Why ‘Green Cities’ Need to Become a Deeply Lived Experience

Urban greening (M Cornock/flickr, CC BY-NC)

by Benjamin Cooke, RMIT University and Brian Coffey, RMIT University, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/why-green-cities-need-to-become-a-deeply-lived-experience-65566 

Australian cities are inherently diverse places, but that diversity can lead to conflict between different values about what cities should and can be. 

Our series, Conflict in the City, brings together urban researchers to examine some of these tensions and consider how cities are governed and for whom.

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Enthusiasm for urban greening is at a high point, and rightly so.

Ecological studies highlight the contribution urban nature makes to the conservation of biodiversity. For example, research shows cities support a greater proportion of threatened species than non-urban areas. Green space is increasingly recognised as useful for moderating the heat island effect. Hence, this helps cities adapt to, and reduce the consequences of, climate change.

Reducing urban heat stress is the main objective behind the federal government’s plan to set tree canopy targets for Australian cities. Trees are cooler than concrete. Trees take the sting out of heatwaves and reduce heat-related deaths.

The “healthy parks healthy people” agenda emphasises the health benefits of trees, parks and gardens. Urban greenery provides a pleasant place for recreation. By enhancing liveability, green spaces make cities more desirable places to live and work. The increased interest in urban greening presents exciting opportunities for urban communities long starved of green space.

Unpacking the green city agenda

This enthusiasm for “green cities” stands in stark contrast to traditional views about nature as the antithesis of culture, and so having no place in the city. The traditional view was that the only ecosystems worthy of protection were to be found beyond the city, in national parks and wilderness areas.

We embrace the new agenda wholeheartedly, but also believe it’s important not to focus solely on instrumental measures like canopy cover targets to reduce heat stress. We should not forget about experiential encounters. The risk with instrumental (and arguably exclusionary) approaches is these fail to challenge the divide between people and nature. This limits people’s connection to the places in which they live and to broader ecological processes that are essential for life.

Instrumental targets in isolation also risk presenting urban greening as an “apolitical” endeavour. But we know this is not the case, as we see with the rise of green gentrification associated with iconic greening projects like New York’s High Line. Wealthy suburbs consistently have the most green space in cities. Bringing nature into the city is one thing. Bringing it into our culture and everyday lives is another.

Understanding ecology in a lived sense

Urban greening provides an opportunity to recast the relationship between people and environment - one of the critical challenges associated with the Anthropocene. To break down nature-culture divides in our cities, and in ourselves, we argue for the importance of embracing experiential engagements that develop a more deeply felt connection with the city places in which we live, work and play.

We are advocating a focus that does more than just encourage people to interact tangibly in and with urban nature, by drawing attention to the way humans and non-humans (including plants) are active co-habitants of cities. Such an approach works by recognising that human understanding of the environment is intricately wrapped up in our experiences of that environment.

Put simply, green cities can’t just be about area, tree cover and proximity (though they are important). We need to foster intimate, active and ongoing encounters that position people “in” ecologies. And we need to understand that those ecologies exist beyond the hard boundaries of urban green space.

Without fostering a more holistic relationship with non-humans in cities, we risk an urban greening agenda that misses the chance to unravel some of the nature-culture separation that contributes to our long-term sustainability challenges as a society. Active interactions with nature in the spaces of everyday life are vital for advancing a form of environmental stewardship that will persist beyond individual (and sometimes short-lived) policy settings.

Green city citizens need to see themselves as part of, not separate from, the ecologies that exist beyond the hard boundaries of urban green space. PINKE/flickr, CC BY-NC

No getting away from the politics

It is important to consider the policy and governance dimensions of urban greening. If the instrumental orientation prevails, our cities might be “more liveable” (at least for some, at particular locations and points in time), but our societies may not be more socially and environmentally just, or more sustainable.

We therefore emphasise the need to understand and critique the dimensions of the renewed interest in urban ecology. We have to consider whether this interest is associated with existing political economies, which embrace technocratic expertise to the exclusion of other voices, or whether urban greening can foster the emergence of a more transformative form of decision-making.

