Why is contact with nature so good for us?

In recent years, researchers have become aware of a powerful new kind of therapy, which is just as effective against depression as traditional psychotherapy or medication. And the amazing thing is that you don’t have to pay for this therapy. It’s free, and completely accessible to anyone at anytime. It’s not even a new therapy either – in fact, it’s even older than the human race.

This is ecotherapy – contact with nature. A few years ago researchers at the University of Essex in 2007 found that, of a group of people suffering from depression, 90 percent felt a higher level of self-esteem after a walk through a country park, and almost three-quarters felt less depressed. Another survey by the same research team found that 94% of people with mental illnesses believed that contact with nature put them in a more positive mood. Since then, in the UK contact with nature has been increasingly used as a therapy by mental health professionals.

But as well as helping us to heal our minds, contact with nature can transform us. For several years, I have done research into what I call ‘awakening experiences’ – moments when our vision of our surroundings becomes more intense (so that they become more beautiful and meaningful than normal), and we feel a sense of connectedness to them, and towards other people. The world may somehow seem harmonious and meaningful, as a strong feeling of well-being fills us. (These are similar to Abraham Maslow’s ‘peak experiences’ – see my book Waking From Sleep for a fuller discussion.) And my research consistently shows that contact with nature is one of the most frequent triggers of these experiences – in fact, around 20 percent of them.

This is certainly true for me. I have what you could call ‘low intensity awakening experiences’ very frequently when I’m amongst nature. If I go walking in the countryside on my own (it doesn’t happen so often with other people) there usually comes a point when a feeling of well-being begins to well up inside me, and when the trees and the fields and the sky around me seem to be more alive and beautiful, and to be shining with a new radiance. The clouds above me seem to be moving with a dramatic beauty, and I have a sense that ‘all is well.’

Of course, countless poets have written of the states of awe and ecstasy they’ve experienced whilst alone with nature too. This is what William Wordsworth’s poetry is most famous for: his sense that nature is pervaded with what he called ‘a motion and a spirit which rolls through all thinking things, and all objects of thought.’ Other poets like Walt Whitman, Emerson, William Blake and W.B. Yeats have also left us many descriptions of the sense of meaning and harmony and inner joy they experienced while contemplating natural scenes.

Why does nature have this effect on us?

It’s not surprising that nature has a therapeutic effect when you consider that the human race – and all our evolutionary forebears – have been closely bonded with it for all our existence. It’s only in recent times that many of us have been confined to man-made environments. For us, contact with green spaces is therefore like going back home, and fills us with the same sense of safety and belonging. We crave nature in the same way that a child needs a mother, and derive the same feeling of comfort from it.

But the main reason why nature can heal and transform us, I believe, is because of its calming and mind-quietening effect. In nature, our minds process a lot less information than normal, and they don’t wear themselves out by concentrating. And most importantly, the beauty and majesty of nature acts a little like a mantra in meditation, slowing down the normal ‘thought-chatter’ which runs chaotically through our minds. As a result, an inner stillness and energy fills us, generating a glow of being and intensifying our perceptions. (Again, see Waking From Sleep for a fuller discussion of this.)

So the next time you feel depressed or frustrated, don’t choose retail therapy or mood-altering medication – put on your walking boots and try ecotherapy instead. You may not just get a boost of well-being, but an awakening experience as well.

Steve Taylor is a psychology lecturer and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality, including The Fall and Waking From Sleep. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as ‘an important contribution to the global shift in consciousness happening at the present time.’ Visit his Website and his Blog for more.

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“From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning.”

E.O. Wilson

Having already tested his parents’ indulgence by adopting snakes as companions, young Ed Wilson pressed his luck even further by raising black widow spiders, which he hand-fed with live insects. By the time he took up farming ants, it must have come as something of a relief for the household.

Ed, of course, went on to become E.O. Wilson, the Harvard entomologist whose passion for creepy crawlers spawned a lifelong commitment to understanding the intricate connections between all life on Earth. Now approaching 80, he remains a leading figure in the field of systems biology, which studies the complex networks formed by the interaction of biological systems. Wilson’s childhood experience provides the archetypal account of raising a field biologist—one with hands perpetually dirty from poking into wild nooks and crannies, seeking to know what lives there. And the scientific community owes much to his early and enthusiastic attention to that world, a colorful example of the spirit embodied by so many scientists whose childhood pastimes developed into careers spent advancing our understanding of the natural world.

