But are not exercise and the open air within the reach of us all?

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 checkin
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 glade
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
surscs:
https://www.pdfdrive.com/the-nature-fix-why-nature-makes-us-happier-healthier-and-more-creative-d61378058.html