Oliver Milman is a New York-based journalist and environment correspondent for The Guardian.
While in graduate school and mulling relationship problems, Marc Berman did something that felt faintly ludicrous: He walked up to an oak tree and started talking to it.
The grandeur of this oak, in Ann Arbor’s Nichols Arboretum, seized Berman. It was strikingly large and isolated from the rest. “I’m a scientist, so I don’t know if I really believe in this stuff, but it had this aura about it,” he recalled. “There was something very powerful about that tree.”
Berman thought about previous awe-inspiring interactions in nature, such as gazing at gargantuan sequoias, and felt a sense of calm.
He hadn’t lost his mind. The Sylvan encounter, in 2008, came at a portentous time. He was working on landmark research at the University of Michigan that outlined the psychological benefits of being close to nature.
In a study for this research, people took a test challenging their attention and working memory and then went for a stroll through a park. Afterward, upon taking the test again, they improved their scores by an average of nearly 20%, much more than another group who had walked amid the grinding roar of downtown. Even being shown pictures of nature scenes improved participants’ mental functions, Berman and his colleagues found, compared to images of cityscapes.
These findings support the common wisdom that interacting with nature has restorative benefits. A growing body of scientific studies has confirmed this, revealing how hiking through landscapes or even gazing at them through a window can provide benefits such as lower blood pressure, quickened healing times and improved moods.
Lately, though, scientists have been looking beyond individual health outcomes and investigating how nature’s powers impact us collectively.
Trees, babbling streams and rolling hills can make us feel more connected to others and engender a sense of shared society, too. Exposure to nature also increases our “self-transcendence,” researchers in China found last year, making us feel more of a bond to others and realize that we are part of a mosaic of life that is larger than just ourselves.
Berman, now a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has observed similar effects. In another study, he found that while walking through a nature conservatory, people thought less about themselves and more about their environment and others, and while in a shopping mall, they felt more personal, impulsive urges.
Nature not only revives us, it seems to revive our spirit of common cause. This raises compelling possibilities in our fractured, often lonely age of inanity and roiling anger erupting from the screens to which we find ourselves perennially glued. The trouble is that our access to nature is unequal, politically fraught and steadily shrinking. Could small interventions to reintegrate nature into our cities, schools, healthcare and daily life be the salvation we need?
Nature’s Healing Power
Nature as therapy isn’t a new concept. Roman and Greek aristocrats withdrew to their countryside villas to clear their minds, and the restorative functions of the outdoors were obvious to thinkers of the time. Hippocrates, the ancient Greek “father of medicine,” is believed to have called nature “the best physician.”
Many centuries later, while designing Central Park, the architect Frederick Law Olmsted recognized the power of nature to pull together the increasingly stratified classes of New York City. “We need the calming influence of green spaces to cleanse our souls and rejuvenate our spirits,” he said.
Over in Japan, meanwhile, people practice shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, immersing themselves in nature to practice mindfulness and improve health and wellbeing while breaking from technology and busy city life. In Norway and other Nordic countries, the concept of Friluftsliv, which translates as “open-air life,” was popularized in the 19th century by the playwright Henrik Ibsen and embraces the idea that it is better for your mind and soul to be in nature, regardless of the weather.
But it’s only in the last 50 years or so that we have applied the rigor of the scientific method to such claims and beliefs, which had long seemed frivolous or overly humanistic to some. In 1984, a foundational study found that post-surgical patients at a suburban Pennsylvanian hospital whose rooms had a view of trees rather than a brick wall had shorter hospital stays, required less pain medication and received fewer negative nurse evaluations.
“Scientists are looking beyond individual health outcomes and investigating how nature’s powers impact us collectively.”
This finding, which spurred many hospitals to reorient their surroundings, was followed by the scientific validation of a rush of other longstanding hunches about the benefits of nature. Aspects of nature have now been linked, variously, to improvements in cognitive function and self-control behaviors among children and a reduction in the risk of many psychiatric problems later in life, such as depression, substance abuse and eating disorders.