North America has a long tradition of nurturing this spirit, as expressed in the writings of individuals from John James Audubon to Rachel Carson. Yet the past three decades have witnessed major societal and technological changes that have transformed the way in which many young North Americans encounter nature. Where Wilson’s 1930s home might have held nothing more electronic than a crystal radio to lure him indoors, the twenty-first century equivalent can offer hundreds of television channels, increasingly vibrant computer games, kaleidoscopic Internet access, and endless social interaction to be found on glowing monitors.

Personal travel has evolved just as dramatically, so that many children spend much of their time enclosed in vehicles, often being shuttled from one indoor activity to another, perhaps without even glancing up from a handheld game or cell phone. They may well have toured airports and shopping malls on both sides of the country by the time they are teenagers, without ever having wandered among the trees left in an undeveloped lot down the street—if their neighborhood even has such property. Nor would they be encouraged to wander in such a fashion, warned of the threat posed by hostile strangers or the even more hostile legal liabilities associated with any injury. The result of this confluence of factors can be what author Richard Louv called “nature-deficit disorder” in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, a term that refers to the psychological and physical toll exacted as we become alienated from the natural environment.

These profound lifestyle and societal changes are prompting questions from researchers about what could be an equally profound change in how many North American children perceive the natural world. Of course not all children spend all their time indoors, nor is technology inherently bad; nevertheless, some observers are voicing distinctly practical concerns. If a substantial proportion of the population has little or no direct interaction with pristine natural environments as children, how will that affect their lifelong attitude toward such places? How will they come to regard the value of environmental science or policy? Above all, what kind of environmental scientists and policy managers will they become, if such careers even occur to them?

Nature, Twenty-First Century Style?

Mark Hafner fears he may already know the answer, and it haunts him. A mammalogist with the Department of Biological Sciences and Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he regularly addresses audiences about a telling challenge he has dubbed “hantavirus hysteria.” In the early 1990s, several human fatalities caused by respiratory infection were linked with exposure to a species of hantavirus resident in native rodent populations in the U.S. Southwest. Mammalogists working with these animals were advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and later required to outfit themselves with disposable gowns, respirators, goggles, and latex gloves to prevent infection.

Experienced researchers laughed off the gear as “moon suits”—and later epidemiologic analysis such as a report by Charles F. Fulhorst et al. in the April 2007 Emerging Infectious Diseases largely disproved the likelihood of becoming infected with hantavirus in the field—but Hafner insists that such recommendations have made younger newcomers to mammalogy distinctly nervous. For students who may be coming to the discipline without having spent much time in uncontrolled outdoor settings, he suggests, field work may mark the first time they have touched a wild animal. Moreover, he asserts, as the amount of gadgetry available to students has increased, their interest in the broader aspects of field work (such as collecting specimens) has decreased. As he puts it, “They’re so much more comfortable around equipment. Many of them would panic at the idea of being out of cell phone range.”

For Hafner, as for many scientists, field work often marks the highest points of his life. Eager to share the joy, he annually invites undergraduate students to join him on field trips. But each year he has been getting fewer and fewer takers, while the handful who do so remain unsure of the objective. “They just go along as passive participants, not someone who’s training to do this themselves in the future,” he says. “I just don’t know who’s going to be sampling natural populations of rodents in the future.” Hafner sees a real problem rooted in successive generations of children deprived of meaningful experiences in the natural world.

He is not alone in his assessment. In the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Environmental Management, Oliver Pergams and Patricia Zaradic introduced the concept of “videophilia,” which they defined as “the new human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media.” Employing U.S. national park visitation as their bellwether, they found the steady decline of such visits since 1988 closely matched the growing prevalence and diversity of electronic entertainment options such as television, video games, and the Internet. The researchers point to census figures revealing a substantial and continuing increase in the amount of time people spend at these pastimes—an additional 327 hours per year in 2003 compared with 1987. Rising oil prices also showed a significant correlation with declining park visits.

