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Aaron: Welcome to The Landscape, your show about America’s parks and public lands. I’m Aaron Weiss with the Center for Western Priorities in Denver.
Kate: And I’m Kate Groetzinger in Salt Lake City. Today on the pod, we’re taking a break from Trump and Doge to talk about what nature does to your brain. We spoke to author Florence Williams about her book, The Nature Fix, which came out in 2017, but is just as relevant today. Her book looks at the science behind why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more resilient, qualities we could all probably use a bit more of these days. But before we get to that, let’s do the news.
Aaron: I’ll just preface this by saying the news is not going to make any of us happier, healthier, or, well, maybe more resilient. Anyway, let’s do this. Well, the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is neither a department nor efficient, have been busy attacking our public lands since our last episode. President Trump signed an executive order to increase timber harvesting in national forests, and that came after Doge fired 3,400 forest service employees. Those forest rangers were temporarily reinstated by a federal review board, at least in theory, but they could just end up getting fired again in upcoming mass layoffs, and otherwise known as rifts or reductions in force that have already been telegraphed by the White House.
In a speech to Congress last week, Trump touted his plans for energy dominance and promised an update on critical minerals, which did not come last week. He may have been referring to plans to build mineral refining capacity on Pentagon military bases according to new reporting by Reuters. That’s not all. Doge also published and then unpublished a list of federal buildings that it plans to sell off as well as leases it plans to terminate, and that includes over 2,000,000 square feet of office space used by the interior department. It also placed a $1 spending limit on federal employee credit cards, including those used by the National Park Service to book travel and even buy toilet paper, according to reporting by Wired.
And then finally, the Trump administration revoked a number of legal opinions issued under president Biden, including one that protects migratory birds. That one with that order now being gone essentially lets oil and gas companies and wind farms kill all the birds they want, and they won’t be responsible for killing them. So, yes, all of this is chaotic and a big old mess. We do have an episode on that logging executive order coming up, so be on the lookout for that.
Kate: Our guest today is Florence Williams, author of the Nature Fix, why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative. Florence is also a contributing editor at Outside magazine and a freelance writer. Florence, thank you so much for joining us today.
Florence: Oh, thanks so much for having me.
Kate: Well, I’m excited to talk to you because this book has really actually changed the way that I experience nature and the outdoors. For example, I no longer pop my AirPods in every time I go for a walk. And I realized that I urgently need to go camping, and I have the great privilege of living in Utah. So I have a lot of great wilderness and backcountry available for me to get into. But before we explain why nature is so impactful and important for our health, how did you come up with the idea for this book?
Florence: Well, it was actually an assignment. So, it was from Outside magazine, but the timing was really interesting because I had spent twenty two years living in the Rocky Mountains, in either Montana or Colorado. And I had just moved with my family to Washington DC, and I was really miserable. The adjustment was difficult. You know?
I went from having trails outside of my back door, then I walked on every day to, you know, just being in the middle of this, you know, megalopolis, with a lot of gray and concrete and traffic and noise and low flying aircraft. And I was really miserable. I mean I felt like this stress bomb had gone off in my head. You know I was having trouble sleeping. I would sometimes literally wanna burst into tears trying to navigate the traffic circles.
And Outside magazine said, hey. Do you wanna write a science story about why it’s good for us to be in nature? And I thought, well, funny you should ask because I am right now feeling the effects of not being in nature. And I was curious about it. So the timing was good.
Kate: And then it just turned into a book because there was so much there.
Florence: Yeah. I mean, at first it was an article. You know, I had to find a place to report the science. And, you know, when you’re, you know, when you’re given an assignment, it’s not like you’re told what to do. You have to actually go sort of find the reporting.
And so I I found that there was current science happening in Japan, where the culture there was really promoting this idea of forest bathing, of what they call Shinrin-yoku. And actually they had just designated dozens of what they call forest therapy trails in Japan. And at the same time these scientists were studying what happens to our nervous system, what happens to our brains, and so I wanted to actually see the science taking place. But after I wrote the story, I started hearing about more science, more experiments around the world, and other questions, you know, being answered. Yeah.
