Is Our Disconnect From Nature a Disorder?
By Michael Todd •
Somewhere during the American experience, between Teddy Roosevelt and color TV, being outdoors and maybe even working up a sweat started to lose its universal appeal. There remain those who fetishize the outdoors, from Ted Nugent to REI shoppers, and the urge to connect with nature never vanished. But as Americans became more urban and more cocooned in their cars and air conditioning, the values of nature were honored more by their absence than in their activities.
The price of this disconnect is usually tallied via our bodies, with a simple equation that a lack of outdoor activity must surely be connected with the nation’s growing waistline and obesity-related maladies like diabetes. There’s an always-growing corpus of academic work that does make that correlation, and even causation, explicit. Last month, for example, a policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research noted that in California as a whole, about a third as many kids who live near parks get in an hour of physical activity a day (the recommended daily threshold) at least five times a week compared to kids who can’t get to a park easily.
But increasingly, researchers are examining the impact of the natural world on our minds. (At Pacific Standard, for example, we’ve reported on the benefits of biophilic design, how nature makes us nicer or improves our attention span, the rise of attention restoration theory, or even how just looking at a picture of the outdoors can blunt the harsh edges of stress.)
Last week, to cite one well-publicized recent study, Scottish researchers outfitted pedestrians with mobile electroencephalographs and set them loose for 25-minute strolls in Edinburgh. Those whose paths wended through green spaces “showed evidence of lower frustration, engagement and arousal, and higher meditation” based on EEG readings, the academics wrote, adding a quantitative page to the annals of similar qualitative “restorative literature.”
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http://www.psmag.com/blogs/the-101/nature-deficit-disorder-outdoors-outside-54707/
