Quality of life entails direct and convenient access to nature. Relatively few people, however, would say that experiencing nature is an integral part of their daily lives. Working as a municipal planner, I learned how local governments ensure this unfortunate reality became the norm for increasing numbers of people. Research completed by scientists and the medical community, in turn, has clarified how both individuals and entire communities lose out.
Direct, convenient access to nature is something my family has experienced for the better part of two decades in Halifax, Nova Scotia. These conditions, however, were established over a century ago, long before modern, often pathological, municipal planning practices spread across North America.
From our front door, we could walk five minutes through a wooded cemetery to get to a 16-acre Victorian-era public garden featuring towering old trees and elaborate flower beds. I’d walk the garden paths four or five days a week throughout the year. When our daughter was young, I’d occasionally take her with me to get a treat at an old horticultural building and sit by a large fountain to watch birds take a bath.
Ten minutes away by bike, sat a 184-acre forest park that’s bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on three sides. Like everything else in this compact urban environment, these natural areas played an integral part in our lives in ways I couldn’t have imagined as a teenager. Growing up in Central Pennsylvania, the nearest forest park—Pinchot State Park—was thirty minutes away by car, and I didn’t know that “public gardens” were even a thing. In Halifax, our children experienced an alternate reality.
My family’s middle-class circumstances were not the norm. Figures published by the Brookings Institution show that 60% of Americans in cities live within a half mile of a park. But cities are no longer where most of the middle class live, and urban residents often consider parks to be dangerous places, particularly at night.1 In older suburbs, the number of people living near parks drops to 40%. And in newer suburbs, it’s about 20%. If you live in an exurb, the percentage is smaller still at 12%.2 The takeaway is that municipal planners and the local governments they work for do a poor job of shaping an environment that brings people in contact with nature.
Municipal Planning Practices Limits Access to Nature
One of the more disturbing reoccurring experiences I had working as a municipal planner in both Baltimore Country, MD, and Halifax, Nova Scotia involved sitting in weekly development review meetings and listening to planners talk about “open space.” Every week, I’d watch a half-dozen planners sitting around a table deliberating over whether a sufficient amount of open space had been allotted per the zoning regulations.
Both municipalities methodically snuffed out nature to accommodate auto-dependent development. In exchange, zoning regulations required relatively small amounts of dedicated land on which a developer might plant grass and shrubs in an office park or install swing sets behind a pod of townhouses. Steep, unbuildable slopes behind single-family homes typically qualified as open space. In the mind of some urban planners, this last scenario is what’s referred to as “designing with nature.”
Municipalities have created zoning regulations dictating how developers allocate these relatively small, often unused plots of land. Consider, for example, the bureaucratic language in the regulations I was responsible for maintaining at Baltimore County:
Open ground area less than ten feet wide may not be designated amenity open space, except that a suitably planted area as little as seven feet wide may be so designated if that area is within a parking lot.
(Baltimore County Zoning Section 101)
Ill-conceived zoning regulations create equally ill-conceived places to live. And they come with a cost to our well-being.
Science Quantifies the value of direct, convenient access to nature
Science tells us that living close to natural areas provides health benefits. The precise mechanisms explaining how these benefits are delivered aren’t yet completely understood, but there’s solid data that tells us what we instinctually understand. Nature is good for us. Increased exposure to nature leads to a reduction in mortality, chronic inflammation disorders, cardiovascular disease, and depression.3
In America, all these pathologies are on the rise. The American College of Cardiology, for example, projects a “steep rise in cardiovascular diseases by 2060.” A recent study at Boston at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital reveals that doctors are seeing dramatic increases in cancer in younger adults.4
This study, published in Nature, showed increases in 14 different cancers in adults under the age of 50.5 A key finding is that people born in 1980 experience a higher risk of developing cancer than people born in 1970. People born in 1990, in turn, experience a higher cancer risk than those born in 1980. Researchers predict that this risk will continue to rise with each successive generation.
Some of the increase relates to screening and early detection, but researchers were clear to point out that diagnostic improvements don’t account for the degree to which these figures have risen. They conclude that the situation is nothing less than an “emerging pandemic”, which bodes poorly for young adults today.
So, what’s responsible for the rise in early-onset cancer? Researchers point to dramatic changes over the past several decades in our “early life exposome.”
Our “exposome” is the sum of all those environmental factors that shape our health: the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe, our social interactions and bonds, and our lifestyle. Since the 1950s, key risk factors have increased, such as consuming highly processed foods and leading sedentary lifestyles. There are other risk factors, but here, I just wish to focus on sedentary lifestyles and our diminished opportunities to connect with nature.
The auto-dependent development that local governments embrace both reduces levels of ambient physical activity and disconnects us from the natural world, and that’s a problem.
Like the rest of the world, a larger percentage of Americans live in urbanized areas each year. In 1900, about 40% of the population lived in urban areas. By the time World War 2 broke out, that figure had risen to 57%. Today, it’s over 80% and continues to rise.6
Most of these expanding “urbanized” environments are auto-dependent.
In those weekly development review meetings I attended, it was rare for my planning colleagues to express any concern over the implications of continually expanding suburban environments largely devoid of nature. We have an evolutionary predetermined need to have regular contact with nature, yet it’s not discussed in the day-to-day world of municipal planning offices.
In Halifax, I regularly go to the public garden and forest park because of the way they make me feel. And these perceived benefits of being surrounded by nature are something more than a figment of my imagination. As I said, nature is good for us. Research, for example, has established a solid connection between time spent in forests and improved metabolic and cardiovascular health, a stronger immune system, and a reduction in stress, anxiety, anger, and depression.
