 30 and then 85 “and then I could see his cranium start to move.”
I looked at my sandwich.
“You see where I’m going with this.”
I nodded.
“Do you want me to stop?”
“Yes, please.”
That second day, I joined the increasingly sociable paddle raft. At
some point, Tania Herrera, sitting on the raft tube across from me in
the bow, started singing, “I kissed a bug and I liked it.” She told
stories about being in Iraq. She was part of an all-woman transport
truck they nicknamed the Maxi Pad. Then someone asked me why I
wanted to write about breasts, the topic of my first book. That
inspired Herrera to come up with a name for our rubber boat: the
Boob Tube.
It was a long day on the river, a hot, twenty-mile paddle
punctuated by swimming and a beachside lunch. The canyon in this
section is steep and dotted with large ponderosa pines that emerge
from shiny black gneiss outcrops. We were passing through the
middle of the ancient Idaho batholith. Angela Day, a blond, plump
Navy veteran, bobbed along in her kayak like a mellow duck, not
working too hard and giggling through the waves. Anderson, the
nerve-damaged former ski racer, rode the stand-up paddleboard; in
the rapids it became more of a kneeling board, and sometimes an
upside-down board. In the afternoon, nurse Lopez spilled out of her
kayak in a tricky rapid. From the Boob Tube, I could see the panic in
her face, the desperate gulps of air and water. She got back in the
kayak, but she wasn’t happy about it.
At processing that evening, she looked defeated. Facilitator
Partridge had asked the group what their passions were. “I used to be
passionate about everything,” said Lopez, whose PTSD and a chronic
back injury got her medical retirement from the Army. “Life, work,
nature. Even today I was passionate about kayaking until, what the
fuck, and now I expect to be disappointed by everything.” She
shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get back in, I don’t know.”
Anjah Mason said she didn’t know what she was passionate about.
“I used to be passionate about my family.”
Connie Smith, a former Navy captain from Texas, said she was
passionate about her work training service dogs.
Angela Day said she was passionate about her relationship with
the Lord. “Today, in the kayak, I was like, ‘Come on, Lord, bring it
on! You can do better than that!’”
Linda Brown, soft-spoken, in her fifties, said she was passionate
about outdoor sports. “I can’t say I’m passionate for any length of
time, but I do believe I’m passionate about the outdoors, trees
especially.”
Pam Hana, still manic, bouncing on her chair, said, “I’m
passionate about staying single and frickin’ free! I’m loving it!
Seriously!”
Herrera said she used to be passionate about her job in the Army.
“I was a lead gunner in Iraq, in a turret, with a headset. My kid dream
came true, of a car that talked to me. I wanted to be Knight Rider with
the biggest gun and the coolest clothes. I remember thanking God for
allowing my dream to come true.” She looked at the sand. “It’s so
hard to create a dream again and go forward. That’s where I get stuck.
How do I do that now with all these barriers, these health issues, the
medicines, the bad relationships, no money, the disability?”
Angela Day said, “I don’t want to leave my safety zone.”
“You left it today on the river,” Partridge said.
“Yes. But it’s become normal for me to leave the house only once
a month to buy groceries. I do have a deep personal dream not to be
that way.”
“Like when you’re on the river, sometimes you have to ask for
help,” said Partridge. “People have your back.”
“It was the funnest day ever today!” said Hana.
“For you.” Lopez glowered.
WHEN SOME OF the teens first arrived at SOAR, they were still putting
their clothes on backward. They forgot to eat or they couldn’t stop.
They lashed out in anger and they were easily frustrated. ADHD
symptoms appear to express themselves differently in boys and girls.
The classic symptoms in boys, which are better understood, are
hyperactivity, impulsivity, and distractibility. We all sit somewhere
on the continuum of these traits, but people with more severe
symptoms appear to have different chemistry in the parts of their
brains governing reward, movement, and attention. They may have
trouble listening or sitting still, and they get distracted by external
stimuli. Easily bored, they tend to be risk-takers, looking for charged
activities that help flood their brains with the feel-good
neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine, which
otherwise get gummed up in the ADHD brain. Kids with ADHD are
more likely to suffer head injuries, accidentally ingest poisons, and
take street drugs.
Long-standing research suggests that kids like Zack—and indeed,
most kids—would be better off in dynamic outdoor learning
environments from the very beginning. As Erin Kenny, founder of
Cedarsong Nature School on Vashon Island, Washington, has put it,
“Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.”
It’s what the man who founded kindergarten had in mind in the
first place.
Friedrich Fröbel was born in 1782 near Weimar, in the heart of
Germany’s ancient forests and lush vales. A student of natural history
who came of age under the spell of Romanticism, he was a lover of
the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Everything is good
as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature,” Rousseau wrote
to Fröbel’s delight; “but everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
In Émile, Rousseau made a case for cultivating curiosity and freedom
in childhood. This radical notion came to influence every aspect of
progressive education. In Fröbel’s day, children under the age of
seven typically stayed at home or were farmed out to crèches of
convenience. Fröbel understood that an education filled with nature
and art could instill a lifelong readiness to learn. He believed children
would also pick up emotional skills like empathy, as well as a
profound sense of the interconnection of all living things.
After working in primary education for a number of years, he
started a school for small children in 1837. It was while walking in
the woods (walking in the woods!) that he came up with the name:
kindergarten. In it, children would absorb the natural world through
all their senses. They would grow plants outdoors, exercise, dance,
and sing. They would manipulate simple objects like blocks, wooden
spheres and colored papers, thus learning, almost despite themselves,
the universal laws of geometry, form, physics and design. Fröbel
didn’t believe in lock-step lesson plans. Children, he said, should be
guided largely by their own curiosity and “self-activity.” For a while,
the idea caught on, but the Prussian government, fearful of instilling
free play and, by extension, free atheistic thinking, shut down public
kindergartens before Fröbel’s death in 1852. Still, his ideas resonated
with scores of wealthy, well-connected women who became
phenomenally successful international missionaries for the cause. “It
was the seed pearl of the modern era, and it was called kindergarten,”
argues Norman Brosterman in his compelling history, Inventing
Kindergarten.
Childhood would never quite be the same.
Although, as kindergarten spread to other nations, including
America, the concept changed in ways that would have made Fröbel
hurl an abacus. He had opposed formal lessons for this age group, and
didn’t even want alphabetical letters on blocks. But in the late
nineteenth century, educators saw the need to prepare children,
especially working-class children, for an industrial work life.
Kindergarten shifted to more time indoors and the lessons became
more programmatic. Despite a brief flirtation with nature schools in
the 1960s and 1970s, American kindergarten continued its relentless
slouch into sit-down academics.
But Fröbel’s naturecentric ideas didn’t disappear from Europe. To
this day, European kids aren’t taught reading and math in earnest until
they reach age seven. Germany has more than 1,000 “forest
kindergartens” called Waldkindergärten, and they are growing in
popularity across northern Europe. In these preschools, kids are out in
all kinds of weather, playing with natural materials and pretty much
having a ball. I’d visited a school called Auchlone in Perthshire,
Scotland, where kids ran happily around climbing trees, playing house
in twig teepees and hosting a funeral for a dead frog. For snack time,
a four-year-old boy helped light a campfire for making popcorn. The
school’s director, Claire Warden, is a big fan of kids and fire. She’s
also a proponent of preschoolers handling knives and challenging
themselves physically. She’d told me how after a large tree fell over
during a storm, the children had spent days sawing and pounding off
sharp bits to make it safer to climb upon. This, she explained,
launched a typical, nature-based curriculum: the kids improved their
manual dexterity, learned about cause and effect, and practiced
teamwork.
Warden knows some of these ideas might be shocking to
American parents and their notions of bubble-wrapped childhoods.
“We can’t avoid all risk,” she’d said. As if on cue, a boy in yellow
boots stalked by carrying a junior hacksaw. “Junior hacksaw” would
be an oxymoron in America, but here it’s another teaching tool.
Earlier, I’d seen the same boy with a potato peeler. “What we do is
hazard assessment, not risk avoidance,” she’d said. “Schools that are
boring and not engaging will end up costing parents and taxpayers
millions when these children are teens.”
Today, a tenth of preschoolers in Scandinavia spend nearly their
entire days outside, and another huge percentage spends a significant
portion outdoors. In Finland, outdoor play is integrated into the day
throughout primary school to an astonishing degree: it’s common for
students to be turned out for fifteen minutes out of every hour.
When I was in Finland, I’d asked a sixth-grade teacher named
Johanna Peltola why. She was, like many Finns, extremely pragmatic.
“When they go outside and get fresh air, they think more clearly,” she
said. And yet, while American education experts sing the praises of
the Finnish school system, celebrating the nation’s high spot in global
academic standings, they routinely ignore the fresh-air factor.
Outdoor play isn’t even mentioned in Amanda Ripley’s chapter on
Finland in The Smartest Kids in the World.
Interestingly, Finland reports the same percentage of children
diagnosed with ADHD as the United States: about 11 percent, mostly
boys. But while most adolescents in the U.S. are taking medication,
most in Finland are not.
What Fröbel believed, and the Finns practice, science has
affirmed. Nature play enhances at least two activities known to
develop children’s cognitive and emotional development: exercise
and exploratory play. A large meta-analysis of dozens of studies
concluded that physical activity in school-age children (4–18)
increases performance in a trove of brain matter: perceptual skills,
IQ, verbal ability, mathematic ability, academic readiness. The effect
was strongest in younger children.
