Prospect and Refuge. Experts tell us these habitat preferences are
remarkably consistent across cultures and eras.
Yet until recently psychologists and neuroscientists didn’t take
these affinities very seriously. “Studying the impacts of the natural
world on the brain is actually a scandalously new idea,” Richard
Louv, author of the 2008 bestseller Last Child in the Woods, told me.
“It should have been studied thirty to fifty years ago.” So why now?
Probably because we’re losing our connection to nature more
dramatically than ever before. Thanks to a confluence of
demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from
nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re
increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent
indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity,
depression, loneliness and anxiety, among others.
In parts of East Asia, which suffers perhaps the greatest epidemic
of indoor-itis, rates of nearsightedness in teenagers surpass
percent. Scientists used to attribute myopia to book-reading, but it
instead appears to be closely linked to time spent living like naked
mole rats, away from daylight. The sun primes the retina’s dopamine
receptors, and those in turn control the shape of the developing eye.
We are learning about what this rift from the outdoors is doing to our
retinal cells, but what about our minds?
We have gained much since the dawn of the Internet, but many
experts argue we’ve also grown more irritable, less sociable, more
narcissistic, more distracted and less cognitively nimble. We can’t
blame all our malaises on a separation from nature, but our
complaints reveal some fraying of psychological resilience. There are
times when we could all be a little less reactive, a little more
empathetic, more focused and more grounded. That’s where a nature
dose can help, and many of the researchers in this book say they can
prove it.
It wasn’t apps or John Muir that compelled me to wonder about