We also ask how we can enhance the prospects for more deliberative and place-based responses. An experiential turn for urban greening may be one way to make green space planning and practice more democratic. By questioning who we might be greening for and how, we can open the way for the much-needed acknowledgment of Indigenous histories and participation in the making of urban space.

Giving urban greening an experiential focus might also help open our eyes to the needs of the more-than-human. Rather than simply cultivating green spaces for a narrow set of anthropocentric benefits, we pose the question: who are the participants in urban greening? It’s a way of acknowledging that we inhabit cities with plants and other non-human lifeforms.

An interesting area of policy development that may be productive for urban greening is the idea of the playful commons. This is an example of a governance approach that is more open to affective and experiential interaction - the community participates in negotiating, licensing and designing the use of public space. Applying this approach to urban greening might encourage more deliberative forms of governance that can deliver more environmentally just and sustainable cities for the long term, for both humans and non-humans.

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You can read other Conflict in the City articles here.

Benjamin Cooke, Lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University and Brian Coffey, Lecturer, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Reclaiming Friendship: A Visual Taxonomy of Platonic Relationships to Counter the Commodification of the Word 'Friend'

by M Sendak from a vintage ode to friendship by J M Udry

by Maria Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org, Daily Good: http://www.dailygood.org/story/1373/reclaiming-friendship-a-visual-taxonomy-of-platonic-relationships-to-counter-the-commodification-of-the-word-friend-maria-popova/

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies - Aristotle

Friendship, C.S. Lewis believed, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself … has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

But the poetic beauty of this sentiment crumbles into untruth for anyone who has ever been buoyed from the pit of despair by the unrelenting kindness of a friend, or whose joys have been amplified by a friend’s warm willingness to bear witness.

I often puzzle over the nature, structure, and function of friendship in human life - a function I have found to be indispensable to my own spiritual survival and, I suspect, to that of most human beings. But during a recent interview on Think Again, I found myself concerned with the commodification of the word “friend” in our culture.

We call “friends” peers we barely know beyond the shallow roots of the professional connection, we mistake mere mutual admiration for friendship, we name-drop as “friends” acquaintances associating with whom we feel reflects favorably on us in the eyes of others, thus rendering true friendship vacant of Emerson’s exacting definition. We have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.

In countering this conflation, I was reminded of philosopher Amelie Rorty’s fantastic 1976 taxonomy of the levels of personhood and wondered what a similar taxonomy of interpersonhood might look like. I envisioned a conception of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces.“I live my life in widening circles,” Rilke wrote.

Within the ether of strangers - all the humans who inhabit the world at the same time as we do, but whom we have not yet met - there exists a large outermost circle of acquaintances.

Inside it resides the class of people most frequently conflated with “friend” in our culture, to whom I’ve been referring by the rather inelegant but necessarily descriptive term person I know and like.

These are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.

Even closer to the core is the kindred spirit - a person whose values are closely akin to our own, one who is animated by similar core principles and stands for a sufficient number of the same things we ourselves stand for in the world. These are the magnifiers of spirit to whom we are bound by mutual goodwill, sympathy, and respect, but we infer this resonance from one another’s polished public selves - our ideal selves - rather than from intimate knowledge of one another’s interior lives, personal struggles, inner contradictions, and most vulnerable crevices of character.

Some kindred spirits become friends in the fullest sense - people with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy.

A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real.

It is important to clarify here that the ideal self is not a counterpoint to the real self in the sense of being inauthentic. Unlike the seeming self, which springs from our impulse for self-display and which serves as a kind of deliberate mask, the ideal self arises from our authentic values and ideals.

Although it represents an aspirational personhood, who we wish to be is invariably part of who we are - even if we aren’t always able to enact those ideals. In this sense, the gap between the ideal self and the real self is not one of insincerity but of human fallibility. The friend is one who embraces both and has generous patience for the rift between the two.

A true friend holds us lovingly accountable to our own ideals, but is also able to forgive, over and over, the ways in which we fall short of them and can assure us that we are more than our stumbles, that we are shaped by them but not defined by them, that we will survive them with our personhood and the friendship intact.