Even more intriguing, researchers at Pennsylvania State
University have found that early social skills matter more than
academic ones in predicting future success. They followed 750
children for 20 years. The children whose kindergarten teachers rated
them as having strong abilities to cooperate, resolve conflicts and
listen to others were less likely to later be unemployed, develop
substance abuse problems, get arrested, live in public housing, or go
on welfare. Germany sponsored an even more ambitious study in the
1970s. There, researchers tracked graduates of 100 kindergartens.
Half the programs were play-based (although not necessarily
outdoors) and half were academic and instruction-based. The
academic students made initial gains; but by grade four they had
fallen behind their play-based peers on every scholastic and
socioemotional measure used. In a move that would have warmed
Fröbel’s art stations, Germany reversed its trend toward academic
kindergartens.
But, alas, not the United States, where little kids spend more time
at their desks than ever. Preschoolers in the United States average just
48 minutes of exercise a day in their schools, even though the
recommended level is 2 hours, according to a 2015 paper published in
Pediatrics. Of that 48 minutes, only 33 minutes is outside. A 2009
study in Pediatrics found that 30 percent of third-graders get fewer
than 15 minutes of recess a day, and another study found that 39
percent of African-American students had no recess compared to 15
percent of white students.
Parents aren’t helping much either. Jane Clark, a University of
Maryland professor of kinesiology calls toddlers “containerized kids”
as they spend increasing time in car-seats, high chairs and strollers,
and then shift into sedentary media consumption. According to the
Outdoor Foundation’s research (funded by the U.S. National Park
Service and outdoor industry manufacturers), participation in outdoor
activities declined among all children, but declined the most—15
percent—among six-to-twelve-year-olds between 2006 and 2014.
Those figures include hiking, camping, fishing, cycling, paddling,
skateboarding, surfing, wildlife-viewing and other activities, and do
not include organized sports.
In 2004, 70 percent of U.S. mothers recalled that they had played
freely outside themselves when they were children, yet only 31
percent allowed their children to do the same, despite a drop in crime
since then. British children seem equally tethered. Since the 1970s,
their children’s “radius of activity”—the area around the home where
kids are allowed to roam unsupervised—has declined by almost 90
percent, according to a report by the National Trust. While 80 percent
of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school in 1971, by 1990 fewer
than 10 percent did so.
In the U.K., two-thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns
come from trees.
AT SOAR, MANY students arrive on meds, and many stay on them. At all
times, the instructors carry sealed messenger bags full of
pharmaceuticals strapped to their torsos like baby marsupials. Though
Willson emphasized that SOAR is not a way to get kids off ADHD
medication, some do find that they can taper off. Zack’s parents told
me they were planning to toss his anxiety drugs during his upcoming
holiday break, and they expected to lower the dose of his stimulant as
well. “The changes in him have been nothing short of miraculous,”
said his mother, Marlene De Pecol. “Now he’s just happy.”
If, as the research suggests, outdoor free play is so important to
kids’ physical and mental health, you might expect to see evidence of
illness during this seismic generational shift indoors. And in fact,
that’s exactly what you see, although it’s impossible to draw a direct
line to a particular cause. The stats are alarming: Preschoolers are the
fastest-growing market for antidepressants in the United States. More
than 10,000 American preschoolers are being medicated for ADHD.
Teenagers today have five to eight times more clinically significant
scores for anxiety and depression compared to young people born in
the 1950s. Since 1999, the U.S. suicide rate has increased for nearly
all groups, with the steepest rise—200 percent—among girls ten to
fourteen years old.
It’s well known that childhood obesity rates have tripled and
allergy and asthma rates have increased dramatically in the U.S. in
the last three decades. According to data from the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, nearly one in ten children has a
vitamin D deficiency. That’s 7.6 million children. And—get this—
two-thirds, another 50.8 million, are considered vitamin D
“insufficient.” We need sunlight for all sorts of bodily processes from
regulating our sleep and diurnal rhythms to facilitating proper bone
growth to boosting immunity. The problem has gotten so bad that
rickets, a disease caused by lack of vitamin D, which had been
virtually eradicated, has begun to show up in pockets of the U.K. and
America. The incidence has quadrupled in the two countries’ children
in the last fifteen years.
When you put little kids in green environments, even if it’s just
some lawn and shrubbery, they start moving. In schools with
conventional urban playgrounds, the boys tend to run around more
than the girls. But studies in Sweden show the exercise gap between
boys and girls narrows in more naturalistic environments. Nature
levels gendered play. The kids in forest kindergartens also tend to get
sick less often than their indoor peers, and they host a healthier, more
diverse array of microbacteria in their bodies.
Zack Smith is one of the lucky ones. Privileged kids have tons of
options, from summer camp to beautifully landscaped schools. But if
we really care about children’s health, connecting more kids to nature
and shaking up early and elementary education, we’re going to have
to figure it out where most of us actually live and work: in cities, in
housing developments and neighborhoods and in public and private
schools.
I asked my son, now in seventh grade in D.C., how many minutes
of recess he gets per day.
“Recess? We probably haven’t had recess in three months.”
This was a problem. I called the head of his junior high.
“I know,” she said, putting on her appease-the-unhinged-mother
voice. “I wish they could go outside more, too, but it’s been too
muddy, and then the corridors get muddy.”
In other words, it was a janitorial problem. In Finland, kids keep
their boots by the front door. Maybe schools in the United States
don’t need more iPads and test prep; maybe they just need more
Wellies.
IT ALL SOUNDED good, but like much in Singapore, the nature love was
well packaged, ready-made for brochures and airport posters. Were
all the nice parks and green-carpeted buildings the ones the tourists
and investors see? Was this a Potemkin paradise? To examine the
reach of nature into the lives of real people, I visited a community
hospital, Khoo Teck Puat. It’s not close to the center of the city, and
it’s not used much clinically by foreigners or expats. But it’s known
as a new and successful example of simple biophilic design. I have to
say, it was gobsmackingly nice, especially for a hospital. Many rooms
faced the inner, luxuriant garden courtyard, dense with trees and
shrubs specifically selected to attract birds and butterflies. Outside sat
a sizable pond, a medicinal herb garden and a walking path. Artificial
mini islands floated in the pond to attract egrets. The overall site
employed a conscious design for biodiversity: endangered fish swam
in a little watercourse that wove through the garden. Sadly, this is
about the only habitat they have left.
Plants draped over balconies on each floor, giving the impression
the building had just risen from the jungle floor, adding to the
Shangri-La effect. “We call it the hospital in a garden,” said chief
gardener Rosalind Tan, who is sometimes called Madame Butterfly,
as we walked by a blooming hibiscus, popular with the tiny golden
sunbird. “We know from practical experience that people enjoy
greenery and we try to create a healing environment for patients so
they can have lower blood pressure and be in a better condition to see
a doctor.”
We walked through the spotless ICU, where every patient has a
view of trees out six-foot windows. At many points, corridors and
landings open up to the outdoors. I noticed none of the usual
antiseptic hospital smell, despite the place having one of the lowest
hospital-acquired infection rates in the country, according to Tan. I
was reminded of a 2012 study from a Portland, Oregon, hospital
showing that rooms with better ventilation from outside garnered
more diverse bacterial profiles and fewer “bad” bacteria. Tan next
showed me the organic vegetable garden on the roof, which is mostly
tended by locals who enjoy gardening. Patients eat some of the
produce, and some is sold in a farmers’ market. She plucked a few
long purple and green leaves off a rhoeo oyster plant and gave them to
me to make a tea. “Our signature drink, full of antioxidents,” she said.
“Good for cooling.”
I went back to my chia-plant hotel and brewed some. Then, newly
cooled, I headed out again. Everyone told me that before I left
Singapore, I had to see the Gardens by the Bay. This is a huge, showy
billion-dollar attraction on the newly reclaimed waterfront land. A
“premier urban recreation space,” it consists of numerous outdoor
gardens and two ginormous horticultural greenhouses. Typically, such
conservatories have to be heated; here, they have to be cooled. They
showcase biozones from temperate climates, including cloud forests,
Mediterranean olive groves and the California chaparral. But the
park’s piece de resistance is a grove of eighteen Supertrees that are
entirely fake. Better than the real thing, they soar between 80 and 160
feet into the sky like giant skeletal golf tees. A narrow walkway
snakes through the canopy of a few of them so that you can view the
city skyline unencumbered and then eat high-end egg rolls on
cowhide cushions at the penthouse restaurant. The structures collect
and sprinkle rainwater on the (real, but planted) vines and bromeliads
growing on them. They collect solar power in panels, and, best yet,
they convert that electricity into an evening light extravaganza.
Recovering from the egg rolls, I settled onto the finely clipped
lawn below, surrounded by couples and small children running around
on the family outing. The sky grew dark, and the first notes of an
electronic symphony began. Suddenly, the trees erupted in colorful
neon bursts that kept perfect time with the symphony. The Led
Zeppelin stoner laser show has nothing on this. I felt an emotion not
dissimilar to what I experienced in the canyons of Bluff, Utah. I felt
the stirrings of awe.
