hurricanes, heat-index advisories.)
I yearned for the mountains. And yearning is a devastating thing,
because it is defined by loss. As the months ticked by, I realized that
if I was going to explore what nature offers our brains, I also had to
acknowledge what its absence means. I felt disoriented, overwhelmed,
depressed. My mind had trouble focusing. I couldn’t finish thoughts. I
couldn’t make decisions and I wasn’t keen to get out of bed. I was
perhaps, at least in part, suffering from what journalist Louv calls
nature deficit disorder. (The DSM hasn’t added it, but presumably
they’d want to treat it with a pill.) Louv defines it as what happens
when people, particularly children, spend little or no time outside in
natural environments, resulting in physical and mental problems
including anxiety and distraction. He also coined the toothsome term
“nature neurons” to highlight the essential link between our nervous
systems and the natural world they evolved in. Was the breakage of
this link really happening? Is there science supporting the notion of
nature deficit disorder? If so, how much nature do we need to fix
ourselves? Do we need to move into a hemlock tree like in a Jean
Craighead George novel, or will looking out the window do?
If I was going to do more than merely survive in my new urban
habitat, the type now shared by most people on earth, I was going to
have to figure some things out. What was it about nature that people
seem to need? How could we get enough of it in our lives in order to
be our best selves? In the course of trying to answer these questions, I
came to consider the human-nature connection on a neural level.
Some weeks after we rolled into town, I left on assignment for Japan
to write about an obscure and somewhat embarrassing Japanese
practice called forest-bathing. There, I started to learn the science
behind what I was experiencing at home. The Japanese researchers
weren’t content to leave nature to the realm of haikus—they wanted
to measure its effects, document it, chart it and deliver the evidence
to policy makers and the medical community. What the Japanese