For a complementary perspective, see poet and philosopher David Whyte on the true meaning of friendship and John O’Donohue on the ancient Celtic notion of “soul-friend.”

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Maria Popova is a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, andis the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings (which offers a free weekly newsletter).

Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change?

Star Jet roller coaster after Hurricane Sandy (Wikipedia)

by Margaret Hetherman, Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/18/are-we-feeling-collective-grief-over-climate-change

In 1977, I was in middle school in Michigan, and a science teacher shared a tidbit off-curriculum.

Some scientists had postulated that as a result of "pollution," heat-trapping gasses might one day lead to a warming planet. Dubbed "the greenhouse effect," the image was clear in my 12-year old mind: people enclosed in a glass structure, heating up like tomatoes coaxed to ripen. It was an interesting concept, but something in the very, very distant future.

Fast-forward ~ 30 years later. The year was 2006, my daughter was three, and my dreams of a White Christmas were going to hell in a hand basket. There wasn't a snowflake to be seen in Brooklyn and it was DECEMBER - a far cry from childhood memories of jumping off the roof into fluffy mounds after a blizzard.

Something was awry. An Inconvenient Truth had just been released, and those graphs and slides were suspiciously coinciding with what we were beginning to see in the form of extreme weather, à la Hurricane Katrina. Any number of idioms might well have marked the juncture: "canaries in the coal mine" comes to mind.

"The disconnect is almost understandable: we are hitting tipping points of no return, etching our fate in glacial ice while the full consequence of our inaction remains hidden from view." So why weren't we coming together to nip this in the bud? Why were we failing to embrace what appeared to be so obvious?

The deterioration of our planet - the only home we have ever known and an assurance we used to take for granted - is bound to elicit a wide range of emotions in different individuals. Mourning is personal, but as a species, could it be that we are making our way through the stages of grief as outlined by the late Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross?

Psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, M.D. doesn't necessarily think so. She points out that the Kübler-Ross framework was a response to people who hear devastating news and feel personally very involved, extremely vulnerable and know that the diagnosis is essentially inescapable. "That's not where most people are with climate," Dr. Van Susteren states. "It takes a long time for some people to lay down the sense within that something is true."

Yet she speaks of a collective anxiety that is insidious, even if we haven't managed to connect all the dots. "There isn't the slightest shred of doubt in my mind, that everyone on some level is anxious, deeply anxious, about climate change," the forensic psychiatrist says. She attributes her belief to decades of experience with people who have difficulty knowing what they are feeling on a deeper level, and she understands that anxiety comes from many headwaters.

"We can be anxious about ISIS, we can be anxious about our kids ... our health, our finances and all the rest. The confluence is such that it becomes amorphous and we walk around with a great deal of indescribable unease. And it can be either very difficult, or people will outright deny - depending on how deep or great their walls are - that it is coming from an overwhelming sense that the world is turned upside down from climate." 

Denial

Denial has been rampant since the earliest years of climate change awareness. Virtually every day brings reports of a new catastrophe. Bolivia's second-largest lake recently dried up and we won't soon forget the melting of tennis shoes at the Australian Open. Sure, there are cycles of nature to consider. But when you find yourself crossing Main Street in a rowboat on a regular basis? Or happening upon femur bones off the bank of Virginia's Tangier Island because the cemetery is underwater?

The disconnect is almost understandable: we are hitting tipping points of no return, etching our fate in glacial ice while the full consequence of our inaction remains hidden from view.

Dr. James E. Hansen, renowned climatologist and former Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan speaks to the matter of timescale. "The problem is that the inertia of the system is not our friend," states the founder of and Adjunct Professor in Columbia University's Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program Earth Institute. It has caused the effects to appear only slowly. "That has been the fundamental difficulty. It looks like something in the far future."

Sitting across the table from the 75-year old scientist, it becomes rapidly clear that his greatest concern is for future generations. That, he says, was the point in writing his book, Storms of my Grandchildren. It also inspires his participation as guardian for future generations in a current landmark federal climate change lawsuit against the government for failing to protect children's constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property - a case that Dr. Van Susteren has collaborated on as well.

