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HEALING IN THE NATURAL WORLD

By Guy Dauncey Growing up in southern England and Wales, we always lived

close to the woods, streams, and hills of the nearby countryside. The towns were

built to be dense and tight, so it was relatively easy to walk out of the

buildings and away from traffic into a land of kingfishers, beech trees, and

marsh marigolds. It was “smart growth” before anyone had invented the term.

Today, I live in a clearing with a small, organic nursery in a recovering,

second-growth forest, just north of Victoria. On a typical winter day, we see

ravens, tree frogs, a Cooper’s hawk, hummingbirds, blue jays, and woodpeckers,

as well as worms, spiders, and a host of smaller birds. And, of course, the

forest. In the August 6 issue of New Scientist, Joan Maloof, a biology

professor at Salisbury University in Maryland, describes how the Japanese have a

word to describe the particular air of a forest. They call it shinrin-yoku:

“wood-air bathing.” Maloof writes: “Japanese researchers have

discovered that when diabetic patients walk through the forest, their blood

sugar drops to healthier levels. Entire symposiums have been held on the

benefits of wood-air bathing and walking.” I’m able to enjoy shinrin-yoku all

the time, but for those who live in concrete canyons, amidst a soundscape of car

alarms and sirens, instead of the croak of frogs and the wind, it has become a

distant experience. In Emily White’s article Greening the Blues, published in

the October issue of The Ecologist, White writes about depression and the

aspiration of drug companies and their medical colleagues to turn it into a

clinical illness that should be treated with drugs. The World Health

Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be second only to heart

disease as a cause of disability. White notes that during her career, she was

transferred from a downtown Toronto law firm to a government office in Iqaluit,

Baffin Island, in the Arctic. Although she took along her stash of SSRIs

to treat her depression, with 24 hours of daylight, she started hiking the

tundra, taking photos, and exploring the surrounding world. Her anxiety

decreased, her mood improved, and she found herself becoming interested in

things. According to White, it wasn’t that she was getting more exercise: “It

was that the landscape around me was so vibrant and solid that I began to feel

that way as well.” In her article, she offers some intriguing evidence for one’s

capacity to heal in a natural environment. In work with autistic children and

people with organic brain diseases, when animals are introduced the subjects

have an improved attention span, laugh and talk more, and demonstrate less

aggression. When people are shown photos of natural settings, their blood

pressure drops, their heart rates fall, their muscles relax, and they report

feeling less stressed and anxious. In hospitals, when post-operative patients

are given a room with a view of trees, they need fewer painkillers, develop

fewer complications, and check themselves out sooner than patients in rooms

with an urban view. In a long-term study of the type of wall art typically

destroyed by psychiatric patients, while abstract images were often attacked,

not once in 15 years had a patient destroyed a picture of a natural scene.

Now, let’s return to Joan Maloof’s work. As a biologist, she has delved into the

science of all of this, and notes that researchers in the Sierra Nevada of

northern California have found that the air in the forested mountains contains

120 chemical compounds. Some of these compounds derive from bacteria and fungi

in the soil, but most come from the trees, which release them from pockets

between their leaf cells. They also produce edible monoterpenes (MT),

fragrances, which have been shown to both prevent and cure cancer. When we

inhale them, they become part of our bodies, and the forest becomes part of us.

Having evolved along with nature for five million years or so, our bodies

and souls are part of nature. There is something within us that longs for the

forest and the stream. Until this last, tiny micro-slice of time, we have always

lived in close proximity to the animals, Our cities, suburbs, colleges, and

schools should offer many more green spaces, trees, and urban farms. The first

remedy for depression should be a zoology lift, not Zoloft. When we attack

nature, by clearcutting forests or paving farmland, we attack ourselves. There

is a reason why our health care budget is spinning out of control: we are

cutting ourselves off from nature’s drugs, which are natural and free, and

handing the responsibility for our health over to the drug companies, which

produce anything but free products. Guy Dauncey is author of the award-winning

book Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. He is editor of

EcoNews, and president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org).

He lives in Victoria.

 

http://www.reiki-for-holistic-health.com

402-25 Kensington Road

Brampton, Ontario, L6T 3W8

Canada

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