There was a lot of momentum for it, and I realized, okay. I think there is a book here.
Aaron: Alright. So give us the very short version, and I do wanna dive into the details, but what is it that being in nature does to our brains and our bodies?
Florence: Well, what the scientists were finding in Japan was really intriguing because they were doing these measures after just fifteen or twenty minutes of people being in a forest. It’s on one of these forest therapy trails. And, what the scientists were finding was, you know up to a sixteen percent drop in stress hormones like cortisol after just fifteen minutes. A sort of slowing of respiration rates, of heart rate, blood pressure, and then these increases in mood, like positive affect, feelings of vitality, optimism. That’s just after twenty minutes, you know.
And at first, I was a little skeptical because I thought, well, it’s because people are outside and they’re exercising. But the researchers were trying to control for that by also having people walk around a downtown cityscape. So it wasn’t just an exercise effect. So, you know, I thought that was intriguing because that was after fifteen minutes. And then, you know, the more I got into it, the more I started talking to researchers elsewhere in the world, I was finding out about other results.
For example, a ninety minute walk, in a sort of city park, but it was, you know, a park but not a wilderness, was contributing to a reduction in negative thinking, like rumination that is related to depression. Again, not seeing those effects in people who walked around the city, just people who are walking around these kinds of green spaces. There were scientists who were finding that people were having less activation in their frontal cortex, their prefrontal cortex. More activation in parts of their brains associated with sensory and motor skills. Things like empathy and creativity were increasing after time outside, whereas our attentional networks seem to be getting a little bit of a rest outside.
So I thought, you know, that was also very intriguing. There were researchers looking at fractal patterns and how, you know, fractal patterns, which are patterns that repeat at different scales, they’re often found outside in nature. For example, along coastlines or in forests, you know, clouds. These patterns also seem to be having an effect on the brainwaves, in our brains and indicating that we go into kind of a calmer and more alert state in the presence of these fractal patterns. So those are a few of the bigger ones that, you know, I found pretty quickly.
Kate: So, obviously, a huge amount of benefits. But what counts as nature? In the book, you say the benefits of nature work along a dose curve. What do you mean by that?
Florence: Yeah. So it seems like if you kind of take exposure to nature and superimpose it on the food pyramid, you know, remember that old food pyramid? There are different effects at different tiers of that pyramid. So the bottom of the pyramid is sort of our nearby nature, you know, our urban nature, things like our street trees. That’s what we’re exposed to kind of, you know, day in day out, and there are effects at that level.
So we know even just looking out a window onto green space is associated with a little bit of a cognitive refresh. You know, when we go back to the task at hand, we seem a little bit, a little bit sharper, after taking kind of a micro break even just to look out a window. We know that street trees are associated with greater cardiovascular health, and seem to also be associated with more feelings of optimism. Little pocket parks in our neighborhoods are associated with a reduction in gun violence, a reduction in aggressive behaviors. People who are in hospitals, hospital rooms that look out onto green space as opposed to looking out onto other buildings, report a need for less pain medication.
They get discharged from the hospital earlier. They have more optimism about their health outcomes. And, these are people who are going in for the same procedures. So pretty well controlled study. So that’s the bottom of the pyramid.
And then that, you know, that could be like fifteen minutes also of going outside and having this little bit of shift in your nervous system. People who are in the middle of the nature pyramid, so people who go out for like half a day at a time or maybe go out for a long picnic, walk around a regional park, something like that, that is associated with, preventing depression. People who get, you know, two to three hours of nature exposure a week seem to be in kind of a sweet spot for physical and emotional health. And then the tippy top of the pyramid is, you know, when we’re out actually in the wilderness maybe for like a couple of days at a time. And researchers I talked to about something called the three day effect, where when we are, you know, away from modern life for about three days, our dreams actually change.
We sleep better because we become more in sync with the natural circadian rhythms. We go to bed earlier. We wake up earlier. And, of course, when we spend all that time outside, we also have the time and space to really think about the big questions, sort of who we are, what we want to do with our lives. We might experience, you know, big doses of awe that make us feel a little bit less involved with our own ego and more connected to the world around us.