"These children are going to be around late in this century, so even though the large effects are not so soon, we can now see that they are going to occur if we don't rapidly phase down emissions," states Dr. Hansen. "And I think some of them - mainly the sea level issue - is [coming] sooner than has been assumed by many." Hansen believes people are moving in the direction of accepting that climate is changing and that humans are at least a factor if not the dominant factor.

But there is also the matter of our wiring.

"Denial is something that allows us sometimes to get through the day," says Dr. Van Susteren. "And in some cases that's really good, that's adaptive, but in other cases it's going to kill you ... and this one's going to kill you." 

Anger

While many in the denial camp have now set their tents up elsewhere, stragglers remain, buttressed by a heavily financed machine that has deliberately cultivated and preserved that pesky first stage of mourning. ExxonMobil and The American Petroleum Institute have long sowed doubt about the science behind climate change, taking their lessons from the tobacco industry playbook.

The Koch Brothers estimated by Forbes to be worth $44.2 billion each, have funneled mind-blowing sums through "charitable family trusts" and "think tanks" to influence policy and public opinion, planting seeds of uncertainty among the general public, and blocking attempts to regulate emissions, thereby ensuring that their pockets remain literally coated in oil.

What does it mean when our Senate Majority Leader urges the country's governors to defy regulations to reduce carbon pollution?

Some powerful forces have been messing with our opportunity to process the truth, and move beyond the stage of denial toward a stance of action. From where I sit, the angriest entities at the moment are those whose political and financial fortunes are at stake.

The truth is that our children, and their children, will be the ones to really know the rage. There's no telling how the devastation will play out, as the regions least responsible for the demise become uninhabitable; and the world as we know it, perhaps ungovernable.

"Right now, the path is, as the Buddhists like to say: if we're not careful we're going to end up where we're headed," offers Van Susteren. She believes we are headed to a place where the world will look at our country and recognize that our per capita emissions, the droughts, floods, and searing hot days will be "because we gaily or callously, or with willful ignorance went about our ways, consuming what we wished, emitting what we felt like." 

Bargaining

When the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997, the atmospheric CO2 level was 368 ppm. Today, it stands at 404 ppm and I'm scratching my head because living in the Holocene has been good (think of it as "life with benefits"), and I'll be sad to lose Miami to the rising sea.

The lengths we've gone to with our bargaining, pollution trading, and decades-away targets are staggering. This year brought April in Paris and 175 countries signed a historic climate accord. The deal, which supports the cap-and-trade system, strives to keep global temps from rising more than 3.6°F by 2100.

Hansen, a proponent of an alternative Carbon Fee-and-Dividend model, argues that the UNFCC and IPCC scenarios assume negative emissions in the second half of the century, and that this will saddle young people with the task of having to phase out fossil fuels.

"They're going to have to somehow achieve negative emissions, which means you're going to have to suck that CO2 out of the atmosphere," says the scientist. "We have to make clear what the burden is, that we're leaving for young people."

The bottom line is that we best make haste. If a heat wave in Phoenix sounds brutal, consider Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which are slated for a heat index of 177°F during this century if we don't mitigate the magnitude of warming. 

Depression

In 2010, the NIH issued "A Human Health Perspective On Climate Change." The report portends dark consequences ranging from sexual dysfunction to the migration of large communities, hostile political environments, conflict, and war.

"Climate change has the potential to create sustained natural and humanitarian disasters beyond the scale of those we are experiencing today," reads the NIH report. "Extreme weather events, sea-level rise, destruction of local economies, resource scarcity, and associated conflict due to climate change are predicted to displace millions of people worldwide over the coming century."

But the future grief on our planet will not be like that of a natural disaster, according to Dr. Van Susteren, when there is a low point and then the worst is over - when people grieve, work together and then pick up. "The fingerprints of humans are all over the frequency and intensity of climate disasters ... what will happen when future generations look back and know that we could have taken action - that we knew - and we didn't?"

Dr. Van Susteren can't shake off a sense of shame when she speaks about how future generations will feel: "That we abandoned them willfully, negligently, intentionally, and out of dereliction of duty." 