This was nature in the Future City, a mix of metaphor, technology
and evolutionary impulse. It embodies what the writer and digital
pioneer Sue Thomas calls “technobiophilia.” Who’s to say what real
nature is anymore anyway? The human hand underlies all of the
world’s ecosystems now. Singapore just represents the extreme end of
constructed nature. It still pushes many of our neurological buttons
for grass, green, blue, safety, beauty, play, visual interest, wonder.
Could I find it truly satisfying? Could any of us who have spent time
in wilderness? In a word, no. It wasn’t unpredictable and therefore
couldn’t be interesting for long; it didn’t stay novel or fulfill the
Kaplans’ quotient of being mysterious or escapist enough. But I
looked at these children, and their young parents, and I realized that
most of them had probably never seen a much wilder nature, and they
didn’t miss what they didn’t know. If this isn’t an argument for
conserving wilderness and making sure people experience it, I don’t
know what is.
Heading out of the park, a fragile sliver of hazy moon hung in the
southern sky.
I hadn’t noticed it at all.
I TOOK AWAY two big lessons from Singapore. For greenery to truly
seep into all neighborhoods, there needs to be a strong governing
vision. Second, urban nature will serve us best when it’s allowed to be
a little bit wild, at least in spots. I couldn’t help but wonder if cities
had something better to offer in the awe department. Real nature, the
kind we evolved in, incorporates entropy, blood, high winds, a
beating, pulsing geophony. In Singapore, nature more or less looked
like nature, but it didn’t sound like nature. It didn’t act like nature.
Where was the possibility of all that Darwinian tooth and claw?
Celebrating living trees instead of fake trees seemed like a logical
first step. In fact, trees might be our single best tool for urban
salvation. City dwellers get most excited about two natural features:
water and trees. Now fans can even write emails to trees in Melbourne
(“As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a
branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all
the time. You’re such an attractive tree.” The trees, which are tagged
with individual identification numbers in St. Mary’s Park, sometimes
write back via the park crew).
My man Olmsted understood this devotion. In his principles for
park design, he thought no features should stand out as too distracting
or spectacular. There should be no flamboyant flower beds and only a
minimal amount of overt architecture. The magic formula: generous
meadows loosely defined by trees. Winding pathways leading to
mystery, flirtatiously half concealed by trees. Trees, trees, trees. They
were so important to the Olmsted schema that he ordered no fewer
than 300,000 of them for Central Park’s 800 acres, effectively
freaking out his budgetary overlords. There were so many trees and
shrubs that Calvert Vaux had to recruit a small team of family and
friends to fill in the master drawing with tiny green spots. This was
pixelation, circa 1858.
Urban trees provide not just aesthetic pleasure but concrete health
benefits. Although certain species of trees can worsen asthma through
pollen and other compounds, taken as a whole they generally improve
people’s physiology in several important ways. Public officials
perhaps didn’t fully appreciate this until a rather astounding study
was published in 2013. Geoffrey Donovan, an urban forester with the
U.S. Forest Service, spotted an intriguing natural experiment: a pesky
scourge called the emerald ash borer, a “phloem feeder,” landed on
our shores in about 2002, whereupon it decimated 100 million ash
trees throughout the Midwest and Northeast. Gone, poof. Donovan
decided to see if there was any relationship between the treepocalypse
and the incidence of cardiovascular disease in humans.
Donovan was already aware of some seminal European studies
looking at human stress, illnesses and loosely defined “green space”
in cities. And there were other studies, including Richard Mitchell’s
work in Scotland, showing lower mortality rates near urban parks.
While Mitchell’s research revealed a big health boost to poor people,
Donovan’s work showed the sudden tree blight had a bigger impact on
wealthier neighborhoods, probably because those had the most trees
to lose. Overall, the counties that were hit by the borer suffered
15,000 additional deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more
from lower respiratory disease. Those figures represent a sizable 10
percent increase in expected mortality. It’s hard to say whether the
deaths were caused by worsened air quality or changes in stress
brought on by not having the tall, green, comforting trees to look at,
or both. If trees can move us so powerfully in their metaphoric reach,
as the veterans on the Salmon felt, then perhaps looking at sick or
dead trees is in itself stressful.
Toronto takes its 10 million trees very seriously, valuing its urban
forest at $7 billion. A recent study there showed the higher a
neighborhood’s tree density, the lower the incidence of heart and
metabolic disease. Putting it into raw economic perspective, the
health boost in those living on blocks with about 11 more trees than
average was equivalent to a $20,000 gain in median income. Lucky
residents were rich in trees.
Every tree helps. As the founding nature/brain researcher Rachel
Kaplan told me, “nature doesn’t have to be pervasive. One tree is an
awful lot better than no tree.” But more trees are best. The city of
Washington, D.C., and partner nonprofits have been trying to plant at
least 8,600 trees a year in an effort to increase the street canopy to 40
percent in the next two decades. New York City recently completed a
wildly ambitious campaign to plant a million trees, and Los Angeles,
Shanghai, Denver and Dubai are in the middle of similar ones.
Trees are considered a critical part of the global carbon storage
solution, the heat-island solution and the urban air-quality solution.
It’s a tall order, but they stand at the ready.
Epilogue
But are not exercise and the open air within the reach of us all?
— WALT WHITMAN
If there’s one major theme of this book, it’s that the benefits of
nature work along a dose curve. Tim Beatley, who runs the Biophilic
Cities Project at the University of Virginia, promotes a concept called
the nature pyramid. It’s a recommended menu for getting the nature
humans need, and I think it’s a genius idea. It also happens to mirror
the structure of this book, from quick doses of nearby nature to longer
spells in wild places. Inspired by the ubiquitous food pyramid,
Beatley places at the base the daily interactions with nearby nature
that help us destress, find focus and lighten our mental fatigue. These
are the birds and trees and fountains in our neighborhoods, our pets
and our house plants, public and private architecture that allow for
daylight, fresh air and patches of blue sky and naturalistic
landscaping. These are our daily vegetables, and Singapore, laser
lights and all, has it nailed. We should all be so lucky.
Moving up the pyramid are weekly outings to parks and
waterways, places where the sounds and hassles of the city recede,
places that we should aim to imbibe at least an hour or so a week in
the Finnish fashion. These might include wilder, bigger city parks if
we’re lucky, or regional parks that we can travel to fairly easily.
Moving up higher still are the places that take more effort to get
to: the monthly excursions to forests or other restful, escapist natural
areas along the lines of what Japan’s Qing Li recommends—a
weekend per month—for our immune systems.
At the very pinnacle are the rare but essential doses of wilderness,
which Beatley and scientists like Utah’s David Strayer think we need
yearly or biyearly, in intense multiday bursts. As we’ve seen, these
trips can rearrange our very core, catalyzing our hopes and dreams,
filling us with awe and human connection and offering a reassurance
of our place in the universe. There may be particular times when
wilderness experience can be most helpful to us, such as during the
identity-forming roller coaster of adolescence or following grief or
trauma.
The more we recognize these innate human needs, the more we
stand to gain. I’d love to see more wilderness therapy, more kids in
summer camp and on nature field trips and on scouting expeditions
and on quests of one kind or another, and more opportunities for city
populations in general to touch the wild. We all need a regular check-
in for personal introspection, goal-setting and spiritual reflection.
Best to turn the phone off.
Distilling what I learned, I came up with a kind of ultrasimple
coda: Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or
not. Breathe.
According to Beatley, there’s cause for hope. Cities around the
world are undertaking projects large and small to integrate a range of
natural elements into everyday life, and they’re seeing huge payback,
from New York’s High Line to the opening up that we saw of South
Korea’s Cheonggyecheon River. When cities become greener, it
makes not only people more resilient but the cities themselves. They
can better handle extremes of moisture and temperature; they rebound
more quickly from natural disasters and they provide refugia for
disappearing species from bees to butterflies to birds and fish.
Since our brains especially love water, it makes sense to put it at
the heart of these projects. Thirty-two miles of the Los Angeles River
are being transformed from a concrete-lined eyesore into a biological
and recreational corridor. Copenhagen now has several safe
swimming areas in the harbor. People swim in organized events from
San Francisco’s Baker Beach to Alcatraz. Washington, D.C.’s
Anacostia River, once a forgotten, crime-ridden excuse for sewage,
now hosts Friday Night Fishing for families and canoe trips for
schoolchildren. But try topping this: Wellington, New Zealand, offers
a public snorkel trail. Such places exemplify, said Beatley, “cities of
awe.” But the challenge remains to make “blue space,” whether
awesome or merely restorative, accessible to everyone.
We still have a long way to go. You can see poverty from space.
My own city, D.C., has a clear “tree line” that can be seen in satellite
photos analyzed by the Washington Post. To the west of that line, in
the affluent Northwest quadrant, the streets glow green from above.
To the east, where 40 percent of residents live in low-income
neighborhoods, the area looks flat and gray. The picture is hardly
unique, and this inequality is our essential conundrum as we move
toward increasingly urban habitats.
Olmsted understood that throughout history—from the ancient
Persians to the English gentry, whose manicured hunting grounds first
inspired city parks—the rich always got to enjoy restful glades and
pastures. Olmsted wanted to break that pattern fundamentally. Not
only did he want people to heal in parks; he wanted all people to have
the chance. In the 1870s, he actually posted notices in tenements and
sent circulars to all the doctors in New York City with directions to
Central Park and Prospect Park; the posters included a description of
natural destinations to aid convalescents.
