I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but moved out to rural NJ in my thirties. I bought a house on a lake with no motorboats, plenty of black bears and raccoons and lots of trees. I now live in the rice fields of East Java, Indonesia, so I guess you can say I love the outdoors.
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!
That's a great paper. Several assumptions I had are confirmed after looking through it such as the importance of countering off-gassing. I don't think people are generally aware of this, they just sort of assume it's a solved problem or a diminutive one. Even natural materials like wood will release formaldehyde.
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.
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 is a massive, recent hayfever problem in Japan because cedar trees planted to be used for timber after WWII weren't as construction methods changed.
The thing that always gets me is that when I spent summers in canada I experienced not an iota of hayfever, but I get pretty significant symptoms in the UK. I think it's about the only strong draw to emmigration at some point in the future!
I'm the same way. I'm from the US and have never had any allergies ever, though I've spent a lot of time outdoors. I spent a summer in the UK one year, and the whole time I had horrific allergies. I was basically hopped up on Benadryl the whole time.
Opposite for me. I grew up in rural England surrounded by flowers and forests. Never had a hint of allergies. Lived in Germany on the edge of the Black Forest for ten years... no problems.
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
My hay fever declined after a serious allergic reaction that sent me to a hospital. Then I also had a few cats, to whom I was allergic to. Hope yours declines, too. I guess I lucked out!
I also have allergies but I'd take them in a second over cutting down the trees. (Though I might look for a state to live with more allergy friendly trees)
I too suffer from hay fever from trees. They're my number one allergen followed by cats. The last athsma attack I had was on a football (soccer) field surrounded by trees.
I'd never use it as an excuse to complain about trees.
Agree, wildlife & wilderness is great, but my guess is that there's a confounding factor such as wealth, population density, etc. that has more of an impact on health than trees.
The study accounted for both income and area income. So while there may be a confounding factor, I assume wealth is out of the picture. It doesn't seem to have accounted for population density however.
What about the evidence of earlier discharge at the same hospital? It wasn't clear how carefully that was evaluated, but surely that would nullify wealth, population density etc since the only difference was the room that people were put in.
First, just to be clear, issue at hand is the title, which states trees CAUSE calmness which CAUSES health.
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.
This is why studying marginal effects -- like when the Emerald Ash Borer invaded county-by-county and caused a discrete time-series event that you can analyze before-and-after, as mentioned in the article -- is so critical.
I opted for a lower quality apartment this year because all it's windows face vast green fields or trees. The effects are undeniable - some of my favourite times this year have been spent just sitting on my balcony admiring the greenery.
Went on my first cruise this year. I'm so glad we got a balcony -- I think I spent most of the trip just sitting on the balcony enjoying the sound of the ocean, or watching people at port. The balcony was my favorite part of the whole vacation...
I agree, I also just moved to a more tree ridden area a while ago and the backyard is much larger. IT's always so peaceful just like you said. Fall is just breathtaking as well.
Having trees in the city is nice, and Berlin has an ok level (at least where I live). But I recently started to do long weekend day hikes in the area around the city, and the effect is even better. The constant change of natural forms while moving really frees up my mind and floods it with new impressions that I don't have on my work days. I used to have a meditative effect from running, but it has become a bit too much routine in that regard.
There must be something about "natural forms" (as in varying, not changing, non-rectangular) that creates that feeling.
I fully agree. Trees (and plants in general, and rocks) are more fractal, and contain interesting detail on many levels... There's something pacifying about being around them vs flat, rectangular urban surfaces.
Personally, I've always felt nigh claustrophobic when surrounded by trees. Give me the flat, wide-open desert, though, and I feel sublime. There's something pacifying about seeing as far as my eyes can see. Now, I do love some national parks, such as the Grand Canyon, or Zion, in which you can become surrounded by trees and mountains and feel utterly awestruck at the beauty. But I feel my spirits tick up as soon as I hit the vast expanse of desert again upon exiting the trees.
In terms of major cities, Berlin is wonderfully green almost all over. Trees line most streets, in a much more natural-feeling way than you'd find in places like Manhattan.
"Are trees alive?" is the question to ask yourself. They can seem very un-alive to us humans. But when the wind blows and their leaves move you can see it. They are literally WAVING at you. Think back to when you were 8 on the playground and a friendly kid waved at you. Trees just wanna play. But wait you say, that's just the wind. The tree isn't deciding to move like the 8 year old kid decided to wave his/her arms. OR DID the tree purposely make its leaves in a shape to catch the wind and that movement is 100% intentional. When you see it that way you can stare at trees for hours. Also, every single one of those trees is naked. When you are bored/depressed/lonely just stare at trees and giggle.