Acceptance

Hansen, who first brought global warming to the attention of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee 28 years ago, seemed initially taken aback by the proposition that humanity might be working through a framework typically associated with death and dying.

"That model sort of assumes that ... the consequences are all inevitable," expressed the man who is arguably the planet's most reliable champion of climate health. "So I'm not yet willing to accept that, and here’s the real story - that this is tragedy. Because it's avoidable."

Hindsight may prove the only true vantage by which to see how we've worked through the scaffold of bereavement, and it will be left to our progeny to judge whether we conducted business as usual, or reversed course when approaching the most critical thresholds.

Meanwhile, the cauldron simmers with a stew of emotions, actions and inactions. The realities hit closer to home with every Hurricane Sandy, each new Zika hot spot on the map, and with the ever-dwindling array of animals, from the Monarch butterfly, to the pelican and stork and 1300 other types of birds whose collective song, or lack thereof, might well serve as warning: we, too are a threatened species.

© 2016 Scientific American

Margaret Hetherman is a writer, editor and essayist. Her opinions have appeared in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, and other media work has appeared on CNN, MTV and the BBC.

Science Explains How Spending Time in Nature Boosts Kindness and Generosity

by Sean Gonzalez, Lifehack: http://www.lifehack.org/379113/science-explains-how-spending-time-in-nature-boosts-kindness-and-generosity 

 

According to research that has taken place in Japan, Finland and Texas, people who took walks or were shown images of nature were found to have a natural decline in heart rate. 

 

When stress becomes an overwhelming burden, it’s the exact opposite. If nature can reduce the stress levels riveting people’s lives, then generosity and kindness are bound to follow suit. 

 

When agitated, it can be difficult to take the time needed to make sure you are calm and collected. You might snap at your friend for something they said without even realizing it. Your nerve endings having taken the increased heart rate into a zone of animosity that can be quelled by visiting the wonders of the earth.

Participants in studies from the University of California have been done on kindness to see if kindness is more willing to be shown in nature. In economic games - The Trust Game and the Doctator Game - trust and generosity were measured.

It was found that the people who viewed images of beautiful nature acted more trusting and kind than the people who were not shown them. In a separate study about kindness, individuals were asked to fill out emotional surveys while either sitting next to plants or not next to visually stunning plants. After the survey people were asked if they would volunteer making paper cranes, the researchers noted that the participants who sat next to the plants were more generous and willing to make more.

This type of research gives a small look at the many values that nature offers, and the best part is, it’s everywhere around us. Think back to the times when you were younger and running around during recess, the imagination as free and wild as can be. Think of the times of playing in the park and being free, meeting other kids who were willing to play games with you. There’s a natural kindness that seeps through us when we are just sitting in the presence of nature’s landscapes.

There’s a reason why people in cities are always viewed as standoffish. Everyone is walking around with massive buildings and through crowded streets. There’s trash laying dormant on the street, cars impatiently waiting for you to cross the sidewalk and a lack of the green embrace of the world. In my head I see cities textured in a gray fog. When I think of nature I see illustrious images with full colors and the world, instead of the man made towers that constrict and take away from that.

The researchers from California also made the observation that positive emotions come from being surrounded by nature, which begins to emanate from individuals as prosocial and kind behaviors. Maybe the next time you’re feeling caught under and ready to snap, think of taking a refreshing walk through nature. Let the air blow through your hair and instill the generosity in your soul.

Six Scientifically Proven Ways a 30-Minute Walk In The Forest Will Improve Your Health

American Lady butterfly against a cloud-filled sky (Wikipedia)

by Ted Ballantine, Lifehack: http://www.lifehack.org/376942/six-scientifically-proven-ways-30-minute-walk-the-forest-will-improve-your-health

 

There is something inherently magical about a walk through the forest. Just imagine the trees towering around you, sunlight peeking through the tops, the texture, and crackle of the uneven ground beneath your feet. You can almost feel the magic now. We all know that getting out into nature is good for the soul, but did you know that a walk in the forest can have a tangible and positive effect on your health?

