the Nature Fix - Florence Williams
The Nature Fix - Florence Williams - Norton 2018
If you are a biophilia-denier then this book is for you. That is if you believe that there is no direct health benefit from immersion in nature or that the benefits are the result of the withdrawal of the stresses caused by social or urban situations. If you are interested in the scientific research being conducted to explore and measure the health impact of exposure to nature, then this book is for you. If you are just minded to travel with Florence Williams on her global tour of analytic experimenters and ecotherapy pioneers, then this book is also for you.
Williams takes us first to the shinrin-yoku practioners of Japan. Where we see how forest-bathing has become an intrinsic and large part of public health policy and provision. Yoshifumi Miyazaki an eminent Japanese researcher has been able to demonstrate that leisurely forest walks, compared to urban walks deliver a 12% decrease in cortisol levels, a 7% decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4% decrease in blood pressure and a 6% decrease in heart rate. His subjects also report better moods and lowered anxiety. The extensive notes and reference section in The Nature Fix allows us to fact check and delve deeper and makes the book the springboard int the research of the positive impact of nature on our health. Yoshifumi sets the benefits firmly in the Biophia Hypothesis. A million years of evolutionary adaptation has made the natural environment our home; it is then no surprise that we feel much better when we’re in it.
We are taken to the United States where researchers are focused not on the mood enhancement or general heath improvements of forest bathing but on measurable cognitive impact. A series of cognitive assessments and biomarker identification unpicks the impact of exposure to nature on attention, memory and creativity. A group of neuroscientists cooperate and compete to find the clearest ways to isolate and measure the benefits of nature.
Part two catalogues the ways researchers are attempting to identify the mechanism by which nature makes its positive impact, considering the specific sense by which we become aware of nature. Park Hyundai-Soo leads the research in South Korea on the impact on our brains of the phytocyanides we can smell. Much research has been conducted in Europe, the States and SE Asia on the impact of noise on our stress levels, and the benefit of birdsong. Frances Kuo of The university of Illinois has strong evidence that people with better views perform better on a variety of social achievement indicators: the results carefully scrutinised to ensure that associated influences such as wealth are correctly factored. The physicist Richard Taylor has worked with the environmental psychologist Caroline Hagerhall and found that people prefer pictures with a fractal pattern; specifically they like pictures with fractals of a particular range. Images of nature, on a screen have been shown to impact on our brains, and these effects measured using EEG and MRI scanned. We are given some relief from the envy we feel of Florence travelling the world talking to scientists passionate in the therapeutic impact of nature, when we read if her becoming nauseous when subjected to poorly projected 3-D simulators of landscape.
In Finland, a country where the population is still close to its forest home, the Japanese experiments are systematised and replicated. Nature enables a lower pulse rate and the beginnings of a parasympathetic nervous system leading to feelings of peace and well-being. Notably it is shown that the more nature you experience, the better you feel.
Glasgow is where both social inequality and proximity to wild landscape are in sharpest relief. The ways in which nature access can at times neutralise social divides is explored as a range of recuperative projects are discussed.
It’d be unfair to focus on this books study of empirical research and testing. The author is keen to place our view of nature within the intellectual cultural of Wordsworth, Muir, Thoreau and Burke and to centralise key emotional concepts of love and compassion. This is balanced with seeing how nature therapy can help in very practical ways the recovery of war veterans suffering debilitating PTSD. This book is a veritable mine of knowledge and as fascinating on the impact of traumatic events on memory function, the evolution of attention and the epidemic of ADHD or the development of Singapore as an urban nature-city. It is compulsive from start to finish and rather than recommend you stop what you’re doing, and get hold of a copy, and put yourself in a place where you can overload with the deeply therapeutic sensations of nature and read it there.