Why shouldn’t doctors prescribe time outside to their patients?
It’s taken nearly 150 years for Olmsted’s idea to gain some
traction. There aren’t many doctors sending their urban patients to the
park, but there are a few. Nooshin Razani, a pediatrician at Children’s
Hospital in Oakland, California, has forged a partnership with local
parks so inner-city kids can get to them more easily and more often.
Like Razani, Robert Zarr, a pediatrician at Unity Healthcare in
Washington, D.C., saw that conventional approaches weren’t serving
his underprivileged patients. Many were suffering from obesity,
diabetes, depression, anxiety and asthma.
“This is a no-brainer,” he said. “Parks are free. They are an
incredible resource not being used. We just need to connect people to
them.”
Health care is only a piece of the solution. The access-to-nature
movement also ideally needs to grow out of schools, churches,
workspaces, neighborhood associations and cities as a whole. And it
won’t happen unless we acknowledge more consciously our need for
nature. As I’ve learned through the course of reporting this book, we
profoundly undervalue that need. You can see it when we cut recess
and outdoor play for kids, when we design buildings and
neighborhoods that cut off light, space and fresh air, when we stay
inside instead of making the effort to get out. The wealthier you are,
the more likely you are to satisfy your nature neurons, but it’s often a
subconscious fulfillment met by exclusive neighborhoods and
restorative vacations. Until we all fully acknowledge the need for
nature that’s driving some of our behavior, we won’t work to make it
available for everyone.
I’m heartened by the small bursts of activism taking place in
communities throughout the country, whether through fun and
innovative groups like Outdoor Afro, GirlTrek, CityKids, Nature
Bridge, the Children & Nature Network and dozens of others.
Adventure playgrounds—complete with mud puddles and you-build-it
twiggy forts are springing up in places like Houston, Texas, and
Governors Island, New York. So-called “tactical urbanists” are
installing pop-up parks and guerilla gardens on city streets.
Increasingly, organizations, public agencies and institutions are
working hard to get people, including me, into the thin ribbons of
blue-green that still weave through our urban habitats. It’s no longer
enough to save wild places from people—now groups are saving them
for people. The Nature Conservancy, known for preserving important
ecosystems and habitats, created a new Human Dimensions Program
(HDP), an initiative to bring human well-being considerations into
conservation practice. The U.S. National Park Service introduced a
major Healthy Parks, Healthy People initiative, specifically geared
toward making parks more attractive to diverse populations for both
the health of the parks (so they’ll be used) and the health of people.
“In the past we tended to encourage visitors to come to the parks and
have fun and learn something and be safe,” Diana Allen, chief of the
service’s Office of Public Health, told me. “Now we say come have
fun and be healthy. That’s huge.”
If we value how important access to parks is for neighborhood
well-being, then we need to measure it. The nonprofit Trust for Public
Land recently compiled a helpful “ParkScore” index, ranking every
major U.S. city by the proportion of residents living within a 10-
minute walk of a park. Minneapolis ranked first (no wonder they’re so
happy there!), with 86.5 percent success. I was surprised to see
Washington, D.C., ranked third, at 80 percent, if you include public
lawns like the National Mall.
I’ll admit, I’m still struggling to make peace with my own
migration to the city, but my mood, along with my habits, are getting
better. Since starting this book, I’ve changed the way I walk around,
seeking out the routes with more trees. I go to parks a lot, and I walk
in them often. I make my kids come with me. We make an effort to
listen to the birds, to look at the fractal patterns in nature, to watch
the creeks flowing. I still shake my fists at the planes, but I also enjoy
getting on them to go somewhere more wild.
This winter, we had a blizzard big enough that it stopped virtually
all mechanized air and street traffic for a couple of days. The deer
took back the streets, bounding through the city in the snow. People
frolicked in the streets too, sledding down boulevards, doing
handstands, stomping around between shoveling sessions. When the
sun came out, my husband and I laced on some old ski boots and
schussed down to the canal path. We were about the only people down
there.
“It’s so quiet!” I said.
“We could be in Yellowstone!” he said.
We heard a few titmouses and cedar waxwings.
On our way back home, we passed an old Italian woman surveying
the shoveling work of some teenagers. She said, “So pretty out!” I
said, “No planes!” and her expression took on a revelatory look and
she laughed and said, “Brava! No planes!”
Then we skied back toward the house and I cheered on a man who
was almost done shoveling his epically buried car. We ran into some
neighbors we hadn’t seen in two years and found out one had been
undergoing cancer treatment. We talked for half an hour. We came
upon a pack of enterprising boys and hired them to shovel our
driveway. When they finished, they came in to watch the last plays of
a Broncos game along with our next-door neighbor, who brought
snacks. “It’s like a neighborhood again,” he said.
It was still the city, but it had been, if not taken over by natural
forces, at least temporarily matched by them. Nature asserted itself
and the city watched, and played.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's
search function to locate particular terms in the text.
1 Title, “The Cordial Air,” from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Nature, first published
in 1836. “In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.”
1 “May your trails”: From Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1988), preface.
2 About the MacKerron study quoted: It’s worth pointing out that MacKerron
controlled for lots of variables, such as weather, companionship, etc., and he also
was able to factor in the vacation effect by looking only at responses given during
weekends and national holidays, when presumably most people were not working. In
other words, people weren’t just reporting feeling happier because they were off
work whenever they were in nature. Everyone was off work, so the playing field was
more level. From George Mackerron and Susana Mourato, “Happiness Is Greater in
Natural Environments,” Global Environmental Change, vol. 23, no. 5 (Oct. 2013): p.
992.
3 As Nisbet rather dejectedly concluded: Elizabeth K. Nisbet and John M. Zelenski,
“Underestimating Nearby Nature Affective Forecasting Errors Obscure the Happy
Path to Sustainability,” Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 9 (2011): pp. 1101–6.
4 We check our phones 1,500 times a week: Based on a survey in the U.K. by a
marketing agency, Tecmark.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-
2783677/How-YOU-look-phone-The-average-user-picks-device-1-500-times-
day.html, accessed May 26, 2015.
4 iPhone users vs. Android users: From an Experian marketing survey, written about
here http://www.experian.com/blogs/marketing-forward/2013/05/28/americans -
spend-58-minutes-a-day-on-their-smartphones/, accessed May 27, 2015.
4 Regarding children spending little time outside: Only about 10 percent say they are
spending time outdoors every day, according to a Nature Conservancy poll,
http://www.nature.org/newsfeatures/kids-in-nature/kids-in-nature-poll.xml.
4 “Tired, nerve shaken, over-civilized people”: John Muir, Our National Parks (New
York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), p. 1.
4 “pestiferous little gratifications”: From Mose Velsor (Walt Whitman), “Manly Health
and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” ed. Zachary Turpin,
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2016): p. 289.
4 Wordsworth lines: from The Prelude, 1805.
5 Beethoven’s tree: Cited in Eric Wiener, The Geography of Genius (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 2016), p. 235. The Beethoven quote is from his letter to Therese Malfatti
in 1808.
5 For more on prospect and refuge theories of human habitat preference, see Jay
Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley, 1975) and Gordon
Orians, Snakes, Sunrises and Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014).
6 We’ve become arguably more irritable, less sociable, more narcissistic: see studies by
Clifford Nass, including Roy Pea et al., “Media Use, Face-to-face Communication,
Media Multitasking, and Social Well-Being Among 8-to-12-Year-Old Girls,”
Developmental Psychology, vol. 48, no. 2 (2012): p. 327 ff. On nature deficit
disorder, see Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods (New York: Workman
Publishing, 2005).
11 On Taksim Gezi Park, see Sebnem Arsu and Ceylan Yeginsu, “Turkish Leader Offers
Referendum on Park at Center of Protests,” New York Times, June 13, 2013.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/world/europe/taksim-square-protests- istanbul-
turkey.html?_r=0, accessed July 2, 2015.
12 Olmsted quote: can be found in Witold Rybyznski, A Clearing in the Distance:
Frederick Law Olmsted and the Nineteenth Century, Kindle location 4406.
Portions of this chapter originally appeared in Florence Williams, “Take Two Hours of Pine
Forest and Call Me in the Morning,” Outside, Nov. 2012, published online Nov. 28, 2012.
17 “In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world”: Edward O. Wilson, The Biophilia
Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), p. 32.
17 “There is nothing you can see that is not a flower”: Matsuo Basho quoted in Margaret
D. McGee, Haiku—The Sacred Art: A Spiritual Practice in Three Lines (Woodstock,
VT: Sky Paths Publishing, 2009), p. 32.
19 With the largest concentration of giant trees: Miyazaki from the book Designing Our
Future: Local Perspectives on Bioproduction, Ecosystems and Humanity, ed. Mitsuru
Osaki: Okutama Town designated in 2008, pp. 409–10.
19 68 percent of the country’s land mass: Qing Li. “Effect of Forest Bathing Trips on
Human Immune Function,” Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, vol. 15,
no. 1 (2010): pp. 9–17.
19 one hundred Forestry Therapy sites within ten years: Yoshifumi Miyazaki, “Science
of Nature Therapy,” p. 8, http://www.fc.chiba-
u.jp/research/miyazaki/assets/images/natural%20therapy(07.06)_e.pdf, accessed June
2015.