 

The Secret the Japanese Have Known For Years

 

Nature-based therapy is nothing new, at least in the East. Developed by Japanese scientists in the 1980s, Shinrin-Yoku (literally translated as “forest-bathing”) is a critical part of the Japanese health and wellness system. Take it from Dr. Won Sop Shin, Minister of the Korea Forest Service, who stated in October 2015 that, “A study showed that a 30-minute forest trek decreased negative feelings such as stress, depression, anger, fatigue, anxiety, and confusion, and improved cognitive skills.” So, take some time out of your usual routine and find some trees! If you’re still not convinced, here are six real health benefits a walk in the forest can have.

 

Reduces Cortisol Levels 

 

Cortisol is our body’s stress hormone, designed to kick in when we need to fight or flight for our survival. High levels of this hormone can weaken our immune systems, change our metabolism, as well as make us feel tired, stressed, and weak. It is an important hormone to keep in balance. However, keeping that balance isn’t easy in our fast-paced, high-stress lives. That’s where a walk in the forest can help. One study, conducted in two dozen forests across Japan with nearly 500 participants, concluded that a walk in the forest significantly decreased levels of cortisol. The hormone’s levels dropped nearly 16 percent more than when the same person walked in an urban environment. Additionally, the participants’ blood pressure showed improvement after spending just 15 minutes in the forest.

 

Lowers Blood Sugar

 

Studies have shown that forest therapy effectively decreases blood-glucose levels in diabetic patients. In a 1998 study, patients were given blood-glucose tests before walking in the forest, and were tested afterward to measure any changes. The forest environment itself can cause “changes in hormonal secretion and autonomic nervous functions” that can help lower blood sugars, as well as the added physical exercise from walking. However, it is the combination of walking in the forest where patients saw the most improvement.

 

Improves Concentration and Brain Function

 

Forest walking is a natural mood enhancer, but it can also help our brains function better and can even improve concentration. A research team from Chiba University collected data from two large groups of adults: 500 who took part in forest therapy, and 500 who didn’t. In a study published in 2013, researchers confirmed that “spending time within a forest can reduce psychological stress, depressive symptoms, and hostility, while at the same time improving sleep and increasing both vigor and a feeling of liveliness.”

 

Improves Mood

 

We’ve always known that fresh air, exercise, and getting out in nature can improve our mood, but there is real evidence that forest walking can actually decrease clinical depression, and help patients with alcoholism.

Dr. Shin says, “Forests can improve psychological stability in patients with depression and alcoholism. Scores on the Beck Depression Inventory decreased among patients with depression and scores on a self-esteem measure increased among individuals with alcohol use disorder, after participating in a forest healing program.”

Fights Off Allergy Symptoms

Tom Ogren, author of The Allergy Fighting Garden, says most allergy sufferers don’t have to worry too much when they are truly in nature. He says, “In nature, things are much more in balance, certainly the trees and shrubs are in a gender balance, and there is usually around one female tree for every male tree in the wild. This horticultural balance keeps the air cleaner, is better for everyone, especially anyone with allergies or asthma.” For those with allergies, a walk in the forest can actually boost your own immunity and improve your allergic reactions as you get more exposure to nature. Dr. Shin says, “Patients with pediatric asthma or atopic dermatitis obtained relief from their symptoms after undergoing a forest healing program.” If you’re looking for respite from allergies, stop leafing through pages of air purifier reviews, and just get outside!

Helps Your Body Fight Cancer Cells

Just the scent of trees can assist your body in fighting cancer cells, according to a 2009 study. One of the biggest benefits of forest-bathing comes from a compound called phytoncide, which is derived from trees and plants and is breathed in by humans during forest therapy. It is this phytoncide exposure that helps our bodies, explains Dr. Shin, by increasing our levels of a particular brand of disease-fighting white blood cells. “The forest environment can boost the immune system by increasing the number of natural killer cells, which may facilitate recovery from cancer. Actually, the forest healing program was found to facilitate the recovery of breast cancer patients.”

Conclusion

Our bodies were meant to live in nature, and it is nature itself that is our healer. Step away from the screen and make it a date: you and the forest. Your mind, body, and soul will thank you for it.