We know that this is also really beneficial emotionally. And, of course, we also know that people can recover more easily from things like trauma and grief if they have multiple days outside, in wild spaces.
Kate: So you actually came to Utah and experienced some of this research for yourself and experienced some of those effects you just mentioned. Will you tell us a little bit about what that was like and what you did in Southern Utah?
Florence: Yeah. I was really lucky to connect to a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Utah, David Strayer, who’s really been pioneering a lot of this work, in terms of, our different brain waves in different parts of our brains and sort of how they are changing outside in nature, how our attention span is shifting, how our creativity might be boosted by multiple days outside. He’s been researching the three day effect, and he was teaching a class, called Cognition in the Wild, where he was taking students actually on camping trips, you know, for three days. I was able to join one of those, doing some measurements, you know, how his students’ moods were shifting, how their creativity might be shifting, how they think about their lives, you know, and watching those things shift. And he’s run some really interesting studies.
For example, there’s an arboretum in Salt Lake City, and in one of his lab studies, he had people walk through that park, I think, for about forty minutes. And he assigned students to either walk while talking on a cell phone or while leaving their cell phone turned off. And what he found was that the people who were on their phones, kind of multitasking with their phones while they were walking through this arboretum, or a botanical garden, couldn’t actually remember anything that they’d seen while walking around. It was as if they hadn’t taken the walk at all in terms of what they actually noticed.
Aaron: And I guess that makes sense. You talk to anyone who’s tried to, you know, watch TV while texting on their phone. You there’s you can’t process two things at once, much less being outside. And one of the things that I’m curious about is this notion of awe, of being able to measure when you are awed by something. And it’s tangential to being outside, but obviously a lot of the time we are awed by what we see in nature.
What does this experience, this feeling of awe, do to our brains?
Florence: I was also really fascinated by that science of awe. I found it some of the most surprising research that I found. You know, obviously, sometimes we feel like we’re in a better mood when we’re outside or we might, you know, have an idea, you know, for something we’re working on. That I was really used to. But what surprised me about the awe research is that when we experience awe, it seems to actually shift our behavior as well as our physiology.
So in terms of physiology, we seem to produce fewer inflammatory markers in our cells after experiencing awe. So in that way, it seems to be good for our physical health. Somehow, it engages the vagus nerve, which also can help shift our nervous system, you know, into a more restful state. It can make us more connected to each other perhaps because of that vagal nerve involvement. But I think there’s also this concept of feeling very small in a vast landscape when we’re confronted, you know, with an incredible view, for example, or the Milky Way.
But it can also be kind of a small piece of all, like a very beautiful flower that kind of stops us in our tracks, and we notice the beauty. That stopping in our tracks turns out to also be a very significant part of the awe experience. Because whatever it is that we were kind of ruminating about in our brains just just quiets down. And we think about the external world for a moment, you know, instead of our ex instead of our internal world internal world. Again, that’s really good for our psychological health.
Makes us feel more connected to the world around us and to each other. And I think that that takes us to the surprising bit, which is that experiencing wilderness and nature and the beauty out there is actually really good for civilization because it makes us feel more connected to one another. And in fact, the ability to experience awe may be quite unique among humans. It may be one of the things that has really propelled our evolution and development. Because when we look at the Milky Way, you know, which we used to do every single night with our kin, you know, or our clan, it was binding.
It was cohesive. It made us feel like we were sort of in it together. And that is something that is increasingly missing, I think, from our civil discourse these days, this feeling of cohesion. And it could be because we are simply not experiencing the kind of daily drip of awe that we are supposed to as a species.
Kate: Yeah. I actually recently was listening to an episode of The Daily Podcast with Ed Yong, a science writer, who many people are probably aware of. And he explained he described modern life as sort of imploding. Like, we’re all imploding, like, because of the algorithm. We’re all living in these increasingly isolated bubbles.
And reading your book sort of in that context or thinking about your book in that context makes a lot of sense and that nature is something that gets us outside of ourselves and could even work to make us feel more connected to others like you said. So I think that’s really interesting and really relevant for right now.