20 In addition to those: “Suicide in Japan,” Japan Today, Jan. 18, 2011.
20 commuting hell: Eric Goldschein, “Take a Look at Why the Tokyo Metro Is Known
as ‘Commuter Hell,’” Business Insider, Jan. 11, 2012; and Ronald E. Yates,
“Tokyoites Rush to ‘Commuting Hell’” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 28, 1990.
21 Erich Fromm, who described it in 1973: Fromm quote from The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973), p. 366. Cited in
Stephen R. Kellert, Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution and
Development (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997).
21 Wilson distills the idea more precisely: Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson.
The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995), p. 416.
23 As Miyazaki explained it: See Yoshifumi Miyazaki, “Science of Nature Therapy”
(above) and Juyoung Lee et al., “Nature Therapy and Preventive Medicine,” in
Public Health—Social and Behavioral Health, ed. Jay Maddock (Rijeka, Croatia:
InTech, 2012); and Miyazaki et al. “Preventive Medical Effects of Nature Therapy,”
Nihon eiseigaku zasshi/Japanese Journal of Hygiene, vol. 66, no. 4 (2011): pp. 651–
56.
25 We suffer the consequences: Sandor Szabo, Yvette Tache, and Arpad Somogyi, “The
Legacy of Hans Selye and the Origins of Stress Research: A Retrospective 75 Years
After His Landmark Brief ‘Letter’ to the Editor of Nature,” Stress, vol. 15, no. 5
(2012): pp. 472–78.
25 heart disease, metabolic disease, dementia and depression: Esther M. Friedman et al.,
“Social Strain and Cortisol Regulation in Midlife in the US,” Social Science &
Medicine, vol. 74, no. 4 (2012): pp. 607–15.
27 The brains-on-built-environment: Roger S. Ulrich et al., “Stress Recovery During
Exposure to Natural and Urban Environments,” Journal of Environmental
Psychology, vol. 11: 201–30.
28 But Li found similar results with NK cells: Qing Li et al., “Effect of Phytoncide from
Trees on Human Natural Killer Cell Function.” International Journal of
Immunopathology and Pharmacology, vol. 22, no. 4 (2009): pp. 951–59.
33 “We used to wait”: Arcade Fire, “We Used to Wait,” from The Suburbs, 2010.
37 a 50 percent improvement in creativity: The four-day wilderness pilot study is R.A.
Atchley et al., “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning Through
Immersion in Natural Settings,” PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 12 (2012), published online,
e51474.
42 “Every one knows”: William James, The Principles of Psychology (Chicago: Henry
Holt/ Encyclopedia Britannica, 1991), p. 261.
42 “My experience is what I”: James, p. 260.
42 “spiritual alertness of the most vital description”: William James quote from the
biographical note in James, p. vi.
43 “I am away from the office”: From the Twitter feed of Shit Academics Say, May 13,
2015, 9:41 P.M., https://twitter.com/AcademicsSay.
43 For perspective, it takes: The brain’s processing speed is about 120 bits per second,
from Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of
Information Overload (New York: Dutton, 2014), p. 7.
43 Moreover, task-switching: Task-switching burns up oxygenated glucose . . . Levitin,
p. 98.
46 “The average American”: Levitin, p. 12.
48 “employs the mind”: Olmsted’s 1865 Report to the Congress of the State of
California as quoted in Roger S. Ulrich et al., “Stress Recovery During Exposure to
Natural and Urban Environments,” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 11,
no. 3 (1991): p. 206.
49 partly “recovered”: The Kaplan/Berman cognitive study: Berman et al., “The
Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature,” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no.
12 (2008): pp. 1207–12.
53 At least one MRI study: The MRI study showing increased activation in the insula
and anterior cingulate is Tae-Hoon Kim et al., “Human Brain Activation in Response
to Visual Stimulation with Rural and Urban Scenery Pictures: A Functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging Study,” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 408, no. 12
(2010): pp. 2600–2607.
Some of the material in this chapter appeared in different form in Florence Williams, “This
is Your Brain on Nature,” National Geographic, January 2016.
59 “I can’t begin to count”: Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is
Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (New York: Picador, 2014): p. 61.
62 South Korea then had a lower GDP: Hong, p. 2.
62 One-third of Koreans were homeless: Daniel Tudor, Korea: The Impossible Country
(North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2013), Kindle location 171.
62 “that quality of air”: From Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905), p.
170, http://www.archive.org/stream/e00ssaysoftravelstevrich#page/n7/mode /2up,
accessed 6/17/15.
62 “The piny sweetness”: From “Pan in America” and cited in Tianying Zang, D.H.
Lawrence’s Philosophy of Nature: An Eastern View (Bloomington, IN: Trafford
Publishing, 2011), p. 7.
65 The sabinenes seem: “The Forest and Human Health Issues in Korean Forest Policy
and Research,” topic paper, Korea Forest Research Institute, Oct. 27, 2014.
66 Flying out of poverty: This is based on the World Bank’s most recent ranking, found
here: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf, accessed June 2015.
66 98 percent of South Koreans graduate: Tudor, Kindle location 1954.
67 In a country where: Tudor, Kindle location 1939.
67 sanshin, the mountain spirit: Hong, Kindle locations 740, 757.
67 Trees, too, have long been: Tudor, Kindle location 498.
67 which means body and soil are one: Hong, Kindle location 726.
73 1 trillion odors: Caroline Bushdid et al., “Humans Can Discriminate More Than 1
Trillion Olfactory Stimuli,” Science, vol. 343, no. 6177 (2014): pp. 1370–72.
73 The researchers measured: Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi et al., “Chemosensory Cues to
Conspecific Emotional Stress Activate Amygdala in Humans,” PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no.
7 (2008), published online, e6495.
73 Svante Pääbo is the Swedish: This interview with Pääbo about human smell is
available online through Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s DNA Learning Center
website: http://www.dnalc.org/view/15149-Human-smell-receptors-Svante -
Paabo.html, accessed Nov. 2014.
74 what about us?: For more on the domestication of humans, see Razib Khan, “Our
Cats, Ourselves,” New York Times, Nov. 24, 2014, accessed Nov. 2014.
75 2.1 million premature deaths annually: Tami C. Bond et al., “Bounding the Role of
Black Carbon in the Climate System: A Scientific Assessment,” Journal of
Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, vol. 118, no. 11 (2013): pp. 5380–552.
75 smog-choked Mexico City: Calderón-Garcidueñas et al., “Air Pollution, Cognitive
Deficits and Brain Abnormalities: A Pilot Study with Children and Dogs,” Brain and
Cognition, vol. 68, no. 2 (2008): pp. 117–27.
76 Nineteen percent of Americans: Gregory M. Rowangould, “A Census of the U.S.
Near-Roadway Population: Public Health and Environmental Justice Considerations,”
Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, vol. 25 (2013): pp.
59–67. The study also mentioned that “greater traffic volume and density are
associated with larger shares of non-white residents and lower median household
incomes,” on a national level. Additionally, counties with residents living near high-
volume roads often do not have an air-quality monitor in the same area.
76 rose petals to lure Marc Antony: Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 36.
76 pleasant smells trigger “approach behavior”: Paula Fitzgerald Bone and Pam
Scholder Ellen, “Scents in the Marketplace: Explaining a Fraction of Olfaction,”
Journal of Retailing, vol. 75, no. 2 (1999): pp. 243–262.
76 If a store smells good: Rob W. Holland, Merel Hendriks, and Henk Aarts, “Smells
Like Clean Spirit: Nonconscious Effects of Scent on Cognition and Behavior,”
Psychological Science, vol. 16, no. 9 (2005): pp. 689–93.
76 People assigned to a room: Katie Liljenquist, Chen-Bo Zhong, and Adam D.
Galinsky, “The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity,”
Psychological Science, vol. 21, no. 3 (2010): pp. 381–83.
77 The so-called “pinosylvin”: Mi-Jin Park, “Inhibitory Effect of the Essential Oil from
Chamaecyparis obtuse on the Growth of Food-Borne Pathogens,” Journal of
Microbiology, vol. 48, no. 4. (2010): pp. 496–501.
77 Although aromatherapy is the most popular alternative: Yuk-Lan Lee et al., “A
Systematic Review of the Anxiolytic Effects of Aromatherapy in People with Anxiety
Symptoms,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, vol. 17, no. 2
(2011): p. 106.
77 “a safe and pleasant intervention”: Lee, p. 107.
77 significantly less anxiety using “aromasticks”: Jacqui Stringer and Graeme Donald,
“Aromasticks in Cancer Care: An Innovation Not to Be Sniffed At,” Complementary
Therapies in Clinical Practice, vol. 17, no. 2 (2011): pp. 116–21.
77 Other studies have reported: Toshiko Atsumi and Keiichi Tonosaki, “Smelling
Lavender and Rosemary Increases Free Radical Scavenging Activity and Decreases
Cortisol Level in Saliva,” Psychiatry Research ,vol. 150, no. 1 (2007): pp. 89–96,
and Yumi Shiina et al., “Relaxation Effects of Lavender Aromatherapy Improve
Coronary Flow Velocity Reserve in Healthy Men Evaluated by Transthoracic
Doppler Echocardiography.” International Journal of Cardiology, vol. 129, no. 2
(2008): pp. 193–97.
77 In one survey of 400 Londoners: George MacKerron and Susana Mourato, “Life
Satisfaction and Air Quality in London,” Ecological Economics, vol. 68, no. 5
(2009): pp. 1441–53.
