the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a key region for regulating
fear and stress.
Meanwhile, a study from Portugal found that people living near
industrial “gray space,” as opposed to green space, reported
“decreased use of coping strategies” and less optimism. That last bit
is not trivial; optimism is associated with healthier behaviors, lower
triglycerides and mental resilience. We could use some more
resilience: globally, depression is responsible for more healthy years
lost than any other condition, according to the World Health
Organization.
Now that I’d learned about the ways in which being in nature
changes our brains for the better, it was time to figure out how to
bring the lessons back to where most of us live, in cities. Here are
some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we
benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of
water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about
landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so
everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage
our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural
refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less
aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall.
For warding off depression, let’s go with the Finnish recommendation
of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets,
neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times
need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from
severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized
selves.
Basically, we need hits from a full spectrum of doses of nature. Is
it even possible that megaurban habitats could provide them?
To see how an optimist might view our crowded future, I went to a
city where the future has arrived: Singapore. It’s unusual for being
both a city and a country, the only one in the world. More than 5