which Beatley and scientists like Utah’s David Strayer think we need
yearly or biyearly, in intense multiday bursts. As we’ve seen, these
trips can rearrange our very core, catalyzing our hopes and dreams,
filling us with awe and human connection and offering a reassurance
of our place in the universe. There may be particular times when
wilderness experience can be most helpful to us, such as during the
identity-forming roller coaster of adolescence or following grief or
trauma.
The more we recognize these innate human needs, the more we
stand to gain. I’d love to see more wilderness therapy, more kids in
summer camp and on nature field trips and on scouting expeditions
and on quests of one kind or another, and more opportunities for city
populations in general to touch the wild. We all need a regular check-
in for personal introspection, goal-setting and spiritual reflection.
Best to turn the phone off.
Distilling what I learned, I came up with a kind of ultrasimple
coda: Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or
not. Breathe.
According to Beatley, there’s cause for hope. Cities around the
world are undertaking projects large and small to integrate a range of
natural elements into everyday life, and they’re seeing huge payback,
from New York’s High Line to the opening up that we saw of South
Korea’s Cheonggyecheon River. When cities become greener, it
makes not only people more resilient but the cities themselves. They
can better handle extremes of moisture and temperature; they rebound
more quickly from natural disasters and they provide refugia for
disappearing species from bees to butterflies to birds and fish.
Since our brains especially love water, it makes sense to put it at
the heart of these projects. Thirty-two miles of the Los Angeles River
are being transformed from a concrete-lined eyesore into a biological
and recreational corridor. Copenhagen now has several safe
swimming areas in the harbor. People swim in organized events from