HEAD OUTDOORS FOR HEALTH
I have to chuckle when something mainstream catches up to what I've said for decades. Such was the case last week when the Wall Street Journal carried a nearly full-page story titled "For Better Health, Just Head Outdoors. " Like many headlines, it's a bit misleading, but worked to attract my attention.
It starts off quoting Gretchen Daily, professor of environmental science at Stanford University: "There's an urgent need emerging in science and at the gut level to increase the nature experience. This field is just exploding." Let's see, how long ago to Richard Louve coin the term "nature deficit disorder?"
The article says the Japanese practice of "forest bathing is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression, and fatigue." Daily's fascinating research comparing a walk in the woods with a walk down an urban sidewalk showed dramatic differences in cognition: "mood, creativity, the ability to use your working memory."
The headline, then, is inaccurate: it's not just about getting outdoors; it's getting outdoors surrounded by nature. The entire article is about that difference and it's quite profound, including elevated anti-cancer killer cells. In this case, the term outside is highly nuanced. That's kind of like the term food. What kind of food? What kind of outdoors?
Unfortunately, none of the research in the article used non-forest ecosystems in the studies. It was either forest (trees) or urban settings. While I enjoy a walk in the woods as much as anyone, as a pasture-based livestock farmer, I enjoy a walk in prairie-type ecosystems just as much. You can see farther for one thing, and the number of birds and spiders, I would argue, is far higher due to the insect population.
Wild turkeys cannot survive in the forest. Their offspring, called poults, need extremely high protein to survive. Nature's high protein offering is insects. But grasshoppers and crickets don't live in forests; they live in grasslands. Wild turkeys, therefore, depend on edge--the intersection of forestal and open grasslands--to nurture their babies.
I realize that small patches of forest are often easier for urban scientists to find nearby their college campuses than vibrant and functional prairie-based livestock systems. I'm sure the omission is not purposeful. But this is a perfect example of subjective science. All the studies cited in the article concluded that a walk in the woods was the therapeutic alternative. I doubt that anybody in the research design group queried about the efficacy of a walk on a prairie-based livestock farm.
The bias is profound. The article's readers will never wonder if they could get the same benefit from visiting our farm and roaming our fields, communing with the cows and pastured chickens, maybe rubbing a pig's belly and gathering a dozen eggs from the laying hens. This is the limitation of science: it can only ask what can be imagined by the researchers. If they miss something glaring, that's okay because after all, they say, science is objective.
It's not. It's highly subjective and biased toward the imagination limitations and the reductionism of the study. While I'm thrilled to see this kind of article in the mainstream press I'm frustrated that yet again it skews nature to a place where humans, animals, and management don't exist. Folks who think they've just read an epiphany are in fact denied a more holistic and well-rounded view. The research and its finding are inherently myopic, and that's a shame. Maybe I should invite the research team out to our farm to see if head-high grass, prairie birds, incessant insect chirping and cud-chewing cows would yield similar benefits.
Or how about comparing it with the same amount of time (45 minutes) spent working in your backyard garden? I wonder what that would yield.
Where is your favorite nature get-away?