Contact with Nature
Nature contact may benefit health, a relationship supported by both theoretical and empirical considerations. Nature contact may take many forms in the built environment, such as plantings in buildings, views out windows, biophilic building design, commun
- PDF / 727,332 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 576 x 720 pts Page_size
- 28 Downloads / 229 Views
tion As winter showed signs of yielding to spring, it was time for the Community Learning Garden in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood to have its soil prepared for planting. This community garden, a project of the Southeastern Horticultural Society, relies heavily on volunteer labor from the community, and this task would be no exception. On Martin Luther King Day, about thirty volunteers showed up at the garden to prepare the soil, build new compost bins, and tidy up. Instead of renting a tiller, they dug the soil by hand, turning woodchips into the red earth in hopes of attracting worms and enriching the soil. Many of the volunteers were children; a two-year-old boy happily swung a shovel half his size, while older boys wielded their shovels seriously. A 900-square-foot plot was turned in little more than an hour, then seeded with rye and red clover. The boys then moved on to hammering together the compost bins. At the end of the day, the oldest of the children, a middle schooler, approached the garden’s director. He asked if she would A.L. Dannenberg et al. (eds.), Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-036-1_15, © Island Press 2011
229
230
DIAGNOSING AND HEALING OUR BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
be there on Saturdays so he could come back and help some more (personal communication from Kyla Zaro-Moore, Atlanta, Georgia, March 2010). The neurologist Oliver Sacks, while ascending a mountain above Norway’s Hardanger fjørd in 1974, fell and severely injured his leg. He ended up in a hospital in London. After more than two weeks in a small hospital room with no outside view and a third week on a dreary surgical ward, he was finally taken out to the hospital garden. “This was a great joy,” he wrote, “to be out in the air—for I had not been outside in almost a month. A pure and intense joy, a blessing, to feel the sun on my face and the wind in my hair, to hear birds, to see, touch, and fondle the living plants. Some essential connection and communion with nature was re-established after the horrible isolation and alienation I had known. Some part of me came alive, when I was taken to the garden, which had been starved, and died, perhaps without my knowing it” (Sacks 1984, 133–34). Sacks credited his garden contact with an important role in his recovery and mused that perhaps more hospitals should have gardens, or even be set in the countryside or near woods.
The term built environment may conjure images of homes, schools, factories, and streets. But for many people, contact with nature is a subset of their experience of the built environment—in parks, in backyards, even in the views out their office windows. This chapter reviews the evidence that nature contact may benefit health and describes how this benefit may be incorporated into healthy community design.
Nature Contact: A Health Benefit? Many people appreciate a walk in the park, or the sound of a bird’s song, or the sight of ocean waves lapping at the seashore. Even if these were only aesthetic pref
Data Loading...
