For the month of April, I decided to visit the Haw River, which flows near where I live, every day. I wouldn’t hold myself strictly to this, but I would try, and I would observe—not impartially, of course, but closely—how I felt. Some days I took leisurely walks with friends, leaning over the railing of the pedestrian bridge to watch the river, high from recent rains, and to smell the distinctive, muddy smell of the water mingled with that of the banks overrun with invasive honeysuckle. On others, coming home late at night, I drove straight down to the bridge and walked out to stare down at the dark water, a move that felt a bit like the natural-world equivalent of visiting a drive-through restaurant.
I did this because I hadn’t been spending much time at the river, even though it’s only a short walk from home, and even though I like doing it. The results of my informal experiment? I did, in fact, feel better—calmer, more relaxed, clearer-headed. I suspect that many people have similar feelings about the effects of spending time in the wilder places near where they live. Perhaps that’s why Richard Louv’s 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, which explores the relation between the natural world and children’s development, became a bestseller in the United States.
But to know empirically that these experiences are beneficial—and to know exactly how they might help us—requires more than personal experience. A growing and varied body of research attempts to quantify how and why spending time in the natural world might have beneficial effects on humans’ physical and psychological health. One of the first and most well-known studies, published in Science by Richard S. Ulrich in 1984, found that patients recovering from surgery in rooms with a window facing a natural setting had shorter hospital stays and took less pain medicine than did patients whose window faced a brick wall.