Chapter One
Parks & Gardens
community, mindfulness, discovery
Itâs busy in the park today. I sit down and feel the humbling. My fellow Brooklynites seem to feel it tooâthat sense of smallness that happens when youâre closer to the earth. Some are reading, others chatting or looking up at the clouds. There is such peace and pleasure here on the edge of city life that it makes me wonder if humanityâs problems are simply the result of us feeling too big.
Running my fingers through the million little worlds tangled in the grass below, resting my back on the wrinkled tree behind, I close my eyes and listen to the noises of people and nature mixing, and feel right at home. Opening them up again is like coming out of a dream that Iâm not ready to have endânot quite yet.
The Remedy
Natural grasslands form in subhumid climates where thereâs too much rain for a desert but not enough for a forest. Sometimes called prairies, savannahs, and rangelands, these wide-open spaces offer fertile soil and enough grass and plants to keep grazing animals happy. In the US weâve converted many of our grasslands for industrialization and agriculture,1 but weâve come up with something to take their place: the public park.
While humans canât build a mountain or ocean from scratch, we can create a park relatively easily. You can now find open expanses of grass, smattered with trees here and there, in most urban and suburban areas across the country. It makes sense, then, that this landscape is the most widely studied for its impact on human healthâwhich has been shown to be overwhelmingly positive.
How Parks Promote Longer, Healthier Lives
In short, people who live near green spaces live longer. Thatâs what one World Health Organizationâfunded research review, the largest of its kind, found after analyzing results from nine large-scale longitudinal studies (conducted over a period of years) in 2019.2 These studies captured data on all-cause mortality and neighborhood greenness for 8,324,652 individuals across seven countries. Each one quantified greenness using satellite data, so forests fell into the green bucket, as did parks. After adjusting their findings by socioeconomic status (less affluent areas tend to have less green space, and less access to quality medical care), seven of the nine studies âfound a significant inverse relationship between an increase in surrounding greenness and the risk of all-cause mortality,â leading reviewers to conclude that âinterventions to increase and manage green spaces should therefore be considered as a strategic public health intervention.â These findings extend across generations, and smaller research studies have even linked exposure to green space during pregnancy to higher birth weights3 and healthier births4 overall.
As for why people with access to greenery tend to be healthier and live longer, researchers think part of it probably has to do with the activities that green space allows for: exercise, social interaction, and so forth, which have longevity benefits of their own. Green parks can also help regulate surrounding temperatures, reduce pollution, and stifle noise. In turn, they improve air quality and can reduce citizensâ risk of developing conditions like heart disease.5
Then there are the psychological benefits of parks, gardens, and other public green spaces, which weâll focus on in this chapter. Studies have found that those who live near green space have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol,6 reduced rates of anxiety disorder and depression,7 and better overall moodâall of which can decrease oneâs likelihood of getting sick.
Why We Love Parks: Two Schools of Thought on Their Universal Appeal
There are two theories to explain why parks and green spaces make us feel mentally at ease: the evolutionary and the cultural. Evolutionary scholars, who fall more in line with stress reduction theory, think humans feel more relaxed in parks, and more tense in cities, because grasslands mimic the areas where most early humans evolved.
In prehistoric times, settling in grassy plains scattered with a few trees, hills, and water features gave us a better chance of survival. They provided clear views of predators, shady places to rest, landmarks to guide us in case we got lost, and opportunities to find food and water.
While enclosed forests and sky-high mountains can stoke fears of being attacked by a bear or falling to our death, grassy landscapes are low stakes by comparison. This type of landscape may be where many of our ancestors learned how to relax in the first placeâa life-giving skill in itself. âIf you can run away from a saber-toothed tiger, your survival is enhanced. But if after running away, you can get to a peaceful place, relax, and gather your strength, that may further enhance your survival,â the epidemiologist Howard Frumkin writes in Ecopsychology.8
The other argument for why we find peace in parks is more cultural: in âDo Humans Really Prefer Semi-Open Natural Landscapes? A Cross-Cultural Reappraisal,â9 Caroline Hägerhäll, a landscape architect and professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, questioned whether evolution alone drives our unconscious longing for this landscape.
