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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.
Yet we think of nature as a luxury, not a necessity.
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 biophilia hypothesis posits that peaceful or nurturing elements of nature helped us regain equanimity, cognitive clarity, empathy and hope. When love, laughter and music weren’t around, there was always a sunset.
“In our culture, nature is part of our minds and bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.”
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.
“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.”
Remarkably, Frederick Law Olmsted wrote of exactly this phenomenon in 1865, arguing that viewing nature “employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.
What leads to brain-resting? I had asked her. “Soft fascination,” she’d said. That’s what happens when you watch a sunset, or the rain. The most restorative landscapes, she said, are the ones that hit the sweet spot of being interesting but not too interesting.
To the extent that nature sounds are soothing to most humans, three in particular stand out: wind, water and birds.
The five-hours-a-month recommendation stands for those of us in need of a short tonic and as a way to ward off everyday blahs.
How perfect is this: crizzle, “the sound and action of open water as it freezes”?
Over recent decades we have come from dwelling in another world in which the living works of nature either predominated or were near at hand, to dwelling in an environment dominated by a technology which is wondrously powerful and yet nonetheless dead.” And that was in 1960.
As the epidemiologist Ian Alcock put it, if you want to be happy, there is a simple, scientific formula: “get married, get a job and live near the coast.”
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.”
The world is bigger than you, nature says. Get over yourself.
“I’m sure when I get back I’ll have three or four hundred emails. Most of them will no longer mean anything.”
Our capacities for empathy and self-reflection do appear to be challenged—even atrophying—as our digital interactions replace analog ones.
Like us, the river fully transforms from wild to domesticated, but it has no option for reversal.
Sitting here, I felt washed over by the calm of the scene, but it was also mixed with a little anxiety about another weather system approaching from the west. We had no cell reception to check our weather apps. Anxiety may thrive in cities, but it’s also at home in the wilderness—another paradox.
He loved a torrential waterfall, a violent storm, a dark grove. He would have made a good raft guide.
A deeply powerful, awe-inspiring experience can change someone’s perspective for a long time, even permanently.
Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life. — JOHN MUIR
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.
She recalled the words of a yoga instructor: “Anxiety is just excitement without breath.”
He has seen so many lives transformed by six-day trips in the wild that he decided to study them for his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Texas, Austin.
For a moment both boys cheered on Tim, a small boy from Atlanta with eyeglasses so thick they looked like safety gear.
We have come to see the restlessness that was once adaptive as a pathology. A recent advertisement for an ADHD drug listed the “symptoms” to watch for: “May climb or run excessively, have trouble staying seated.”
Ansel Adams’s parents plucked their restless boy out of school, gave him a box Brownie camera, and took him on a grand tour of Yosemite. It was unschooling, California-style.
“When you’re on a rock ledge,” Willson says, “there’s a sweet spot of arousal and stress that opens you up for adaptive learning. You find new ways of solving problems.”
“Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls.”
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.
Meanwhile, a study from Portugal found that people living near industrial “gray space,” as opposed to green space, reported “decreased use of coping strategies” and less optimism. That last bit is not trivial; optimism is associated with healthier behaviors, lower triglycerides and mental resilience.
For warding off depression, let’s go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum.
But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.
City dwellers get most excited about two natural features: water and trees.
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.
Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or not. Breathe.
Why shouldn’t doctors prescribe time outside to their patients?
It’s no longer enough to save wild places from people—now groups are saving them for people.