Exposure to nature can lower our blood pressure, slash the risk of diabetes, improve our mental health and treat ADHD in a way that’s similar to a dose of Ritalin. Likewise, earthly sounds, like crickets chirping and crashing waves, can help us perform better in cognitive tests compared to the cacophony of urban life, such as traffic.
Closeness to the natural world can also help address yawning inequalities that exist among us. Having just 10 more decent-sized trees on a city block, on average, correlated to a 1% increase in how healthy residents reported they felt — a boost equivalent to making them about $10,000 wealthier or seven years younger, noted researchers in 2015. Add, on average, a single extra tree on top of this and participants actually were healthier than those with fewer trees — with a small average drop in a cluster of conditions including stroke, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.
“It does seem a bit magical,” Berman, one of the authors of the 2015 research, admitted. “I’m always wary of things that seem too good to be true, but there just is a lot of evidence that’s showing this.”
Environmental Neuroscience
Berman’s work in nature was shaped by his desire to understand human behavior. He grew up as a shy, awkward kid in suburban Detroit who was haunted by his grandparents’ experiences during the Holocaust and considered the Nazis to be intrinsically evil for their crimes. But during his foray into academia he was struck by the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiment at Yale in the early 1960s, in which a majority of participants delivered large electric shocks to others, usually actors, when told to do so, despite the yelps and pleas of those hooked up to the current.
Humans, Berman thought, are not the tabula rasa theorized by English philosopher John Locke, but we are also not hardwired, preordained automatons. Our surroundings matter.
“It made me think that if you can design environmental conditions to make people evil, maybe you can design environmental conditions to make people good, and that stuck with me,” said Berman, who went on to coin the term “environmental neuroscience” as shorthand for the study of this field.
Importantly, the benefits of nature do not appear to depend on how much we actually enjoy being outdoors. Some people would find a bracing winter forest walk fun; to others it would be a dreary trudge.
But as long as you aren’t freezing or feeling unsafe in some way, the repair to your fatigued attention through what Berman calls the “soft fascination” of nature, as compared to the “hard fascination” of ostensibly relaxing but mentally taxing tasks such as watching TV, will happily occur anyway. Nature tickles our attention gently — it doesn’t overstimulate us like much of modernity does.
“I kind of went into it thinking we’d find, well, if people are exposed to nature that it just makes them happier,” Berman said. “It can make us happy, but it doesn’t have to make us happy to get the benefits, and I think that’s where human intuition is wrong. The cognitive benefits, these attention and memory benefits, are not driven by mood; they’re driven by something else about nature.”
What it is about nature, precisely, that delivers these benefits is less clear. The “biophilia” hypothesis argues that because our evolutionary history required proximity to forests, grasslands and water for our survival, we retain a need for close contact with nature, and this has left us cosmically ill at ease with the straight lines and uniformity of urbanization.
For some people, the benefits of nature could stem from the exercise they get when taking a stroll, or it could simply be the refreshing change of scenery from the monotony of the indoors. Or perhaps the visual appeal of curved shapes and fractals in nature are soothing. When Kate Schertz, one of Berman’s students at the time, showed pictures of nature scenes to study participants, they reported feeling more spiritual and philosophical, even when the images were scrambled to the extent that participants couldn’t tell what they were beyond their mere outlines.
“Our access to nature is unequal, politically fraught and steadily shrinking.”
Or it could be a combination of factors. Regardless of the cause, the benefits of nature have become evident enough that doctors in countries including the U.K., Finland and Canada have started to prescribe exposure to nature to patients to improve their mental and physical health, with 20 minutes spent in a park or gardening cited as the desirable dose. In Canada, you can be given a script for free access to the country’s national parks.