In a study published in the 19 February 2008 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Pergams and Zaradic expanded their data analysis to include other U.S. public lands, the issuance of hunting and fishing licenses, time spent camping or hiking, and visits to parks in Japan and Spain. The findings reinforced their earlier conclusion: even with an undiminished capacity of wild areas to handle more traffic, a smaller percentage of visitors have actually been showing up. Their analysis of 16 data sets on this kind of activity showed an average annual drop of more than 1% since the 1980s, for a total drop of 18–25% to date. “Regardless of the root cause,” they wrote, “the evidence for a pervasive and fundamental shift away from nature-based recreation seems clear.”

Commenting on their work in that same issue of the journal, Nature Conservancy chief scientist Peter Kareiva suggested this shift could well be the most serious environmental threat facing the world today. “In the end, the fate of biodiversity and ecosystems depends on political choices and individual choices,” he wrote, referring to a grasp of the vital role of natural systems in our own welfare, both physical and psychological. “If people never experience nature and have negligible understanding of the services that nature provides, it is unlikely people will choose a sustainable future.”

A parallel stream of research indicates that the foundations of those choices lie in childhood. Just as Pergams and Zaradic were homing in on videophilia, Cornell University psychologists Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies conducted an ambitious national survey of 2,000 adults aged 18–90 to determine how childhood experiences in the natural world influenced a person’s outlook on environmental issues. “When children become truly engaged with the natural world at a young age, the experience is likely to stay with them in a powerful way—shaping their subsequent environmental path,” they reported in volume 16, issue 1 (2006) of Children, Youth and Environments.

When Only the Real Thing Will Do

The research by Wells and Lekies carefully noted that the lifelong impact was more profound when the engagement with nature was spontaneous and unstructured, as characterized by the general unpredictability of pursuits such as hunting, fishing, or simply wandering around a forest. In contrast, participation in organized outdoor programs or environmental education courses did not serve as an equivalent predictor of adult attitudes toward the environment. The results even offered instances where enforced, overly structured time spent in nature with other children could later generate negative attitudes.

Pergams regularly witnesses the intricate dynamics of the personal experience with nature. In addition to being a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is also co-steward of a nearby nature preserve, where he takes groups of elementary school students on outings. There, he says, these young people learn that “wild” means just that—something that does not conform to the neat outline of a curriculum or the logical narrative of even the best documentary, something the children must come to grips with on their own.

“When you go out into nature, it’s a chaotic system,” Pergams says. “What engages people, especially children, is that the chaos is open-ended.” He adds that it might be tempting to re-create this response using ever more sophisticated multimedia technology. A strategically placed web camera in one of those underused national parks, for example, could usher remote wilderness locales into any place with Internet connectivity. This approach could in principle transcend the costs and logistical difficulties of bringing people to any given site, opening up the whole world to virtual exploration.

And yet, virtual is apparently not good enough, according to work published in May 2008 in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. Researchers tracked the heart rate of test subjects, conducting mildly stressful mental exercises in three different simulated office settings: one with a window looking out on a natural scene, another with a comparably sized high-definition television display showing a similar scene, and a third with just a blank wall.

When individuals had access to the window, their heart rate dropped. But when the television image was substituted, stress levels as indicated by pulse rates were no different than if subjects were working in a windowless room. The message, to Pergams, is that the natural world is just too chaotic for our technology to convey. “It’s almost infinite in its complexity,” he maintains. “All simulations, to whatever extent, are merely reductions of that.”

In fact, there may be even more going on than we realize whenever we are immersed in these natural settings. The “savannah hypothesis” proposed in 1980 by behavioral ecologist Gordon Orians suggests that people have an innate preference for landscape features reminiscent of the African savannahs where humans are believed to have evolved—features such as glades of wide-canopied trees, open grasslands, and scattered bodies of water. As researchers have sought to pin down this notion, their mounting evidence points to specific physical interactions. In multiple studies by geographer Roger S. Ulrich, patients recovering from surgery did so more quickly when their hospital room looked out on pleasant parkland. Another study by psychologists Frances E. Kuo and Andrea Faber Taylor, published in the September 2004 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, showed that the treatment of children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder became more effective when combined with outdoor activities. Elsewhere, studies by biological scientist Jules Pretty and colleagues have shown the benefits of exercise to be enhanced when it is performed outside.

