How Trees Calm Us Down
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I do question the science or numbers in the study as much as I believe the basic premise to be true, however, correlation does not automatically imply cause. People suffering more after trees are removed can also mean that urbanization or development brought factories, or unhealthier air, rodents or any number of other negative factors with it.
I do intuitively relax more, and take great solace in my surroundings, and I do believe it is better for people. I would like to see more research on this; there have been a lot of debacles in the past two years in the social sciences and psychology with statistics and peer review. Some of the studies were taken for granted and are now under the microscope for being inconclusive or just wrong.
Yea for trees! And plants, animals and all that entails!
Personally, tree are exciting to me, not calming.
All the research shows is there's a link between trees and health; aka there's a correlation, not causation.
Best example I'm aware of of "confounding factor" is that there's an obvious correlation between an increase in people drowning in pools and ice cream consumption rates. Eating ice cream does not cause drowning, nor do drownings cause people to eat ice cream. Hot weather causes people to swim more, which increases the odds someone will drown.
All I'm saying is this research does not show causation or look for confounding factors, which might show the correlation itself is a false positive.
Moved to New England and I had no idea what is wrong with me. It took me three years to figure out it was tree pollen and not a spring cold... haha
In California now so we will see how it goes.
I used allergy pills for years, but the results were not as good, and they all caused some amount of drowsiness.
I'd never use it as an excuse to complain about trees.
Japanese researcher describes (with control group) the interesting affects of walking in a forest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPNll1Ccn0
Indian researcher describes side affects of indoor plants on health esp. air quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmn7tjSNyAA
I'm incorporating some of these concepts into my tiny house design e.g. a terrarium and an hinoki ofuro, together with natural daylighting.
For a small space having good air quality is very important, I plan to install a selection of plants and rig them up as dual purpose air purifiers as shown in the study, with emphasis on the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.
+1 oxygenation +2 reduced ambient toxicity levels +3 attractive decoration
It's not expensive and it'll pay for itself many times over with better health! Programmers take note! It is easier for your brain to work if it has a nice supply of oxygen. Rocket science I know. NASA science at any rate.
In general society (opinion incoming) has not paid much attention to closed loop systems in the way we ought to (see no evidence the Slingshot scales up). Especially as a way to introduce antifragility. A house in a truly futuristic suburb would recycle heat from water and reliably convert all black/grey water back into distilled water for household use while using the biomass to power the operation. Throw in autonomous air vehicles and ubiquitous net reach from Google blimps and I'd really feel like I'm living in the future. What is more, with houses spread out (side affect of self driving things on land prices), not laying cables/water/sewer lines and not maintaining roads anymore it would appear that it could be a much more economical future. Without cracking closed loop systems it is out of reach. Google Net Blimps, renewable energy, even autonomous vehicles seem like much more tractable problems in comparison despite water filtration seeming simpler.
There must be something about "natural forms" (as in varying, not changing, non-rectangular) that creates that feeling.
Take the example of NYC. The Upper East Side and Clinton Hill are two neighborhoods with a relatively large number of trees. Both of those neighborhoods are two of the most expensive and quiet neighborhoods in Manhattan/Brooklyn.
So it could just be that quiet streets and nice houses calm us down. But then again, maybe having more trees is what causes neighborhoods to be nice and quiet. As far as I can tell, it could go either way.
Draught is the british (and Canada, other places as well) spelling for draft as in draft beer. Not trying to be grammar nazi, just thought it was funny cause the typo was somewhat well placed.
What did water ever do to you?
We are mostly not human. Our bodies contain a vast assortment of usually symbiotic species so it is appropriate to think ecologically, more co-evolution.
It seems reasonable that flora and fauna responses to environmental factors that in of themselves may not be directly relevant to a human, but that we benefit from the interaction as a side effect e.g. useful compounds being produced naturally, partially synthesized from plant life even though the direct plant product may show no sign of helping us because we cannot yet process it artificially. Hope that makes sense.
Having said that, the Japanese researcher I mentioned above does say some kinds of hinoki oil produce comparable effects to traveling in forests.