Many of us may feel we don’t have the time or inclination to poke at ant nests and jump across felled trunks, but the key is “moments, not minutes,” according to Holli-Anne Passmore, an associate professor at the Concordia University of Edmonton who has studied connections to nature. “It’s about noticing nature, even if you’re walking to your car or standing by a tree at the bus stop,” she said.
Someone walking through a park, head down with their earphones in, will have a different, less beneficial experience compared to someone who spends the same amount of time soaking in their milieu. “You don’t have to sit there and meditate; it’s just about being aware that the wind is on your face, the sun is there, there are different sounds,” said Passmore.
“I think it’s obvious that the environmental catastrophes that we’re in the middle of started from a disconnection to nature, from this human hubris that we are somehow other than nature, that we are somehow better than nature,” she added. “People forget we’re just another kind of animal.”
Divorced From Nature
Even if nature can improve our individual health, can it really help knit us back together as a society? Such a prospect appears distant given our current, atomized existence. Where previous generations fretted over TV shows or movies monopolizing chunks of our days, smartphones now consume our daily lives, overwhelming us with a relentless, dizzying stream of alerts, emails, emojis and short-form videos.
The average adult now spends almost seven hours a day, on average, gazing at the internet. Around 40% of children have a tablet by the age of 2 and almost a quarter of children have a cellphone by the time they turn 8. If you’re 18 to 29 years old, more than six in 10 of your peers are almost constantly online.
Young people are increasingly indoors, a situation that has raised concern that they are suffering from what the American journalist and author Richard Louv has called “Nature-Deficit Disorder.”
Screens, in many ways, do the opposite of nature: They can erode our attention spans and raise our anxiety levels. But they aren’t the only thing contributing to the sense of separation that permeates modern, fretful life. In the post-war U.S., car-centric suburbs were designed with a dearth of shared communal spaces, parents became wary of letting their children outdoors due to a heightened fear of crime or mishap, and we started to engage less in civic rituals. Our age of fragmentation began long before TikTok.
“Children’s freedom and autonomy to roam went away first, and then screens filled that time in,” said Louise Chawla, an author and professor emerita of environmental design at the University of Colorado Boulder. “That loss of freedom of movement was the beginning of the decline in young people’s mental health. Screens just assisted it.”
As we’ve become increasingly alienated from each other — more than half of American adults report signs of feeling lonely, with the U.S. surgeon general declaring a loneliness epidemic in 2023 — we’ve also divorced ourselves from the nature that sustains us. People, especially the young, spend less time outdoors than they once did and as a result we are losing not only the mental and physical benefits of nature but also artistic and cultural touchstones.
Researchers recently analyzed 5 million English language books and found something remarkable: Nature words such as “river,” “mosses” and “blossom” have been disappearing from our literature at a rapid rate. Between 1800 and 2019, there was a more than 60% decline in these terms, the study found.
“Our relationship with nature is failing,” said Miles Richardson, a professor of human factors and nature connectedness at the University of Derby who led the research. “We are now in an attention economy; there’s a battle for attention and nature is the element that doesn’t have an advertising budget,” he added. “We’ve been schooled out of the wonder of nature; we’ve been primed to scroll through our phones and look for wonder there instead.”
“Could small interventions to reintegrate nature into our cities, schools, healthcare and daily life be the salvation we need?”
Beyond the impact of technology, political shifts have deepened our division from nature. In the U.S., even the modest funding for environmental programs is under attack.
Budget cuts by Donald Trump’s administration have targeted many programs that link people with nature, such as the Americorps agency, which offers opportunities to work in environmental stewardship, and a nationwide urban tree planting initiative that was halted by the U.S. Forest Service because, puzzlingly, it “no longer aligns with agency priorities regarding diversity, equity and inclusion.”
National parks, too, have been ensnared in efforts to shrink federal spending. The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its full-time staff since the start of Trump’s second term, according to internal data, with remaining employees now having to juggle several different roles just to keep parks open. Some programs have suffered as they have been pushed down the priority list, such as visitor education by park rangers.