Florence: Yeah. And I think it’s really under-recognized, you know, that this lack of awe, this lack of natural connection, could be one of the main factors in the fragmentation of our communities right now.
Kate: So I wanna bring in this concept that you explored, as part of your research, which is an effort by scientists to sort of replicate the benefits of nature in the lab, whether that’s with virtual reality or photos or videos. What did you find, what were those researchers finding? Can we replace nature essentially or not?
Florence: Yeah. That’s an interesting and kind of sometimes scary question. So it gets back to this idea of the dose curve, you know, and it’s sort of, how much immersion do we need and how much can we find and how much can we sort of synthesize. It looks like from the Japanese research and other research that really one of the keys to feeling the emotional restoration of being outside is that all of our senses are engaged. You know, our animal body sort of wakes up as our kind of prefrontal cortex, the more newly evolved parts of our brains, kind of dial down a bit.
And so virtual nature does have benefits and they have been documented. You know, we know that people who are looking at beautiful images of nature for example, feel less anxiety. There have been some interesting studies, for example, of prisoners in solitary confinement. If they can exercise or work out in a room that’s playing nature videos, the guards report fewer incidents of violence, fewer, fewer behavioral problems, for example. We know again people who are looking out of windows seem to, also feel less aggressive, and have fewer symptoms of ADHD.
So there are benefits, but the more senses that we can bring to life, the better we’re gonna feel. So right now virtual reality can’t really simulate, you know,
Aaron: Smell-o-vision.
Florence: Exactly.
Aaron: In places like Korea, Japan, and Finland, forests and parks are increasingly seen as a mental health service. And that’s really interesting, I think, given our current political moment in The US where the interior secretary is referring to public lands as assets on our country’s balance sheet, I assume that he is not talking about them as mental health assets. So what’s the difference in thinking there?
Florence: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a pretty retrograde way of viewing landscapes, for their sort of resource extraction value. But it is historically the way you know a lot of our forests for example, and public lands have been valued. So what was so interesting about going to Japan and South Korea is that they’ve actually rewritten the land policy, you know, documents to say we are not going to just manage these lands for timber, or for wildlife or for recreation. We are gonna start managing them for mental health.
And it’s this kind of totally new concept, a new way of actually managing the land. And so for example, in Japan, there are forest therapy trails, dozens and dozens of nationally designated forest therapy trails. These are trails that are recognized for, you know, their biodiversity, for their health, for their birdsong, you know, for the trees and the leaves and the colors. And then there are also interestingly, the ranger stations at these trails have places where you can go in and you can actually stick your arm in a blood pressure monitor before you go hiking. And then when you come back, you know, an hour later, you can stick your arm in it again, and you can see how much your blood pressure has dropped, which I think is really fascinating.
And then in South Korea, there are entire forests that are now designated as healing forests. And so the services that are offered in some of these healing forests are things like, you know, programs for cancer patients, programs for school bullies, programs for pregnant women, you know, who may be feeling stressed out, programs for burnout. So it’s just a totally different way of allocating resources and thinking of management.
Kate: So on the topic of valuing nature, other than as a resource like timber, I believe it was, in oh my gosh. Was it Singapore that you visited that had this incredible tree canopy that was, like, valued at, like, billions of dollars? What makes trees so special, and why are they so impactful when it comes to improving our health?
Florence: Wow. That’s kind of a metaphysical question too. I mean, you know, people throughout our evolution have felt very connected, I think to feeling comforted by trees, to knowing we can find shelter. You know, there are a lot of spiritual traditions that value our connection to trees. But lately there has been some health research and some neuroscience research and I think that’s pretty interesting.
A study in Toronto looked at street trees in the city and found that people who lived on streets that had, I think it was 11 or more trees, had a boost in physical health that was equivalent to having $10,000 more of income. So, we know that trees seem to be associated ultimately with stress levels. There’s something about living with trees, living on streets with trees, that seems to reduce our feelings of anxiety, for example. And there’s another study looking at the influence of the ash borer in the Midwest, you know in which kind of overnight, you know thousands and thousands of trees died. And people’s health actually deteriorated in a way that was correlated with the loss of those trees.