Now seems like a good time to plug my favorite anime on tiny invisible life forms:
Mushishi http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807832/
My main point however, is a call for some prudence especially with the relatively recent focus on bad statistics in psychology and the neurosciences. A caution against accepting a paper's conclusions because of the correlation of a few variables, and the omission of some obvious other ones. Here's just one link from 2013 [1]. fMRIs are a tool, and like any other, can be used incorrectly, which is also part of the problem. I am not negating Marc Berman's paper or this article based on it; I am just a bit wary of papers or articles with big claims (remember the article cites a 1% improvement after all of the buoying of the affects).
A variable not mentioned is that if you are walking outside, or facing a bunch of trees in a yard from your hospital room, you are getting daylight. Window panes block UVb, but not UVa (some are treated to block UVa too). Sunlight/daylight help you to produce vitamin D, which is linked to depression and the immunity system. This could be the cause of the 1% improvement the article states, and possibly not the trees. Treatment for clinical depression figures are 60-80% successful depending on the study. An order of magnitude greater than 1% [2].
Aside from the few people who have replied to this thread about allergies and other maladies, how many people do you think are going to associate pain, depression or other negatives with an image of trees in their head when responding to a survey?
All that being said. My neighborhood was poor, and crime-ridden, yet my tree-lined block provided me with many peaceful moments of just staring at the trees, or simply listening to the wind in the leaves. I do believe they are beneficial, at least to me (except during a hurricane in NJ, where I thought the 60 foot tall, old oak tree just by my house was going to fall on my roof!).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
[1]http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-Cognitive...
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2014/09/leafy-green-bette...
Random fact the Hawthorne Effect was BS. Perhaps it's true but the original 'lighting' effect experiment was rubbish.
My own personal experience tends to confirm the main point put forth. Indeed, when we moved to the US Southwest several years ago, I thought I would miss oceans the most (having always lived on a coast). But no, I really miss seeing green -- my first time back east after moving here, the impact of seeing all those trees was really tremendous (& positive).
Having said that, the effect mentioned in the study can also be due to the amount of attention that a city street demands, and a lot of other factors. (Walking down Broadway in NYC in the middle of day just isn't the same as strolling through West Village on a Sunday morning!) Not to mention what other commenters have pointed out, e.g., correlation != causality. Quite likely the researchers have thought about this; I would be interested in what they found.
"This Is Your Brain on Nature"
Perhaps inspired by a similar line of thinking.
I found this the most interesting point in the article. I would have assumed that any psychological effect of viewing trees would be largely due to their greenness, since that is their dominant visual aspect. But, assuming a largely deciduous environment, naked trees in winter would seem to have the same effect. So the effect must be stimulated by something deeper than just raw color.
I wonder whether these principles could be incorporated into architecture and interior design, so we feel like we're in a natural setting even when indoors.
(Even better with trees visible through the windows, of course.)
See permaculture, food security, urban farming, distributed production, decentralization.
Trees for some zen or aesthetic cause is an elitist and ignorant perspective. Land use in suburban environments is extremely poor. Food sustainability is very poor.
Trees are a good starting point to start researching. But there are much more serious reasons than a warm fuzzy feeling.
I looked up prices as I was initially in doubt if this was a good cost-benefit. This article claims that New York Cty trees have a lifetime cost of ~3,500 USD (in gardening). I was under the impression of a much higher annual cost, so I was way off in my initial reasoning.
This report puts annual gardening costs of Portland trees at around 40usd [1]
These numbers do not include added road, curb and sidewalk maintenance incurred by the tree, as far as I can tell.
[0]http://scienceline.org/2013/10/the-high-cost-of-carbon-in-ci... [1] https://www.portlandoregon.gov/parks/article/514095
Pretty is nice but beauty without function gets old really quick.
I remember only one incidence of the city being called in, or a private contractor to repair the sidewalk by the two oldest oaks on the bottom of the block whose roots had lifted and cracked the walkway. They just expanded the opening; I'm sure it was not up to code after for width between the areaway fence and the tree's opening in the sidewalk.