CHAPTER 4: BIRDBRAIN
105 “[When] the myopia”: Juler quote from Elie Dolgin, “The Myopia Boom” Nature,
vol. 519, no. 7543 (2015): pp. 276–78, accessed March 2015.
105 “She promised us south rooms”: E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (New York:
Knopf, 1922), p. 13.
107 Nightingale’s famous nursing textbook: Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing:
What It Is, and What It Is Not (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1860), accessed at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/nightingale/nursing/nursing.html in April
2015.
108 One of the first people: “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery,”
Science, vol. 224, no. 4647 (1984): pp. 224–25.
108 prisoners in Michigan whose cells: E. O. Moore, “A Prison Environment’s Effect on
Health Care Service Demands,” Journal of Environmental Systems, vol. 11 (1981):
pp. 17–34.
109 the brutalist Robert Taylor housing project: For the series of Robert Taylor Homes
studies, see Frances E. Kuo, “Coping with Poverty: Impacts of Environment and
Attention in the Inner City,” Environment & Behavior, vol. 33, no. 1 (2001): pp. 5–
34; Frances E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan, “Aggression and Violence in the Inner
City: Effects of Environment via Mental Fatigue,” Environment & Behavior, Special
Issue, vol. 33 no. 4 (2001): pp. 543–71.
110 Analyzing 98 buildings over two years: Frances E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan,
“Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?”
Environment & Behavior, vol. 33, no. 3 (2001): pp. 343–67.
111 The greener-courtyard residents: Frances E. Kuo et al., “Fertile Ground for
Community: Inner-City Neighborhood Common Spaces,” American Journal of
Community Psychology, vol. 26, no. 6 (1998): pp. 823–51.
111 For some reason, social psychologists: For the road rage study, see Jean Marie
Cackowski, and Jack L. Nasar, “The Restorative Effects of Roadside Vegetation
Implications for Automobile Driver Anger and Frustration,” Environment and
Behavior, vol. 35, no. 6 (2003): pp. 736–51.
111 In these studies: The Dutch study is Jolanda Maas et al., “Social Contacts as a
Possible Mechanism Behind the Relation Between Green Space and Health,” Health
and Place, vol. 15, no. 2 (2009): pp. 586–95. The office plant study is Netta
Weinstein, Andrew K. Przybylski, and Richard M. Ryan, “Can Nature Make Us More
Caring? Effects of Immersion in Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations and Generosity,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 35, no. 10 (2009): pp. 1315–29.
112 Several years ago Taylor wrote: Richard Taylor, “The Curse of Jackson Pollock: The
Truth Behind the World’s Greatest Art Scandal,” Oregon Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 2
(2010), http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/CurseOfJackson Pollock.pdf,
accessed March 2015.
113 Arthur C. Clarke described the Mandelbrot set: The quote is from a documentary
presented by Arthur C. Clarke, The Colours of Infinity, directed by Nigel Lesmoir-
Gordon (1995), available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com /watch?
v=Lk6QU94xAb8, accessed June 2015.
114 He and Caroline Hagerhäll: Caroline M. Hagerhäll et al., “Fractal Dimension of
Landscape Silhouette Outlines as a Predictor of Landscape Preference,” Journal of
Environmental Psychology, vol. 24, no. 2 (2004): pp. 247–55.
114 To find out, they used EEG: For a fuller discussion of the EEG study, see Richard
Taylor et al., “Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock’s Fractals,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 5 (2011): pp. 60–70.
115 Taylor believes our brains recognize that: For more on fractals in art and nature, see
Branka Spehar and Richard P. Taylor, “Fractals in Art and Nature: Why Do We Like
Them?” Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVIII, March 14, 2013, published
online.
115 Pollock’s favored dimension is similar: Taylor, p. 60.
116 this D range elicits our best: B. E. Rogowitz and R. F Voss, “Shape Perception and
Low Dimension Fractal Boundary Contours,” in B. E. Rogowitz and J. Allenbach,
eds., Proceedings of the Conference on Human Vision: Methods, Models and
Applications, SPIE/SPSE Symposium on Electron Imaging, 1990, vol. 1249, pp. 387–
94), cited in Hagerhäll (2004).
116 “The stress-reduction is triggered”: Quote from Richard Taylor, “Human
Physiological Responses to Fractals in Nature and Art: a Physiological Response,”
author page at http://materialscience.uoregon.edu/taylor/rptlinks2.html, accessed
March 2015.
117 Long before fractals, Beethoven: Beethoven wrote the resonance sentences in a letter
to Therese Malfatti, his student and love interest, after completing Symphony No. 6
in F Major, titled Pastoral, 1808, cited here: http://world
historyproject.org/1808/beethoven-finishes-his-sixth-symphony, accessed March
2015.
119 “we will suffer physical and psychological costs”: Peter H. Kahn, Rachel L.
Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert. “The Human Relation with Nature and
Technological Nature,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 18, no. 1
(2009): p. 41.
124 Since red makes us vigilant: We walk down red corridors faster . . . Peter Aspinall,
personal communication, June 2014.
124 “If you want to make”: Humphrey quote from Natalie Angier, “How Do We See
Red? Count the Ways,” New York Times, Feb. 6, 2007, http://www.nytimes
.com/2007/02/06/science/06angi.html, accessed April 2015.
124 But pink, interestingly, has the opposite effect: For more on the psychology of color,
see Adam Alter’s aptly named Drunk Tank Pink (New York: Penguin Group, 2013).
124 Berger writes in The Sense of Sight: The John Berger quote comes from Diane
Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 1990), p.
177.
124 In the app, straight and jagged lines: A fuller description of the visual properties that
trigger restoration can be found in D. Valtchanov and C. Ellard, “Cognitive and
Affective Responses to Natural Scenes: Effects of Low Level Visual Properties on
Preference, Cognitive Load and Eye-Movements,” Journal of Environmental
Psychology, vol. 43 (2015): pp. 184–95.
125 the same region Taylor found stimulated: The other studies implicating the ventral
striatum and parahippocampus using fMRI include Xiaomin Yue et al., “The Neural
Basis of Scene Preferences,” Neuroreport, vol. 18, no. 6 (2007): pp. 525–29.
125 craving the “visual opium” of a sunset: Ackerman, p. 255.
125 According to Valtchanov: For more on Valtchanov’s visuospatial theory, see Deltcho
Valtchanov, “Exploring the Restorative Effects of Nature: Testing a Proposed
Visuospatial Theory,” diss., University of Waterloo, 2013.
131 “The faint whisper”: Jansson quote from Moominvalley in November (New York:
Macmillan, 2014), p. 26, first published in English in 1945.
138 They get five-week vacations: Rebecca Ray, Milla Sanes, and John Schmitt, “No-
Vacation Nation Revisited” (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2013), p. 5,
accessible at http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/no-vacation-update-2013-
05.pdf, accessed June 2015;and “Annual Holiday” (Ministry of Employment and the
Economy, February 11, 2010), accessible at
https://www.tem.fi/en/work/labour_legislation/annual_holiday, accessed June 2015.
138 as well as paid one-year parental leave: Details of Finnish parental leave can be
found at http://europa.eu/epic/countries/finland/index_en.htm, accessed June 2015.
149 “Clearings. That’s what I needed”: Quote is from Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk.
(New York: Random House, 2014).
149 In the Gaelic poem “Hallaig”: The haunting audio clip of the poem, read in Gaelic,
can be found here:
http://www.edinburghliterarypubtour.co.uk/makars/maclean/hallaig.html,accessed
April 2015.
149 Weet, williwaw, crizzle: All from Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks (London: Penguin
UK, 2015).
150 In some neighborhoods a man: The information on Glasgow life expectancy comes
from the World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/bulletin/ volumes/89/10/11-
021011/en/, accessed April 2015.
150 The main cause: Richard J. Finlay, Modern Scotland 1914–2000 (London: Profile
Books, 2004).
152 we expended about 1,000 kilocalories: The kilocalorie figures are cited in Jo Barton
and Jules Pretty, “What Is the Best Dose of Nature and Green Exercise for Improving
Mental Health? A Multi-Study Analysis,” Environmental Science & Technology, vol.
44, no. 10 (2010): p. 3947.
153 Walking is the most popular sport in Scotland: From “Let’s Get Scotland Walking:
The National Walking Strategy,” government report (2014), http://www
.gov.scot/Resource/0045/00452622.pdf, accessed April 2015.
154 In other words, there was something protective: Richard Mitchell and Frank Popham,
“Effect of Exposure to Natural Environment on Health Inequalities: An Observational
Population Study,” Lancet, vol. 372 (2008): pp. 1655–60.
155 “40 percent less than those with the worst access”: Mitchell quotes on the AJPM
study are from his blog: http://cresh.org.uk/2015/04/21/more-reasons-to-think -green-
space-may-be-equigenic-a-new-study-of-34-european-nations/, accessed April 2015.
The study itself is Richard J. Mitchell et al., “Neighborhood Environments and
Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mental Well-Being,” American Journal of Preventive
Medicine, vol. 49, issue 1 (2015): pp. 80–84.
156 the percentage of Scotland covered by woodland: Martin Williams, “Hopes for
Forestry Scheme to Branch Out,” The Herald (Edinburgh), June 4, 2013.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/hopes-for-forestry-scheme-to-
branch-out.21253639, accessed May 2014.
