promote fitness, planners can use that information to argue against
paving places like Vartiosaari as Helsinki grows. Even if we think the
Finns are gnomish outliers, we can likely learn a few things from
what researchers here have discovered.
LIISA TYRVÄINEN FREQUENTS a Helsinki restaurant called Kaarna,
which means “Bark,” as in tree, not dog. She used to be an ecologist,
but she got tired of feeling that her research didn’t really matter to
planners and policy-makers, so she got a Ph.D. in economics. She
studied how things like forest and park views dramatically increase
housing values. “The phenomenon of what nature means to Finnish
politicians is all about how to valuate it,” she said while giving me a
tour of Helsinki’s parks. She became intrigued by the research out of
Japan indicating that forests had concrete physiological effects on
human health. In a country like Finland, which is trying to figure out
how to manage its vast forests for the benefit of people and industry,
the health piece, if real, seemed like it could be another useful column
in the national spreadsheets. Is it worth saving natural areas or not?
“I’m wanting more data. I don’t want to be part of rubbish research,
hugging trees,” she said.
Now Tyrväinen runs a research division at the National Resources
Institute of Finland, a government-funded agency. She visited Japan
and then invited some of the shinrin yoku researchers over to Finland
to advise her on setting up similar experiments. She had some issues
with the Japanese protocols and wanted to tweak the experimental
design. Miyazaki and his colleagues were mostly studying young
Japanese men in small groups. Tryväinen wanted bigger studies and
better controls. In the Japanese experiment I observed, for instance,
one group was loaded into a van and driven a couple of hours to a
park, while the other group went straight to downtown. It’s possible
that some of the lower blood pressure and cortisol levels attributed to