So their cardiovascular risks went up as more trees died. Again seems to be related to the ability of living in these natural landscapes to kind of reduce our stress on a daily level.
Aaron: One of the things that I love that you found was that scientists in Finland not only looked at whether it was helpful to spend time in nature, but actually how many hours one needs to spend outside in nature to get these health benefits? Like, what is that tipping point number?
Florence: So in Finland, the tipping point number was five hours a month, which
Kate: is not only
Florence: that much. I mean, it’s, like, you know, a couple hours a week of time in nature spaces, including city parks, that seem to be linked to this reduction in depression. So, you know for them they came up with this kind of formula of if you can spend five hours a month outside in nature spaces you can prevent depression and also increase feelings of vitality. This was before the pandemic of course. But I think it’s interesting that that study was kind of replicated in some ways, but another very large scale epidemiological study in The UK.
And I think that one was from like 2019, So also before the pandemic, showing that the sweet spot of mental and physical health for people in The UK was two hours a week. So a little bit more time, that would be eight hours a month in The UK, five hours a month in Finland. But, you know, similar, again, before the pandemic. So, and this was also when The UK was going through Brexit, you know, and and a lot of other, you know, sort of stressful political events. So it could be that there are times, right, when we just need more more nature, and we may be going through one of those times right now.
Kate: So in the epilogue of the book, you write that you came up with a coda, which is to go outside often, sometimes in wild places, bring friends or not, breathe. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you have the US government do to encourage folks to spend more time in nature? What sort of programs that you found out about would you want to implement here?
Florence: Well, I see changes kind of needed in so many sectors, not just government. You know, I mean, I would love to, of course, see schools, and those are government adjacent. But I would love to see more school programs that take place outside, more environmental ed, more nature schools, nature preschools for example. A huge priority for me is getting kids outside. So I think we need better quality parks.
We need more parks. I’m on the board of the Trust for Public Land, and I love their mission that everyone should live within a ten minute walk of a park. So this is for city governments. This is for city planners. You know, these are things we can do on the local level.
We can increase the quality and availability of people to access parks. We need to increase the number of trails. I think we need more and better trails and we need to link those trails. We need to provide more recreational opportunities. We also, I think, need to provide more infrastructure so that people from different cultures can participate and interact with nature in ways that are comfortable to them.
So for example, more picnic areas, maybe more barbecue grills, different kinds of signage. For example, maybe sometimes instead of calling trails hiking trails, we can call them walking trails. You know ways to be more inclusive, for different cultures and different communities. But, I think increasing access, and increasing the quality of the green spaces that we have, on a national level and on a local level are incredibly important.
Aaron: What was the one thing that surprised you the most doing the reporting for this book?
Florence: I think one of the things that surprised me the most is that nature is good for civilization. You know, I knew that nature was good for me personally. I know that it helps clear my head. You know? I sleep better.
I I can kind of manage my stress levels better if I get time outside. But the research looking at how, experiencing beauty and experiencing awe really makes us think less about our own welfare and our own egos and kind of more about our communities around us. That surprised me. I thought it was really interesting.
Kate: Well, we will leave it there. Florence Williams, author of the Nature Fix, why nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative. Thank you so much for writing this incredible book and for being with us today.
Florence: Oh, thank you so much. It’s been fun.
Kate: Here’s a little bright spot of good news to end this week’s episode. The US Supreme Court has rejected a bid by 19 states to end climate litigation brought by five other states against oil and gas companies. The American Petroleum Institute and other industry players are implicated in the lawsuits in which states are claiming oil companies must compensate them for the costs of rising tides, intensifying storms, and other climate change related disasters. The Supreme Court is the only court that can hear legal battles among states, so this decision closes the book on efforts to summarily end those climate cases brought by states.
Aaron: Well, that is it for today, folks. Please feel free to reach out to us, podcast@westernpriorities.org. Let us know what you think. Let us know what you’d like to see for future episodes. It was kinda nice today having a break from all of the bleak stuff and having something a little more encouraging to talk about.
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Kate: Thanks again to Florence for her time, and thank you for listening to The Landscape.