philosopher John Muir put it in 1901. Walt Whitman warned of the
city’s “pestiferous little gratifications” in the absence of nature. Park
builder and public-health advocate Frederick Law Olmsted
understood. He changed the torso of my hometown and that of many
other cities as well.
The Romantic movement was built upon the idea of nature as the
salvation of the mortal soul and the mortal imagination, with poets
penning odes to high peaks just as industrialization was beginning to
choke its way through Europe. Wordsworth wrote of a fusing of “the
round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky and in the mind of
Man.” Beethoven would literally hug a linden tree in his backyard. He
dedicated symphonies to landscapes and wrote, “The woods, the trees
and the rocks give man the resonance he needs.” Both men were
speaking of a melding of inner and outer systems. It sounds a bit
woolly, but they were auguring the explorations of twenty-first-
century neuroscience, of human brain cells that sense environmental
cues. Our nervous systems are built to resonate with set points
derived from the natural world. Science is now bearing out what the
Romantics knew to be true.
GROWING UP IN the dense, vertical habitat of a prewar apartment
building, I was drawn to the verdant, magnetic acres of New York’s
Central Park. Starting in middle school, I went there most days and
every weekend, riding a rusty Panasonic bike or walking, skating or
sunbathing while tethered to a Walkman. We are animals, and like
other animals, we seek places that give us what we need. Given the
opportunity, children will decamp to tree houses and build forts,
wanting spaces that feel safe but with easy access to open run-around
areas. We work hard to make our homes and yards a certain way, and
when we can afford to, we pay considerably more for residences or
hotel rooms right on the beach, or the pastoral ninth hole, or a quiet,
tree-lined street. We all want our starter castles on the corner of