“nature” could just be the result of more time to space out on the
drive.
Tyrväinen secured close to $16 million for a series of studies
known as the Green Health and Research Project. In Tyrväinen’s
Japan-inspired studies, all participants sat in a van for the same
amount of time and they included more women, more adults, and
more office workers. Also, the Japan team studied hard-core urban vs.
hard-core nature. Tyrväinen wanted to look at environments available
to everyone in the city: a busy street, a managed city park, and a more
wild forest park. The managed park resembles parts of New York’s
Central Park that are manicured and landscaped, such as the boat pond
and surrounding meadows. The forest park, Helsinki’s beloved
Central Park, reminds me of the deep parts of the Ramble but with
bigger, taller pines and some straight avenues.
Tyrväinen also wanted to measure blood pressure because of its
known links to stress and disease. “It’s the long-term physiological
benefits we’re interested in. We’d like to follow these people.” And
she was hunting for more granular information: “What is an optimal
amount, location, type and size of nature spaces for health in
everyday living environments?”
Tyrväinen’s team is interested in what ails normal working people
and what helps them. Their aim is not to improve productivity per se
but to lower national health-care costs and to provide city planners
with data for managing green space. If she can help make people feel
better, that’s fine too, but she’s an economist, not a social worker. In
Europe, 60 percent of job-related health problems are, like bad backs,
musculoskeletal. But the next-highest category (14 percent) is
psychological: stress, depression and anxiety. The Finnish call it
“burnout syndrome,” and it significantly taxes both employers and
government health agencies.
I had to guffaw a bit when I heard about Finnish worker stress.
The Finns typically work eight-hour days. About 80 percent of