None of this surprises Howard Frumkin, director of the CDC National Center for Environmental Health and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. “For the last generation or two, from the time of Rachel Carson, the field of environmental health has been very focused on protecting people from dangerous or toxic exposures,” he explains. “That’s all well and good; we need to do that. But we seem to have forgotten that environmental health can also be a positive effort rather than a negative effort, an effort to promote good environments rather than control bad environments. There’s an awakening in the last few years to the fact that there is this other side to the coin, and it’s a very powerful concept. One wonders why we didn’t get this earlier.”

In Search of Wild Children

So where will the next generation of environmental health scientists come from? The CDC began answering that question in 2008 with its new Collegiate Leaders in Environmental Health internship program. The program exposes undergraduates to a broad overview of environmental and public health issues at the federal level and lets them participate in environmental health projects, interact with federal officials and scientists, and visit important environmental health sites in Atlanta. Frumkin recalls that the plan started with 10 of these posts, but after receiving upward of 200 outstanding applicants the number was raised to 12. If that outcome bodes well for the institutional needs of the CDC, it also inspires Frumkin to see even more that can be done. “We very much need to be creating the next generation of environmental health professionals, but more broadly than that, citizens who care about the environment,” he says.

That call strikes a chord that is echoed in a number of different venues. Some build on the momentum of academic work, like the Red Rock Institute, a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit corporation founded by Pergams and Zaradic to pursue the implications of videophilia and its possible solutions. Meanwhile, grassroots concerns have spawned the Safe Routes to Schools movement in California. Citing CDC figures showing that 50% of children walked or bicycled to school in 1969 whereas only 15% do so today, this group promotes the restoration of outdoor activity. A similar sentiment has inspired Representative John Sarbanes (D–MD) to champion No Child Left Inside, an amendment to the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would assign environmental awareness a much more prominent place in schools.

Of such programs, Louv says, “It’s terrific to see such an array of ideas about how to connect children to nature. We may not agree on all of them, but what’s most encouraging is that we’re having this discussion, nationally and internationally, and that this issue has the peculiar property of transcending political and religious differences.”

Louv stresses that the process of reconnecting children with nature should not be premised on trying to distance children from the beloved technology that would appear to be alienating them from nature in the first place (a traditional recipe for failure, as parents discover in criticizing their children’s choice in music). Electronics are a factor, he says, but he regards the real sources of this alienation as the disappearance of natural play, societal fear of strangers and legal liability associated with injury, and the excessive structure imposed on children’s development.

Even the simple act of loosing children for a few minutes during the school day is regarded by some as an indulgence. As of 2001, the National Association of Early Childhood Educational Specialists in State Departments of Education was sounding the alarm on the decline of recess in schools. In some 40% of the 16,000 U.S. school districts this traditional outdoor break had been eliminated or was being considered for elimination. Much of the rationale for these changes had been summed up a few years earlier by Benjamin O. Canada, the superintendent of Atlanta schools, who was quoted in the 7 April 1998 New York Times as saying, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.” More recently, other schools have banned games such as tag and soccer, citing concerns that such forms of play lead to aggression between children and lawsuits if kids get hurt.

But for many children, recess can be one of only a few chances in a highly structured day to connect with the natural world. And Louv insists children have a right to that connection. “It is a fundamental part of their humanity, and ours,” he says. “If we don’t pass this on to our children and grandchildren, who will? How many generations will go by before our cultural memory fades?”

Wilson puts these very questions to his own colleagues in his 2006 book The Creation. There he reminds them that as important and alluring as they may find the frontiers of laboratory sciences like molecular biology and neurochemistry, the larger living world around us remains the richest and most relevant ground for discovery.

“From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning,” he wrote. “From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.”

Citation: Lougheed T 2008. Wild Child: Guiding the Young Back to Nature. Environ Health Perspect 116:A436-A439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.116-a436

Originally published on Environmental Health Perspectives

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Ecology Global Network.

The American Meat Institute swiftly distributed a press release critical of the studies titled: “Red and Processed Meats Are Safe and Healthy Components of a Balance Diet”.

The Harvard studies conclude, however, that eating a plant-based diet is healthiest.