From what I've seen living in Toronto, NYC and Montreal, streets with nicer houses/apartments tend to have more trees. Those neighborhoods also tend to be quieter.
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.
One hypothesis is that we've also evolved to associate greenery with healthy land and lifestyle. I can see why these signals from millions of years can have the 1% quoted effect.
I think its obvious, we like rivers, mountains, flowers, greenery as they all represent fertillity of the land! (Mountains mean that there will be water even in draughts)
Only if you consider Coors Light, the mountain beer, to be water (which it is).
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.
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:
All of those saying correlation is not causation did not read the article. The study detected an immediate and neasurable effect from just walking among trees.
I was the parent of the thread that brought up 'correlation is not causation' point [0]. I did read the entire article, as well as other papers on the effects of environment on well being.
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!).
It's worth noting that the original publication doesn't claim that it is the trees that have the effect. That is a layer of confusion generated by the New Yorker author. Berman's original work compares "natural" vs urban environments.
Now I think this probably is causation, but pointing out that the correlation is really strong is not an argument against "correlation is not causation".
Reflexively trotting out "correlation is not causation" is a thought terminating cliche. It short circuits our thinking. People often stop at the statement, feeling satisfied in their scientific abilities.
This study was limited to "employees from two large commercial offices", and probably suffers deeply from a Hawthorne Effect[0]. As usual, the rigor is doubtful.
Interesting finding, but the article at least leaves one with more questions than answers (I haven't looked up the original research).
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.
I remember an explanation for the calming effect of nature by David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. He claims that the environment is too complex so your mind "lets go" he repeats some of that here https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20121027044918-402563-david-a... I'm not sure what the basis of that analysis is, but he could be right. I contrast that with the jail from THX 1138 which doesn't seem like it would be relaxing http://nightflight.com/wp-content/uploads/THX-1138-6.jpg
Some of the walks took place in June, whereas others took place in January; most people didn’t particularly enjoy trudging through the harsh Michigan winter, but their scores jumped just as much as in the summer trials.
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.
"Berman and his colleagues have zeroed in on the “low-level” visual characteristics that distinguish natural from built environments. To do this, they broke down images into their visual components: the proportion of straight to curved edges, the hue and saturation of the colors, the entropy (a statistical measure of randomness in pixel intensity), and so on."
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.)
Plant fruit and nut trees. This is vastly more useful than trees for the sake of calm.
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.
Interesting. I love walking among the southern live oaks around where I live. They're just amazing trees. There was one that got hit by lightening a couple weeks back and split down the middle. I actually felt empathy for it. These trees are usually hundreds of years old.
A tree on a street is incredibly expensive to maintain. The tree itself need maintaince from a gardner and the surrounding road and sidewalk needs extra maintenence too.
For the 18 years I lived in Brooklyn, the trees were never maintained by the city. Our block association planted them in the late sixties, and the houses on either side watered them when they were hosing their own sidewalks (as well as keeping all the stray dogs from shitting and pissing in their soil!).
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!
You are absolutely right about the cost, and I was way off when I wrote that comment. See below where I quote actual prices of about 40usd a year to maintain an inner city tree.
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.
At the end of the day it's money not being spent on something else. Would you rather spend 4min sitting in traffic on a tree lined street because plans to upgrade a 4way stop to something that can handle more volume was canned in favor of adding trees.
Pretty is nice but beauty without function gets old really quick.
We are members of two private gardens in Edinburgh - which are fairly large and have loads of trees. The costs of these are £80 and £250 a year - so I don't think there is anything inherent about trees being expensive to maintain if the costs are split among enough people (and these are only split between people who live on 3 streets).
It could work quite well as the new tab screen in a browser. Slowly move the camera through the woodland so that the view changes. That would keep the view incidental whilst keeping some novelty.
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).
I think that would only work if you could capture the olfactory sensations from being in a forest, and the exposure to the sun's UV rays (which trigger production of Vitamin D, which has been linked to depression and mental state).
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?
While the study doesn't seem to have taken into account the houses' values, it has taken into account income (as the article states) and area income (the article doesn't state this). I do not know if that's enough to correct for housing costs. But I do assume that accounting for area income should go a long way to counter your example regarding affording houses. That said, of course correlation isn't causation.
Most of us don't buy houses on our income, but on our credit. This speaks to class, not to wealth; someone with good credit, from a background that grants them that status, is more likely to have a job with good benefits, health insurance, a family that can recommend good doctors, etc.. They're also less likely to live in a food desert, more likely to be able to afford fresh fruits and vegetables, etc..
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.
You seem quite certain that the research is invalid and quite certain of your systemic racism hypothesis. I would invite you to find evidence for your hypothesis in the actual study results.
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.
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!