Studies in Japan link these benefits of our being in forests to the presence of plant chemicals called phytoncides which themselves are a key part of a plant’s defense against insects, fungi, and bacteria. Additional benefits related to the higher levels of oxygen present in forests and heavily treed areas.7
Mindful of rising cancer rates and diminished access to nature, I’d like to mention a finding in Japan relating to fighting cancer. Now, you might be thinking, “I don’t have cancer”, and I don’t think I’m going to get cancer, so what does this have to do with me? The answer is, it’s got everything to do with you.
In our bodies, about two trillion cells divide every day. Depending on what part of the body we’re talking about, cells divide more quickly than others. Skin and muscle cells, for example, divide more quickly than nerve cells. Regardless, cell division takes place every day throughout our body (sex cells excluded, as they do things differently).
Cell division is imperfect. Occasionally, errors occur and cells become damaged. And it turns out that our immune system does more than fight the viruses and bacteria that enter our body. It’s also responsible for “quality control” during cell division. Immune cells called natural killer T cells (a.k.a., NK cells) patrol our body and are constantly destroying damaged cells and small tumors before they become a problem. In layperson’s terms, the difference between a damaged cell versus a cancer cell is that the cancer cell is programmed to reproduce endlessly, whereas a merely “damaged” cell does not.
Professor Tim Elliot, a cancer researcher at the University of Southampton (UK) notes, “If we didn’t have an immune system, then we would be developing cancer a lot more often.”
Although there are situations in which the immune system does not identify and destroy cancer cells, the more of these natural killer (NK) cells you have, the better your odds of finding and destroying cancer cells before they become a problem. This brings us back to research completed over a decade ago in Japan.
Dr. Qing Li moved from China to Japan early in his career to conduct path-breaking research that has spanned four decades. First drawn to the country because of its advanced medical practices, Dr. Li’s life took a turn in 1988 after he spent a week on the Japanese island of Yakushima hiking through its magnificent, forest which could be mistaken for the Garden of Eden.8 It was then that he instinctually understood the impact of nature on our well-being and set out to prove it through immunological research.
Jump ahead twenty years, and Dr. Li and his team of researchers were conducting research on the effect “forest bathing” has on the body in terms of the number of NK cells. Li and colleagues brought a group of middle-aged businessmen into the woods and had them hike in the morning and again in the afternoon for three straight days. Blood tests revealed that their NK counts had increased by 40%. A month later, NK counts were still elevated by 15%. Comparable walks in an urban environment did not affect NK counts.9
The benefits of forests go beyond NK counts. Writer Florence Williams has described how Japanese researchers have been using a combination of field tests, hormone analysis, and brain imaging technology to understand the myriad of benefits forests provide at a molecular level.
Inspired by how Japan has brought together forestry and medicine, other countries like Finland and Korea are conducting similar research. And in all three countries, significant investments are being made in forest therapy. The Koreans, for example, have invested over 140 million dollars in a National Forest Therapy Center. Japan is expanding forest therapy trails throughout the country and over a quarter of the country’s 125M people use them each year as it’s now widely understood that spending time in nature without an agenda is scientifically proven to do both the mind and body tremendous good.
In the forest park near our old home, blackberry bushes lined paths and offered snacks when summer drew to an end. In the fall, I’d kick my feet through mounds of leaves and take in the distinct smell of the air. Winter provided its beauty in palettes of gray and green as naked birch and maple danced in the wind with white pines and balsam fir.10
Unfortunately, most local governments don’t think to provide residents with the natural world that I had at my doorstep and still have not taken for granted. I did, after all, grow up in the suburbs.
- Linda Poon, “Why Don’t Americans Use Their Parks at Night?,” Bloomburg City Lab. June 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-14/why-do-parks-close-at-night. ↩︎
- Joseph W. Kane and Adie Tomer. “Parks make great places, but not enough Americans can reach them,” Brookings Institution, August 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/08/21/parks-make-great-places-but-not-enough-americans-can-reach-them. ↩︎
- G.A. Rook, “Regulation of the immune system by biodiversity from the natural environment: An ecosystem service essential to health,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(46), 18360-7, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1313731110. ↩︎
- Kira Sampson, “Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50,” Brigham and Woman’s Hospital Communications, September 2022, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-report-dramatic-rise-in-early-onset-cancers/. ↩︎
- “Why are cancer rates rising in adults under 50?,” City of Hope, January 2023, https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2023/01/why-are-cancer-rates-rising-in-adults-under-50; “What’s driving higher colorectal cancer rates in young adults?,” City of Hope, March 2023, https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2022/03/colorectal-cancer-young-adults. ↩︎
- Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Urbanization,” Our World in Data, 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization. ↩︎
- Akemi Furuyashiki, Keiji Tabuchi, Kensuke Norikoshi, Toshio Kobayashi, and Sanae Oriyama. “A comparative study of the physiological and psychological effects of forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku) on working-age people with and without depressive tendencies,” Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine. The Japanese Society for Hygiene, June 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6589172. ↩︎
- Deepannita Das. “Meet Dr. Qing Li – The Man Who Wants You to Walk More in The Forests For Your Own Benefits,” Life Beyond Numbers, July 2018, https://www.infom.org/news/2018/07/LifeBeyondNumbers.pdf. ↩︎
- Florence Williams, “Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning,” Outside Magazine, November 2018, https://www.outsideonline.com/health/wellness/take-two-hours-pine-forest-and-call-me-morning. ↩︎
- Springtime in Halifax is cold, rainy, and gray on account of the Atlantic Ocean, taking a long time to heat up after it cooled in the winter. I don’t mention Springtime in the park because Halifax does not have one. ↩︎