“I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”
- Peter Diamandis

About Peter Diamandis

The frequent, often conflicting, changes in the health information stream have left many folks confused about what to eat and how to get and stay healthy. And that’s just the mainstream public health information. Once you include all the other dietary dogmas, from macrobiotic to raw food and veganism, each proclaiming their gospel, it can get really confusing. The reality is there’s no one single “right” diet for everyone or our species could never have survived in so many different ecosystems with so many different diets.

The Epidemic Of Chronic Disease

Not only has all this changing contradictory information been confusing, it also hasn’t led to overall health improvement for the majority of the population. Instead, we’re faced with a growing epidemic of chronic diseases and accelerated age-related degeneration; more incidences of cancer, cardio-vascular disorders, inflammatory conditions and childhood learning disorders then ever before.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), chronic diseases account for over 78 percent of all health care expenditures and are the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S. Hypertension alone affects up to half of all adults over the age of 55 and over 43 percent of the population over age 60 has developed metabolic syndrome (insulin resistance and blood sugar imbalances). Conditions of obesity, child-hood obesity and Type 2 Diabetes are soaring.

Chronic Disease Or Ageing?

As our Baby Boomers enter their senior years, we’re about to be faced with the age-related health care problems of the largest population of people between ages of 65-85 that has ever existed. What is important to know is that conditions commonly seen as signs of aging—low energy, poor memory, low libido, chronic pain, loss of function and weight gain—may actually be signs of ongoing chronic disease processes.

The Root Causes Of Chronic Disease

So what’s behind this epidemic? It’s simple really; a nasty combination of the typical industrial processed food diet plus exposure to pollution and environmental toxins added to sedentary lifestyles with a layer of chronic stress thrown on top. Interacting together, these factors damage and impair core metabolic and cellular functions, predisposing people to negative gene expression and disease.

Genes & Health: Genotype vs. Phenotype

Let’s talk about gene expression in health and disease, because it’s important to understand how much power each individual has to determine positive or negative gene expression. Other than a few diseases due to inherited genetic abnormalities (such as sickle cell anemia and Huntington’s disease), so much about which of your genetic possibilities gets activated and expressed is really up to you!

Your genotype is the entire genetic code or blueprint inherited from your parents, a vast bank of genetic potential and possibility. Your phenotype is the active expression of that genetic code, and it changes and fluctuates according to how you live, where you live, what you eat, what you’re exposed to, even your activity levels.

Think of your genetic code as a software program. Your lifestyle and environmental exposures generate information, a data stream continuously washing over your cells.  This information is read by the software program of your genetic code, which then tells your cells what to do and how to do it. And just as with a software program, the user can determine which files are opened and active.

Move to Alaska and start doing heavy manual labor, it will change your gene expression. Live in a hot desert climate, eat a lot of fast food, don’t ever exercise and that will change your gene expression. The survival of the species absolutely needs this kind of genetic flexibility, because it enables us to adapt to a wide variety of environmental conditions and food supplies.

Four Critical Body Ecosystems For A Healthy Inner Habitat

Wouldn’t it be great to know how to trigger the most positive gene expression possible for your body? How to prevent chronic disease and degeneration, to slow (and in some cases, even reverse) biological aging, to preserve strength and prevent loss of function? (Too bad, no way to reverse chronological age!) Fortunately, there’s a simple way to cut through all the confusion and complication, to know what to do to get and stay healthy.

There are just four critical ecosystems you need concentrate on to create and sustain a healthy inner habitat. The really good news is that most of us need only focus on improving two out of the four. Once you identify which two are your primary inner ecosystems, then you can get very proactive about optimizing your positive gene expression. In the coming months, we’ll focus on each of these four systems in-depth, offering new perspectives and suggestions for positive lifestyle actions.

Your lifestyle choices and environmental exposures are telling your cells what to do. Why not take charge of the information stream and move yourself into the Wellness Zone?

1) Your Wetlands Ecosystem – Gastro-Intestinal Tract

The gut is the core of your health and immune function. Learn about the connections between gut health and brain function, mood, hormone balance and immune activity.

2) Waste Management: Detoxification and Oxidative Stress

Learn about the relationship between toxin exposure and chronic diseases, why improving detoxification functions and addressing oxidative stress are mission-critical health initiatives.

3) Environmental Intelligence Network- Immune System

Discover how the immune system is an intelligent, environmental information and communication network, how it regulates and maintains the balance and integrity of your overall internal ecology.