I can't believe it costs much to maintain them after the initial cost of planting them. I never had to care much for the trees on my property in NJ either, other than pruning some dead limbs that were about to fall over my access way or roof from the taller trees. The younger trees did fine on their own. Although, almost all of the hemlock trees succumbed to the Gypsy moths, but even neighbors who spent thousands on trying to save theirs, suffered almost the same number of losses. I was also not quick to cut them down if they didn't 'look' right. Now one that neighbors said looked dead, is thriving again!
> five times bigger in people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression
> Those who had taken the nature walk performed about twenty per cent better than their counterparts on tests of memory and attention
Housebound or otherwise infirm people would benefit from VR simulations of peaceful locations.
Likewise so would all us shut-in techies that live in our basements...
Let me ask you: why do people play digital soccer games when real soccer is so much better?
Imagine every window in your house doubles up as a transparent video output.
Then you could feed any inputs to the windows. The result is you could create the illusion of changing seasons, or changing locations (with accompanying changes in ambient sound).
That would be worth something!
Houses on streets with trees are more expensive. People that can afford to live there are healthier for obvious reasons.
Likewise, people that are put into better hospital rooms are probably just patients the hospital is willing to expend more energy on, because they have deeper pockets/are the right ethnicity/are "respectable people" etc..
Is there any non-depressing source of science journalism left in the world?
Income speaks only partially to this. Systematic racism is still very strong in housing; people that live in these houses are more likely to have white privilege and to not have the chronic stressors of racial inequality nagging at their health either.
But I'm sure we're "wired" to "enjoy green spaces." The dryads no doubt protect us when we can afford to be near them.
For your hypothesis that the study results are skewed by white privilege at least the following things would have to be true: 1. Neighboorhoods with more citizens from lower classes would need to be less green than neighboorhoods with less citizens from lower classes. (At least where I live, in Amsterdam, that would presumably not be the case as the Bijlmer, one of the largest and poorest neighboorhoods is very probably the greenest one. As an aside, the amount of trees is sometimes seen as a problem for that neighboorhood due to the combination with high crime rates, as foilage provides cover for people with criminal motives, makes the area darker (less light getting through) and makes it feel less safe when combined with the sight of huge high-rise flats). This only adds to problems for the people living there and the stereotyping by those not living there :/).
2. The correlation between house prices and area income would need to be lower than expected but there would need to be a significant correlation between house prices and class (f.ex. credit score)
Contrary to your statement, I do think there's a large correlation between the first two, but I haven't checked with housing data for Toronto. For one, there's also the option to rent a house so the correlation between income and housing quality will be higher, as people with higher incomes can afford higher rent. If I read this report correctly, around 30% of Toronto apartments are rental ones http://www.trebhome.com/market_news/rental_reports/pdf/renta.... With rental homes, surely there's a large correlation between income and housing cost. Secondly, while I do agree that income and class won't necessarily be correlated at the individual level, I would assume it evens out on the neighboorhood level. Neighboorhoods where people have good credit, income stability, good status, a good job, good medical contacts and access to good food, will surely have a higher average income. And actually, income does seem to matter when buying a house in Canada (http://globalnews.ca/news/985258/to-rent-or-to-buy-8-questio...)
So I am sympathetic to your argument that systemic racism makes it more likely that one lives in bad housing, but don't buy that this will explain the study's results. I do wish they would have worked with housing costs/rent.
You did make me investigate Toronto a bit. It has quite a lot of food deserts http://www.ehatlas.ca/built-environments/food-deserts, and apparently its child poverty rate is quite high. I'm often confounded by how cities and economies are built in that part of the world. In the Netherlands, cities are littered with supermarkets and the overall availability of bikes and scooters makes it even easier to get to one. Credit scores are much less of a thing here, too. Whether you can buy a house is based on income and income stability.
Btw, you do seem to be assuming the american(?) situation to some extent. Canada has universal health insurance and putting patients with deeper pockets in better rooms seems to be an odd explanation then, too.