âItâs a consensus assumption that all humans have similar preferences for that natural environment. And that might be. But of course, we havenât tested very many types of environmentsâor people,â she tells me of the motivation for this study. âWe have a very limited range of environments that have been studied. Most of them are Western types of planned nature like parks. And when it comes to the people, we mainly asked students in Western countries or at least industrialized, well-off countries.â
To test this assumption on a new participant pool, Hägerhäll and her team linked up with members of five non-Western Indigenous communitiesâthe Jahai from the Malay Peninsula, the Lokono from Suriname, the Makalero and Makasae from Timor, and the Wayuu in Colombia. The team presented members of these communities with digital renderings of different landscapes and asked them questions about their preferred landscape, comparing their answers with those of Swedish university students. In general, those in the Indigenous communities said they preferred to live in flatter landscapes that had a higher density of vegetation, while the university students would rather live in more hilly, less-forested areas, consistent with the savannah-like landscape of evolutionary theory. The fact that some of the Indigenous communities believed that gods lived on raised ground could have made the hilly scenes register as off-limits to them, causing the difference in preference.
Though Hägerhäll is quick to say that this study has a small sample size and is in no way conclusive, it challenges the notion that landscape preference is purely the result of human evolution. Culture and upbringing probably play a role too.
I see room for both theories to coexist. Listening to Matthew J. Wichrowski, a horticultural therapist at the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, describe what we know about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, constructed in the sixth century BC, itâs hard not to draw parallels between the prehistoric paradise and the parks we frequent today. The gardens contained local flowers, water features, and expansive views of the surrounding land. They were a retreat from the desert beyond, as neighborhood parks are a respite from the demands of technology, work, and other challenges of modern life. Thousands of years later, these gardens still sound like a paradise, indicating that some of our preference for grassland is innate and eternal.
But the more researchers learn about outdoor experiences, the more they see that what people bring to nature matters just as much as what nature brings to them. The reason that our shoulders drop and we take a big exhale when we enter flat, grassy expanses canât always be explained by some unconscious longing alone. âSo much of it,â Catharine Ward Thompson, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Edinburgh, tells me, âis about stories youâre told and your own experience and how familiar you are with a place.â
Relaxing in grassland may be in our nature, but we have to nurture that feeling too. Looking around a neighborhood park on a sunny Saturday afternoon can give us some ideas on how to do that. The various activities we tend to do in public green spacesâwalking, cloud gazing, and so forthâall tap into something unique that this landscape has to offer.
The Friends Who Picnic Together: Green Space Grows Community
Itâs no wonder that families and friend groups flock to parks; green space fosters social interactions. Multiple studies have found that people who live in greener areas tend to socialize more and feel a greater sense of community. Even in urban environments, features like grassy parks and clusters of trees can boost camaraderie among neighbors.
Take one 1997 experiment conducted in two public housing complexes in Chicago.10 Landscape researchers mapped where the complexesâ residents assembled and found that the greater the number of trees that surrounded a unit, the greater the likelihood that people would gather there.
Following this initial observation,11 those who lived in the apartments surrounded by greenery and those surrounded by concrete sat through interviews on the strength of their social ties. Sure enough, the density of the vegetation was a strong positive predictor of the answers, recalls William C. Sullivan, a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois who worked on the study. The greater the number of trees, the stronger the social bonds.
Upon further investigation,12 more-vegetated areas were also found to have less graffiti and crime and a greater sense of safety. Frances E. Kuo, another researcher involved, reflected on these findings in a 2003 paper: âIf stronger social ties among neighbors are key to creating more effective, safer neighborhoods, and treed spaces help promote ties among neighbors, perhaps the greenness of neighborhood landscape ultimately affects levels of safety and security in a neighborhood.â13
Some twenty years later, studies continue to show that small green patches of parks can profoundly affect public healthâespecially in poor neighborhoods with a large BIPOC population, which have previously been neglected on the green front.
So why can green spaces feed the collective? It probably starts with their impact on the individual. We know that spending time in nature can boost mood and ease stress, and happier people tend to make better companions. âWhen youâre mentally fatigued, youâre more likely to be irritable. Youâre more likely to be distracted and miss portions of the conversation or subtle social cues,â Sullivan says. Natural scenes also seem to light up the parts of t...
