Nature Is Good for Your Brain

A Washington Post article reports,

In recent years, a growing body of research has documented the psychological and even health benefits of spending time in natural settings, such as forests or parks. This research has shown that people who live in urban areas that feature more trees have better physical health, that nature walks decrease a tendency towards harmful mental “rumination” and much more.

“When people state the common belief that being in nature relaxes them, that it helps them recover from stress and tragedy, that it’s a healing process to be in nature, we now know there’s a solid basis for that,” Wilson says. “The research has been done and it is true that it’s good for the human mind to be able to live and experience in really natural situations.”

This has led Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson to propose conserving half the world's land and 70 percent of the world's oceans in an attempt to reduce and reverse the massive extinction of plant and animal species occurring in the present. In the article, he states,

We know that we have increased the extinction rate on the order of — the nearest power of ten — to 1,000 times the species extinction rate from when before humans came. And we now know that all of the conservation efforts in the world have together stopped the fading away, the decline to extinction, of only one fifth, 20 percent of the protected species, the species that are listed as endangered. And we know that something pretty big has to happen that’s the equivalent, in the living world, of the threshold, the critical 2 degrees Celsius line that we’re about to cross in terms of temperature change. So we have the same sort of thing in the living world. … And when I gave the solution, instead of dismissing me immediately as a crank, I’ve had a lot of people think that’s a good idea. And that is, the ‘half Earth’ solution. That is, set aside half of the Earth’s surface to natural reserves.

#Environment