These and many other political changes are further eroding our already limited access to nature. Around 100 million Americans, including 28 million children, do not have a park or other green space to walk to within 10 minutes of their home, according to the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.
This lack of greenery is particularly pronounced in lower income communities of color, which disproportionately have fewer trees and other leafy plants, winnowing away their chance to benefit from the soothing effects of nature and making urban neighborhoods much hotter when heatwaves arrive.
A Nature Revolution
In a world seemingly short on empathy, nature offers a crucial and largely non-political pathway toward restitching our fraying societal fabric. After all, what other single, low-cost intervention has been shown to improve individual health while also chipping away at some of the most balefully stubborn ailments of society, such as loneliness and violent crime?
How to actually achieve this sort of breakthrough is a more complex question, however — one that may have to involve reshaping our towns and cities to become more walkable; bringing more green space into urban cores, like Singapore has famously done; and embedding the knowledge and tactile experience of nature into school curriculums.
Jackie Ostfeld, founder of Outdoors Alliance for Kids (or OAK), has worked in several states to bring children into nature, including fifth and sixth graders in Bakersfield, California. Many had never spent any significant time outdoors beyond their neighborhood and, despite living near the Tehachapi Mountains, had never seen these peaks, nor the snow that accumulates on them.
“Screens have become a convenient babysitter, but there are a lot of factors to this problem,” said Ostfeld. “There are more people growing up in places where parents don’t feel it’s safe to run around and be free, parents are working several jobs and don’t have time to take kids outdoors, school budgets are slashed over and over so there’s less money for school trips.”
Awareness of this issue has increased somewhat in recent years, sparking worthwhile responses in several cities. In Los Angeles, there are proposals to have shuttles bring urban residents to nature spaces, while Detroit has a program that allows youths, many who have never been outside the city, to camp and take trips kayaking and hiking.
There is evidence that children’s learning is enhanced by being in nature, that their cortisol levels drop, that they become more inquisitive and in touch with the world around them. Perhaps the next step after pandemic-era remote schooling at home could be remote schooling from the woods, Ostfeld suggested. “Covid created an opportunity for outdoor learning that didn’t get harnessed in a way many of us would’ve liked,” she said. “We just went right back inside when it was over.”
The growing evidence of nature’s benefits should be pressed home to politicians and other decision makers, Berman feels, as an avenue to ameliorate societal problems such as crime and obesity.
“This is a time to invest more in nature and nature access, and getting people more contact with nature, and being more creative,” he said.
That creativity could involve reimagining our buildings, according to Berman. “You could imagine a city of the future where the skyscrapers almost look like giant trees, that have vegetation growing down the walls of them, or even have indoor conservatories where there’s nature indoors,” he said.
“In a world seemingly short on empathy, nature offers a crucial and largely non-political pathway toward restitching our fraying societal fabric.”
For children, lengthy contact with the outdoors should be embedded as standard practice during school days, while for adults, the working week could be reoriented, Berman argues. An eight-hour school day could include two hours of breaks in nature and workplaces could encourage a one-hour period spent in nature to help boost productivity, for example.
Much like how we went through an industrial revolution and then an information revolution, we may one day go through a “nature revolution,” Berman believes. However, the path there may involve drier, more piecemeal methods.
Some politicians will be drawn to how increased engagement with nature could push down crime rates, others to the potential economic savings to the healthcare system. Some school districts may start to rethink recesses and field trips, while a new generation of city planners could design more walkable green spaces rather than the status quo of highways and strip malls many Americans are used to.
Each step, even if it strays from purism by getting people to view nature through virtual reality goggles, could help, Berman believes. “I think I can pound on the table and say, ‘We need to do all these things,’ but I still think there’s still a little bit more we need to do to really quantify these benefits,” he said.
“We can be in the nature revolution, which is that we recognize how important this is. I think a lot of that involves having more nature access, and maybe in some places that might be hard. But we can be creative.”