161 Benjamin Rush, who first popularized the idea: Benjamin Rush quote from Benjamin
Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia:
Kimber & Richardson, 1812), p. 226, accessed at https://archive
.org/stream/medicalinquiries1812rush#page/n7/mode/2up, accessed May 2015.
162 “It was as though”: Johan Ottosson, “The Importance of Nature in Coping,” diss.,
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2007, p. 167.
164 Its motto could be the Emerson quote: Emerson vegetable quote from Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe & Co., 1836), p. 13. A digital version of
the original essay is available here:
https://archive.org/details/naturemunroe00emerrich, accessed June 2015.
166 For some other cool UK studies about happiness, health and coastlines, see M.P.
White et al., “Coastal Proximity, Health and Well-being: Results from a Longitudinal
Panel Survey,” Health Place, vol. 23 (2013): pp. 97–103; and B.W. Wheeler et al.,
“Does Living by the Coast Improve Health and Wellbeing?” Health Place, vol. 18
(2012): pp. 1198–201.
167 Other good walking studies include Melissa Marselle et al., “Examining Group
Walks in Nature and Multiple Aspects of Well-Being: A Large-Scale Study,”
Ecopsychology, vol. 6, no. 3 (2014): pp. 134–147, and Melissa Marselle et al.,
“Walking for Well-Being: Are Group Walks in Certain Types of Natural
Environments Better for Well-Being than Group Walks in Urban Environments?”
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 10, no. 11
(2013): pp. 5603–28.
CHAPTER 8: RAMBLING ON
169 “When we walk”: From Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Writings of Henry
David Thoreau, Riverside ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), p. 258.
169 Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking: Gros is quoted in Carole Cadwalladr,
“Frédéric Gros: Why Going for a Walk Is the Best Way to Free Your Mind,” The
Guardian, April 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/20 /frederic-
gros-walk-nietzsche-kant, accessed May 2015.
170 Anticipating the exercise/nature debate: Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Kindle
location 54.
170 He also wrote, in his essay “Walking”: Thoreau, Kindle location 33.
170 “To you, clerk”: Velsor Mose (Walt Whitman), “Manly Health and Training, with
Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” ed. Zachary Turpin, Walt Whitman
Quarterly Review 33 (2016), p. 189.
171 Hartman’s own history: Hartman’s relocation story is told in Jon Nordheimer, “15
Who Fled Nazis as Boys Hold a Reunion,” New York Times, July 28, 1983.
172 how it “interfused” with the mind: Wordsworth external mind quotes are from the
First Book of The Recluse.
172 a “savage torpor”: Savage torpor, from the preface to Lyrical Ballads, quoted in
James A. W. Heffernan, “Wordsworth’s London: The Imperial Monster,” Studies in
Romanticism, vol. 37, no. 3 (1998): pp. 421–43.
174 He also believed: For a good overview of Berger’s quest and legacy, see David
Millett, “Hans Berger: From Psychic Energy to the EEG,” Perspectives in Biology
and Medicine, vol. 44, no. 4 (2001): pp. 522–42.
174 walk around Edinburgh: The Edinburgh EEG study: Peter Aspinall et al., “The Urban
Brain: Analysing Outdoor Physical Activity with Mobile EEG,” British Journal of
Sports Medicine (2013), published online, bjsports-2012-091877.
177 forty minutes of moderate walking: For Kramer’s exercise studies, see Charles H.
Hillman et al., “Be Smart, Exercise Your Heart: Exercise Effects on Brain and
Cognition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 9, no. 1 (2008): pp. 58–65, and Kirk
I. Erickson et al., “Exercise Training Increases Size of Hippocampus and Improves
Memory,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 108, no. 7 (2011):
pp. 3017–22.
177 Kramer was intrigued: The Stanford walking study is Marily Oppezzo and Daniel L
Schwartz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative
Thinking,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition,
vol. 40, no. 4 (2014).
180 The Bratman “dish” study: Greg Bratman et al., “The Benefits of Nature Experience:
Improved Affect and Cognition,” Landscape and Urban Planning, vol. 138 (2015),
pp. 41–50.
181 “The results suggest”: From Gregory N. Bratman et al., “Nature Experience Reduces
Rumination and Subgenual Prefrontal Cortex Activation,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, vol. 112, no. 28 (2015): p. 8567.
Some of the information in this chapter originally appeared in different form in Florence
Williams’s National Geographic story “This Is Your Brain on Nature,” January 2016.
Calvin and Hobbes quote from Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
(Riverside, NJ: Andrews McNeel, vol.3, 2005), p. 370. Bachelard quote, cited in Michael
Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), p.
109. Ellen Meloy quotes from her lovely work of memoir-slash-natural history, The Last
Cheater’s Waltz (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), pp. 7, 107. Ed Abbey’s chapter title from
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988).
187 “Look at all the stars!”: Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Vol. 3
(Riverside, NJ: Andrews McMeel, 2005), p. 370.
194 “The passion caused”: From Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: University of Notre Dame Press,
1968), p. 57.
195 For more on the origins of the word “awe,” see Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), p. 257.
195 For more on Burke’s influence on Kant and Diderot, see the introduction by James
T. Boulton in Burke, 1968 ed., p. cxxv ff.
196 “inverse P.T.S.D.”: Cited in Michael Pollan, “The Trip Treatment,” New Yorker, Feb.
19, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment, accessed
Oct. 2, 2015.
196 The Piff and Keltner study: Paul K. Piff et al., “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial
Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 108, no. 6 (2015): p.
883.
197 The cytokine study is Jennifer E. Stellar et al., “Positive Affect and Markers of
Inflammation: Discrete Positive Emotions Predict Lower Levels of Inflammatory
Cytokines,” Emotion, vol. 15, no. 2 (2015).
198 For more about Darwin on compassion and the emotion of awe generally, I
recommend Keltner’s How to Be Good. A more academic summary can be found in
Michelle N. Shiota, Dacher Keltner, and Amanda Mossman, “The Nature of Awe:
Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept,” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 21,
no. 5 (2007): pp. 944–63.
200 Nearly half of all Americans: J. Carroll, “Time Pressures, Stress Common for
Americans” a Gallup-Time Poll from 2008, cited in Rudd, 2012.
200 For more on awe and time perception, see Melanie Rudd et al., “Awe Expands
People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well- Being,”
Psychological Science vol. 23, no. 10 (2012). For more on awe and generosity, see
Netta Weinstein et al., “Can Nature Make Us More Caring? Effects of Immersion in
Nature on Intrinsic Aspirations and Generosity,” Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, vol. 35, no. 10 (2009): pp. 1315–40.
203 “Oh Eeyore, you are wet!”: A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner, deluxe ed.
(New York: Dutton, 2009), p. 101.
203 “Between every two”: From Muir’s marginalia in his copy of Prose Works by Ralph
Waldo Emerson, vol. 1 (this volume resides in the Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library of Yale University). Cited in “Quotations from John Muir,”
selected by Harold Wood,
http://vault.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/favorite_quotations.aspx,
accessed April 12, 2016.
203 “I Sliped & bruised my leg very much”: Lewis and Clark account from lewis-
clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=1790, accessed Sept. 2014.
207 Surgeons in World War I: For a look at the role of plastic surgery in World War I, see
Sheryl Ubelacker, “Unprecedented Injuries from First World War Spawned Medical
Advances Still Used Today,” Canadian Press (via Postmedia’s World War 1
Centenary site), Sept. 23, 2014, http://ww1.canada.com/battlefront/unprecedented-
injuries-from-first-world-war-spawned-medical-advances-still-used-today, accessed
June 2015. For an overview of the effects of mustard gas, see “Facts About Sulfur
Mustard,” Centers for Disease Control, May 2, 2013,
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/sulfurmustard/basics/facts.asp, accessed June 2015.
208 Union soldiers after the battle: Olmsted quote from Rybczynski, Kindle edition
location 3244.
208 PTSD wasn’t officially named and recognized: Matthew J. Friedman, “PTSD History
and Overview,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, March 2, 2014,
http://www.ptsd.va.gov/PTSD/professional/PTSD-overview/ptsd-overview.asp.
208 Among veterans, that figure: “Witness Testimony of Karen H. Seal, M.D., MPH,”
House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, June 14, 2011,
http://Veterans.house.gov/prepared-statement/prepared-statement-karen-h-seal-md-
mph-department-medicine-and-psychiatry-san, as quoted in David Scheinfleld,
“From Battlegrounds to the Backcountry: The Intersection of Masculinity and
Outward Bound Programming on Psychosocial Functioning for Male Military
Veterans,” diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2014, p. 27.
208 They are two to four times: Gail Gamache, Robert Rosenheck, and Richard Tessler,
“Overrepresentation of Women Veterans Among Homeless Women,” American
Journal of Public Health, vol. 93, no. 7 (2003): pp. 1132–36.
211 In frightened lab animals: For the role of GCs in memory: J-F. Dominique et al.,
“Stress and Glucocorticoids Impair Retrieval of Long-Term Spatial Memory,” Nature,
vol. 394 (1998): pp. 787–90. For the hippocampus: Nicole Y.L. Oei et al.,
“Glucocorticoids Decrease Hippocampal and Prefrontal Activation During
Declarative Memory Retrieval in Young Men,” Brain Imaging and Behaviour, vol. 1
(2007): pp. 31–41. For norepinephrine: J. Douglas Bremner, “Traumatic Stress:
Effects on the Brain,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006): pp.
