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| The Nature Connection
The perfect antidote to what ails may be right outside your door |
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By Holly O’Dell
 Jupiter Images |
Surrounded by blue skies, palm trees, hiking trails, and mountain vistas, Coachella Valley residents have many reasons to take advantage of their environs. But it’s easy to overlook golden opportunities. We have too much work to do. There’s a good show on television or a backlog of e-mails. It is quicker to drive than to walk to the supermarket.
Whether caused by a lack of motivation or perceived inconvenience, a withdrawal from nature can negatively affect your health. Research indicates that regularly connecting with nature improves mood, reduces stress, and speeds the recovery of disease or injury.
A Growing Gap
If studies corroborate nature’s healing powers, why aren’t we outside as much as possible? A glance into society structure provides insight into why many people have become so ambivalent toward nature. For starters, 80 percent of American residents live in an urban environment.
“The paradigm separates people from the natural world in everything from habitat destruction to the way we’ve constructed and designed our buildings,” says Stephen Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and author of the book Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection. “We’ve become much more of a car culture. People rely on mechanical transport [more] than walking or bicycling, which give people more opportunities to connect with the natural world.”
Kellert cites the role of family as another important contribution to the problem. Nuclear families tend to live far from relatives, eliminating social interaction. “When people get together, they often do it in places like the outdoors,” he says. “The role model of the extended family is gone.” Add dependence on electronics — primarily the television and computer — to the mix and you have a series of factors that conspire, or perhaps enable, people to remain in their homes.
Think about the last time you spent a significant amount of time outdoors. Maybe it was as simplistic as watching the sun set behind the mountains or as invigorating as an early-morning run, but chances are you felt united with the scents, sights, and sounds surrounding you. Such a reaction is built into our genetic code.
“All these sensory responses to the natural environment were very functional and adaptive during most of our evolution,” Kellert says. “They stimulate our curiosity, critical thinking, problem-solving abilities, and creativity. They emanated from our hunt-and-gather past. We continue to respond to rainbows or the presence of water because, even though we’re not searching for food, we’re still stimulated by this rich environment called nature.”
Studies in Nature
Evolving research verifies this intrinsic connection to nature and emphasizes its importance to our well-being. In the book Environmental Health: From Global to Local,
Dr. Howard Frumkin — director of the National Center for Environmental Health and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — summarizes four primary benefits of nature: It helps us pay attention, it reduces our stress, it assists in child development, and it provides us social support through animal contact.
Many medical professionals provide nature-based therapies. Horticultural therapy is a mental health treatment based on the therapeutic effects of gardening. Participants in wilderness therapy report increased vigor and appreciation of others. Ecopsychology applies ecological insight to the practice of psychotherapy.
The existing research, Frumkin believes, only scratches the surface of the nature-health connection. “We have good evidence that nature does enhance our health, but we don’t really know the mechanisms by which it does so,” he says. “There’s a sense of physical control, balance, equilibrium, agility, judgment, and connectedness with the world that may be enhanced by outdoor play. There may be somatic, immunological, orthopedic, and developmental benefits. We only know in the most general sense that nature contact is good, and that’s why we need more research.”
Making Contact
Kellert classifies three ways in which we can come into contact with nature. The obvious one is directly, where we take ourselves outdoors and enjoy our surroundings. Another method is indirectly, when nature is controlled or managed by humans, such as a garden. A third way is to experience nature vicariously. In this instance, we might hear
a story that’s set in nature or watch a TV show about the Sahara desert. “You can never substitute for the direct experience of nature, but certainly all three [methods] are important,” Kellert says.
No matter which you choose, you’re giving your mind and body a much-needed dose of wellness.
“It’s helpful in just making people more cognitively engaged and curious and stimulated, which you wouldn’t think directly relates to health benefits, but it does,” Kellert says. “If people are bored, they tend to complain more. They focus on discomforts instead of being absorbed by the things around them. Nature helps restore emotional and physical balance.”
iStockphoto.com/Brian Walter
Child’s Play
Children spend on average 20 minutes outdoors a week, but nearly 45 hours a week in front of some sort of monitor. To reacquaint them with nature, you must first review the other factors at play, says Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods.
Louv says that the shift from playing outside until the street lights came on to rarely going outdoors to play started in the mid-1970s, but was exacerbated in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Thirty years ago, traditional neighborhoods started emptying out and “stranger danger” fear permeated families nationwide. Ten to 15 years later, cookie-cutter neighborhoods that restricted structural changes, such as building a basketball hoop or a tree house, reigned supreme. Children’s lives became overly structured — “a reflection of their parents’ calendar,” Louv says. Classroom time, standardized testing, and homework hours dramatically increased. Something had to give.
“You will hear parents being scolded for not letting their kids outside, but they’re being forced inside by all these other factors,” Louv says. “We’ve stripped out all nature, all the chances for kids to go out there and play as generations did before them.”
Playing outside does more than burn off a child’s extra energy; it’s helps develop them physically and mentally. A University of Illinois study shows that exposing children with attention deficit disorder to nature lessens their symptoms. And the California Department of Education released a study indicating that students in an outdoor education program scored 27 percent higher in science testing than their counterparts. Other research shows that children who regularly play in natural spaces are more likely to play cooperatively, invent games, and emerge as leaders.
“Once parents learn how good nature is for their kids, it will create a demand for nature,” Louv says. “That means parents have to be far more intentional going into nature.”
Opportunities to connect your children with nature are endless. Create a nature treasure hunt. Overturn stones to see what lives underneath. Install a birdfeeder. Camp in your back yard. Support organizations and institutions — nature conservancies, scouting troops, and schools — that encourage outdoor activities among children. “No one raises their child alone,” Louv says. “Every parent raises children in a social context.”
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