WE ALL NEED OUR OWN CENTRAL PARKS. They may just be backyards, or winding paths or nooks in trees. When I was a kid, my special place was Long Island Sound, an estuary full of waterbirds and shorebirds such as piping plovers, ospreys and little least terns, stretching far behind our house in Rye, New York. Later it was a little patch of rainforest with a running creek next to a muddy football field in Sydney; then the seawater of Gordon’s Bay, Clovelly; then Central Park; and finally Cabbage Tree Bay, Manly, in Sydney. If I close my eyes and place myself under the water there, I feel calm.
Studies have found you only need to spend a little over an hour a week in such places to experience a shift in mood, however slight. American professor Wilbert Gesler calls them ‘therapeutic landscapes’ that provide a ‘healing sense of place’. Gesler is a health geographer, someone who seeks to understand the way people interact with the environment, and how places and locations can affect health and well-being.
The widespread acceptance of these benefits helps explain why forest bathing has gone from alternative therapy to mainstream practice. Yet no one really knows why it works. It could be the peace, the distraction, the fact our brains can unfurl, the birdsong, or even chemicals (phytoncides) exuded by trees, as Dr Li believes. Think of the terms used by nature scientists to describe the way humans act in forests. Effortless attention. Soft fascination. Absorption.
Whatever the case, as Frances Kuo says, ‘The scientific literature on dosage suggests that nature helps in every form, and in every dose.’ As a result, today, around the world, in Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia, Korea, Scotland and England, hundreds of people are training as forest guides, or tree therapists. Once qualified, they take groups of people through woods slowly, encouraging them to take in their surroundings with every sense. There are programs for cancer patients, disadvantaged children, unwell teenagers, veterans with PTSD. Everywhere, curious souls are closing their eyes in woods, listening to birdsong and rustling leaves, smelling moss, oaks, eucalypts, ferns, flowers in bloom, and breathing deep, hoping to find something they feel they have lost — or at the very least, sense it nearby.
INDIGENOUS PEOPLE HAVE KNOWN all these things for millennia. Appreciation of the benefits of nature is an ancient wisdom we are only barely beginning to comprehend, or regain, as the Earth heats, ice melts and species vanish. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people belong to the world’s oldest living culture, and a connection to country is a fundamental part of their identity and of understanding their ancestors and their stories, in which everything that lives is entwined with and linked to every other living thing.
In these traditions, then, people are the custodians and caretakers of the land that sustains them. ‘For Aboriginal peoples,’ says Palyku woman Ambelin Kwaymullina, ‘country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human — all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky . . . Country is loved, needed and cared for, and country loves, needs and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.’ Not only that but country is the source of life and light. As Kwaymullina says, ‘In the learning borne of country is the light that nourishes the world.’
IT TOOK ME DECADES to work this out. I used to see camping as earnest and laborious and too much work. I went on a Venturer Scout camp when I was about fourteen and hated it. It rained and one of the pimply scouts kept trying to pin me up against trees when we were doing chores, and the toilet paper ran out, and I thought I was in hell. It has taken many years for me to realise that those skills of navigating the natural world, of diving, hiking and paddling, aren’t just about collecting badges on a Scout’s uniform: along with our flashlights and thick-soled boots, they are tools for hunting and experiencing awe and wonder. In the years I spent backpacking around Europe and Asia, after late nights spent dancing and exploring local bars, I used to jam a pillow over my head when sleeping at youth hostels to block out the sounds of those mainly Northern European travellers who would set their alarms, rise early, put on their sensible clothes and hiking boots then loudly crunch muesli while examining maps of the day’s hike. I should have gone with them.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I began to go trekking and river raft whenever I could — first in the Himalayan Mountains of Nepal, then the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. When I think of my own experiences of joy, I think of sitting, suntanned and dirty, on top of a rickety bus, hurtling along narrow roads on a mountainside in Nepal after a two-week rafting trip, my legs jammed under luggage ropes to ensure I wouldn’t fall off when we swerved round cliff-edges. I was singing The Carpenters’ ‘Top of the World’ at the top of my voice and grinning at my friends when I suddenly realised it would not be possible to feel happier, or more free.
IT’S NOT JUST FORESTS that uplift us, but oceans too. A 2010 multi-study analysis found just five minutes spent at the coast was enough to strengthen us. It also found, to the surprise of precisely no one in my swim group, that while ‘every green environment improved both self-esteem and mood, the presence of water generated greater effects’. Even better than the forests!
Water even buoys us when we are not in it. A 2016 study from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Michigan State University found that in Wellington ‘higher levels of blue space visibility were associated with lower psychological distress’. This is true for me, every day I swim.
Sometimes I wonder if sunbathing is similar to forest bathing. Not sunbathing in the sense of frying in oil, or bikini-basting on a beach like a lamb on a rotisserie spit, but just sitting in the warm sun, or lying on rocks like a basking seal, drying out after a cold swim. The greatest obsolete word, which I am eager to bring back into usage, is apricity, meaning ‘the warmth of the winter sun’. When you’ve plunged into icy seas and returned to shore with stiff red fingers and numb toes, there can be few delights as sweet as sitting in the sun’s light, soaking up the apricity, thawing down to the bone. Doris Lessing once wrote: ‘All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh.’ She’s right.
In my view the simplest explanation for our intense connection with nature, our biophilia, remains the most plausible: we hanker for the sight of green and blue, for the Earth of our ancestors, the sea of our origins, and the feeling on our faces of the sunlight that first nurtured life. We sense this instinctively, it’s in our wiring; which makes it even more confounding when we choose to ignore it, and allow vast tracts of wilderness to vanish or burn, noise to creep across once silent hills, plastics to choke oceans, and years to pass without pausing to lie under trees as we did when we were children, and stare up through the branches.
Chapter 3
‘A Better Show Outside’
‘In the woods . . . all mean egotism vanishes.
I become a transparent eyeball.’
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, 1836
THE MAN KNOWN AS the father of American storm chasing was in a movie theatre in Bismarck, North Dakota, in the summer of 1956 when his obsession began. David Hoadley had seen a red-gold sun setting under a darkening cloud as he walked in to take a seat, and he heard the sound of cracking thunder after the movie started. Then his father tore into the theatre and told him there was ‘a better show outside’. They drove around darkened streets, past felled cottonwood trees and power lines as skies flickered with lightning, then rounded a corner to see ‘a bare plot of grass, where a broken — but live — power line flashed bright, hot sparks, and jumped like a snake in the wet grass’. The city was black, but the sky blazed with light.