445.
211 Veterans are twice as likely: Jessie L. Bennett et al., “Addressing Posttraumatic Stress
Among Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans and Significant Others: An Intervention
Utilizing Sport and Recreation,” Therapeutic Recreation Journal, vol. 48, no. 1
(2014): p. 74.
211 female veterans commit suicide: Matthew Jakupcak et al., “Hopelessness and
Suicidal Ideation in Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans Reporting Subthreshold and
Threshold Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
vol. 199, no. 4 (2011): pp. 272–75.
Some of the material from this chapter appeared in Florence Williams, “ADHD: Fuel for
Adventure,” Outside, Jan./Feb. 2016, published online Jan. 20, 2016, http://www
.outsideonline.com/2048391/adhd-fuel-adventure?utm_source=twitter&utm
_medium=social&utm_campaign=tweet, accessed Feb. 22, 2016.
221 “Childhood is, or has been”: From “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of
Childhood,” New York Review of Books,” July 19, 2009, www.nybooks.com/
articles/archives/2009/jul/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/,
accessed July 17, 2015.
224 A recent advertisement for an ADHD drug: Mentioned in Richard Louv’s blog post,
“NATURE WAS MY RITALIN: What the New York Times Isn’t Telling You About
ADHD: The New Nature Movement,”
http://blog.childrenandnature.org/2013/12/16/nature-was-my-ritalin-what-the-new-
york-times-isnt-telling-you-about-adhd/, accessed July 20, 2015.
225 Olmsted hated school: From Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance:
Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (New York: Scribner,
1999), Kindle edition location 417. Quote to principal from Kindle edition, location
296.
226 Kuo ADHD studies: see A. Faber Taylor et al., “Coping with ADD: The Surprising
Connection to Green Play Settings,” Environment and Behaviour, vol. 33 (Jan.
2001): pp. 54–77.
226 ADHD kids playing in a park study: Andrea Faber Taylor and Frances E. Ming Kuo,
“Could Exposure to Everyday Green Spaces Help Treat ADHD? Evidence from
Children’s Play Settings,” Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, vol. 3, no. 3
(2011): pp. 281–303.
226 The Barcelona study: Elmira Amoly et al., “Green and Blue Spaces and Behavioral
Development in Barcelona Schoolchildren: The Breathe Project,” Environmental
Health Perspectives (Dec. 2014), pp. 1351–58.
227 Kuo and Taylor’s 2004 study: Frances E. Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor, “A Potential
Natural Treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence from a
National Study,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 94, no. 9 (2004).
228 On play and ADHD, see Jaak Panksepp, “Can PLAY Diminish ADHD and Facilitate
the Construction of the Social Brain?” Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry—Journal de l’Académie canadienne de psychiatrie de
l’enfant et de l’adolescent, vol. 16, no. 2 (2007): p. 62.
229 “Children cannot bounce off the walls”: Quote by Erin Kenny, cited in David Sobel,
“You Can’t Bounce off the Walls if There Are No Walls: Outdoor Schools Make Kids
Happier—and Smarter,” YES! Magazine, March 28, 2014.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/education-uprising/the-original-kindergarten ?
utm_source=FB&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=20140328, accessed July 17,
2015.
229 “Everything is good”: The Rousseau quote is from Émile, cited in Norman
Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), p. 19.
230 For more on the tremendous and largely unsung influence of Friedrich Fröbel, see
Brosterman, who makes a fascinating case for Fröbelian kindergarten literally
catalyzing modern art. Braque, Kandinsky, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright all
spent years holding cubes and making abstract geometric patterns with Fröbel’s
materials, and Wright and Le Corbusier in particular directly credit this for their
design sense. Brosterman suggests these influences were largely ignored by art
historians because they stemmed from the domain of young children and their
women teachers.
232 Finns and ADHD: S. L. Smalley et al., “Prevalence and Psychiatric Comorbidity of
Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in an Adolescent Finnish Population,”
Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 46, no.
12 (Dec. 2007): pp. 1575–83, cited in Daniel Goleman, “Exercising the Mind to
Treat Attention Deficits,” New York Times, May 12, 2014.
232 A large meta-analysis of dozens: B. A. Sibley et al., “The Relationship Between
Physical Activity and Cognition in Children: A Meta-analysis,” Pediatric Exercise
Science, vol. 15, no. 3 (2003): pp. 243–56.
232 The Penn State study on social skills: Damon E. Jones et al., “Early Social-
Emotional Functioning and Public Health: The Relationship Between Kindergarten
Social Competence and Future Wellness,” American Journal of Public Health, vol.
105, no. 11 (2015): pp. 2283–90.
233 The 2015 Pediatrics study on physical activity in preschoolers: Pooja S. Tandon et
al., “Active Play Opportunities at Child Care,” Pediatrics, May 18, 2015, published
online.
233 30 percent of third-graders: Romina M. Barros, et al., “School Recess and Group
Classroom Behavior,” Pediatrics, vol. 123, no. 2 (2009): pp. 431–36.
233 “Containerized kids”: See http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-11-05-
active_x.htm, accessed Feb. 2, 2016.
233 In 2004, 70 percent of mothers: R. Clements, “An Investigation of the Status of
Outdoor Play,” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, vol. 5 (2004): pp. 68–80.
Also see S. Gaster, “Urban Children’s Access to Their Neighbourhoods: Changes
Over Three Generations” (1991), quoted in R. Louv, Last Child in the Woods
(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005), p. 123. On children and exercise, see M.
Hillman, J. Adams, and Whitelegg, “One False Move: A Study of Children’s
Independent Mobility,” London: Policy Studies Institute, 1990. And
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-
generations.html. On preschool diagnoses of ADHD, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/among-experts-scrutiny-of-attention-
disorder-diagnoses-in-2-and-3-year-olds.html?_r=0, accessed July 18, 2015.
234 Teenagers today have: J. M Twenge et al., “Birth Cohort Increases in
Psychopathology Among Young Americans, 1938–2007: A Cross-Temporal Meta-
Analysis of the MMPI,” Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 30 (2010): pp. 145–54,
cited in M. Brussoni et al., “Risky Play and Children’s Safety: Balancing Priorities for
Optimal Child Development,” International Journal of Environmental Research and
Public Health, vol. 9 (2012): pp. 3136–48.
241 “If man is not”: Olmsted epigraph quoted in Rybczynski, Kindle location 2776.
241 For more on the idea of Metro sapiens, see Jason Vargo, “Metro Sapiens, an Urban
Species,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 4, no. 3 (2014).
241 By 2030, there will be: See R. Dhamodaran, “The Great Migration—India by 2030
and Beyond: Harnessing Technology for Better Urban Transportation in India,” a
presentation to the Wilson Center,
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/RAMAKRISHNAN%2C%20DHAMODAR
.pdf, accessed July 31, 2015.
242 “be anything but a hell”: Glaeser quote from http://www.cityjournal.org
/2014/24_3_urbanization.html, accessed July 31, 2015.
242 Leyhausen’s cat studies and the rat results: Cited in E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 255.
242 For more about the increased risk of mental disorders in city dwellers, see Florian
Lederbogen et al., “City Living and Urban Upbringing Affect Neural Social Stress
Processing in Humans,” Nature, vol. 474, no. 7352 (2011): pp. 498–501.
242 Meanwhile, a study from Portugal: S. Marques and M. L. Lima: “Living in Grey
Areas: Industrial Activity and Psychological Health,” Journal of Environmental
Psychology, vol. 31 (2011): 314–22, cited in “The Natural Environments Initiative:
Illustrative Review and Workshop Statement,” Report, Harvard School of Public
Health, Center for Health and the Global Environment, 2014, p. 11.
242 We could use some more resilience: World Health Organization fact sheet,
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs369/en/, accessed Aug. 3, 2015.
243 Singapore is the third-densest: World Bank stats found at http://www
.infoplease.com/ipa/A0934666.html, accessed Aug. 1, 2015.
244 On Singapore, see Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story:
1965–2000 (Singapore: Times Editions: Singapore Press Holdings, 2000), p. 199.
247 Portland hospital infection study: S. W. Kembel et al., “Architectural Design
Influences the Diversity and Structure of the Built Environment Microbiome,” ISME
Journal, vol. 6, no. 8 (Jan. 26, 2012): pp. 648–50.
250 The Donovan ash tree study: Geoffrey H. Donovan et al., “The Relationship
Between Trees and Human Health: Evidence from the Spread of the Emerald Ash
Borer,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 44, no. 2 (2013): pp. 139–45.
251 For the Toronto study, see Omid Kardan et al., “Neighborhood Greenspace and
Health in a Large Urban Center,” Scientific Reports, vol. 5 (2015): pp. 1–14.
EPILOGUE
253 “But are not exercise”: Walt Whitman writing as Mose Velsor, “Manly Health and
Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” ed. Zachary Turpin, Walt
Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2016): p. 212.
255 In the 1870s, he actually: Charles E. Beveridge and Paul Rocheleau, Frederick Law
Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), p. 45, cited
in Carol J. Nicholson, “Elegance and Grass Roots: The Neglected Philosophy of
Frederick Law Olmsted,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. XL, no.
2 (Spring 2004), http://www.dathil.com/cadwalader/olmsted _philosophy100.html,
accessed Aug. 3, 2015.
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