Nature Keeps Cities from Making Us Dead Inside

I bailed on my most recent city, Baltimore, in 2012. First it was to somewhere deep as hell in the mountains of southwestern Colorado, and then it was to this place here in Washington state, which is still in the mountains but at least has respectable internet service. Leaving the city at that time seemed like a pretty good call—all of a sudden, I realized that as a remote worker I didn't need it.

It's nice, really nice. Also: healthy. Nature is healthy. This is indisputable: from pretty much any health angle, nature is good for you.

Being able to just skip out on city life is a hell of a privilege. And a great many folks have a hard enough time just getting near some grass and trees. This is a public health problem now, and, as we move into a promised future of still-increasing urbanization and density, it's poised to become a much, much worse problem: a collective numbing of human souls.

This is the idea behind a Science magazine perspective published a couple of weeks ago and it's worth taking note of given that we're right now at the cusp of outdoors season here in the Northern Hemisphere. We need nature for health, particularly mental health, but what we're given are cities.

Maybe this doesn't have to be a contradiction, write psychologists Terry Hartig and Peter Kahn: We can have nature in cities, but only if we do cities right. This means ditching some of our assumptions about the relationship between nature and urban environments, particularly their mutual exclusiveness.

"Much research on nature experience assumes that too few generations have passed for natural selection to shift the adaptedness of affective and cognitive functioning from the conditions of hominid evolution, and that humans are therefore poorly adapted to living in urban environments, broadly defined," Kahn and Hartig write.

"This natural-urban antithesis neglects the fact that urban environments include settings that are supportive of human functioning; noisy, polluted, car-filled streets lined by anonymous towers are not representative of all urban possibilities. This false antithesis also neglects reasons why people gathered in cities millennia ago, and the consequences of that move for the interplay of natural selection and sociocultural development. Here too, the environmental categories and the urbanization process need closer examination."

The piece goes on to celebrate a broad movement in urban design known variously as green urbanism, green infrastructure, biophilic design, and renaturing. Generally, the idea is for planners to accept urbanism and recognize that synthesis between nature and concrete and glass is possible and even normal. People should be able to "experience nature in cities and to experience cities as natural."

That's an important thing: recognizing that cities are natural, at least for human people. We don't have an alternative anyhow, which is a decent definition of natural. But if we're squeezed into green-less cities, it's easy to lose touch with natural ecosystems. A process called environmental generational amnesia takes over. Simply, every new generation assumes that the environment (or its condition) left by the generation before it is normal. They don't see the natural world as the prior generation first encountered it, just the leftovers. And this progresses on down the line as environmental degredation accumulates.

Greening cities is then a way out of the cycle. "Cities designed well, with nature in mind and at hand, can be understood as natural, supportive of both ecosystem integrity and public health," Kahn and Hartig write. "Further psychological studies can describe how specific improvements in available opportunities for nature experience come to affect mental health and environmental attitudes. How will they change if car-clogged spaces give way to natural places where children can play wildly and others reflect quietly?"