their way to the Glengoyne distillery that I really understood the
national obsession. The hills of Scotland are made of peat, and each
region has a slightly different mix of soil, moisture, temperature and
exposure. Many of the proper single-malts use barley dried with
smoke from the surrounding bog. This is Scottish terroir. We passed a
creek, known as a burn, whose water supplies the Glengoyne distillery
before making its way to Loch Lomond, where Rob Roy hid from the
English in a cave and, where, nearly a century later, William
Wordsworth would fall in love with a dairy maid. To a Scot, each
walk is steeped in poetry and spirits, in blood, rebellion and national
yearning.
DOWN FROM OUR ramble and back in the garret, Mitchell showed me
some bright statistical graphs. In a study that he and colleague Frank
Popham published in the Lancet, they compared early mortality and
disease (in those under age sixty-five) in England with neighborhood
green space (defined as “open, undeveloped land with natural
vegetation including parks, forests, playing fields and river
corridors”). It was a huge study, combing records of 40 million
people. “We quite like death as outcome,” quipped Mitchell. “We
know if they’re dead something is wrong with them.”
In the greener neighborhoods, death rates were lower for everyone
after adjusting for income. Notably, though, deaths were not down for
lung cancer, which is not a stress-related cancer and was correctly
predicted not to be associated with green space. Cardio deaths,
however, were down 4 to 5 percent, which is a big deal given the large
population size. But when the researchers looked specifically at death
and disease per income level, some interesting patterns emerged. The
research showed that income-related health disparities were greatest
in areas with the least green. Here, poor people were twice as likely to
die as their rich neighbors. In the greenest areas, though, poorer
people did relatively much better, starting to catch up to the longer