A dose of nature is good for the soul — now science has proved it

I’m lucky to live by a National Park and what a solace it is. That sure path into quiet — a walk in the bush.

TWAM 11 April 2015

Of course it’s true, it feels true, and now there’s proof — planting more trees has significant health benefits.

Researchers in Canada, the US and Australia have found that having 10 or more trees lining your street has cognitive and psychological benefits similar to a $13,500 pay raise — or being seven years younger. They compared satellite imagery of trees and health data; team leader, University of Chicago psychologist Marc Berman, said that people who live on tree-lined blocks were less likely to report high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease and diabetes. But they can’t pinpoint why. “Is it that the trees are cleaning the air?” Berman asked. “Is it that the trees are encouraging people to go outside and exercise more? Or is it their aesthetic beauty? We need to understand that.”

So to the wonder, for me, almost every morning now, because the thickening of the body is increasing no matter how little is eaten; ah, the joys of middle age. But I’m lucky to live by a National Park and what a solace it is, that sure path into quiet — a walk in the bush. Tree-brimmed, glad of heart, as I stride into the city of birds. An everyday exhilaration but it has to be alone. Nope, don’t want anyone else’s chitter-chatter and mind swamp and twig snap; need the free alone. And can feel myself straightening within it; the posture correcting, the back uncurling. A hand on a scribbly gum’s cool trunk and the thick vellum folds of the paperbark, a face strong to an almost-spring sky; nope, no one must see this. It’s the simple solace that is marinated in nature, where happiness unfurls. This is what it is to be alive. Connected.

There’s someone beloved in my life who’s lived in council flats for years and with every visit the heart flinches at the soullessness of those places; concrete boxes of the depleted human spirit. A world denuded, bereft. Why no rampant green? Why is the tonic of the tree not instinctively recognised here; that invigorating shot of nature? For these fragile people — of all people — it seems like a relatively cheap life-enhancer. But, of course, there’s the flinching metropolitan type too, typified by Woody Allen: “I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me.” A city like Sydney — beyond the great urban lungs of Hyde Park — strikes me as distinctly odd in its modern design. All those chilly caverns of shadow; all those gaping hellholes of driveway that abruptly interrupt the pedestrian’s gaze and path, their rhythm halted by the affront. The latter is the great Australian ugliness of this age, and can occur several times in a city block.

The poisoning of the mighty trees is not unknown around these parts, and every time a council sign draws attention to the fact I’m enraged at the sheer selfishness of the communal transgression; just as when a cherished lion is felled in Africa, or the government approves yet another Chinese mine on our land. It’s an almost spiritual rebuke, a soul-retraction. What are we doing? The natural world too often bears the scars of our short-sightedness. As Wordsworth lamented, “I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.” Just take a look at the projected Shenhua open-cut mine in NSW — the still, sad music of humanity indeed.

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world,” the writer Wendell Berry said. “We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” A sentiment that feels urgent now. Meantime, the jasmine is coming. After winter’s clench, the heart lifts.