4) Your Master Control System: Endocrine System

The master information and signaling system, governs core functions via hormone, chemical messengers that turn on and off the engines of energy production, metabolism, growth, reproduction and more.

Sources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – Chronic Diseases are the Leading Causes of Death and Disability in the U.S.

DifferenceBetween.com – Difference Between Genotype and Phenotype

A New Biology for the 21st Century, by The National Research Council (U.S.) Comittee on a New Biology for the 21st Century

Environmentalism is generally viewed as the movement designed to help protect and preserve the natural world around us, distinct from the artificial world of homes, neighborhoods and cities. This is an overly narrow view. Environmentalism needs to be extended to our inner space, our psyches, as well as the external world, if we are to be effective in tackling pressing environmental problems.

We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors.

- Solaris, a 2002 Soderbergh film

Our global environmental crisis continues, but it is a slow-moving crisis and, therefore, not capable of triggering the appropriate reactions. Problems like biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, climate change, etc., all take place on the scale of decades, even centuries, which is far too slow for most of us to really care about these issues. And this is why those who self-identify as environmentalists or, more importantly, work actively to improve any of these problems, are generally a small minority of the population.

Complicating matters in recent years is the worst global recession in decades and justified concerns about jobs and our economy, an ongoing “war on terrorism” that distracts from other issues, and the ascendancy of right-wing media in the U.S. and increasingly in other parts of the world, that actively campaign against many environmental causes.

What are we to do, then, in order to tackle these slow-moving environmental crises? There are numerous policy and practical recommendations available for all of these problems. I have written fairly extensively, for example, on renewable energy as a major part of the cure for climate change (and peak oil), and many others have offered sensible solutions to all of the environmental challenges we’re facing. And yet none of these major problems is being solved at the pace required – and many are not being solved at all.

What’s missing? It seems to me that we need to change ourselves as much or more than we need to change the world. This essay focuses on a few ideas for the cultural/psychological/spiritual shift that seems necessary for us to solve the environmental challenges we face.

Deep Science

“World” used to mean the “universe” in addition to referring to our little blue-green planet. It was the totality, everything. The German philosopher Schopenhauer mused in the 19^th Century about “unsnarling the world-knot” – that is, figuring out what the heck all of this is around us. But as our knowledge of the world/universe grew, our vocabulary grew. “Universe” was used throughout the 20^th Century to refer to the sum total of planets, stars, nebulas, etc., revealed by our modern telescopes. Nowadays, some use the term “multiverse” rather than universe to refer to the totality, which may include other universes or other dimensions beyond our detection. Brian Greene’s Hidden Reality offers a great overview of this history.

This shift in vocabulary and philosophy is a direct result of the ongoing scientific and mathematical exploration of the reality outside of us. As our knowledge of our surroundings – our environment – has increased, our vocabulary and concepts have evolved. We have grown our worlds by growing ourselves, and vice versa.

The last few centuries have witnessed unprecedented advancements in the study of nature, yielding supercomputers that fit in our palms, space flight, and weapons that can simulate Armageddon if unleashed. But the study of inner space, the human psyche, is an even richer tradition and has been ongoing for millennia. This inner science, or “deep science,” has been most pronounced in the traditions of the East, with Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. The West has many of its own similar traditions, but it is fair to state that the Eastern traditions have a much longer history and more depth.

Alan Wallace (Choosing Reality; Hidden Dimensions, and many other books) has written extensively about this deep science, as has Ken Wilber (The Marriage of Sense and Soul; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and many others). Both are generally Buddhist in orientation, but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to appreciate their writings and wisdom. Wallace’s point, convincingly made, is that while the West has been successful in terms of growing GDP and in developing technology over the last few centuries, the Eastern traditions have a many thousand-year tradition of turning inward and studying the human psyche. We have much to learn from these traditions, with meditation as our primary tool for inquiry. The deep science that Wilber and Wallace write about offers a scientific exploration of one’s own mind, conducted through extensive practice and testing.

The western world has in fact sacrificed inner growth in many ways in order to be so successful at building material wealth. When more than one in ten people in the U.S. is on anti-depressant medication, perhaps as many take anti-anxiety medication, and more than one in a hundred people are incarcerated, it is clear that we, in the iconic civilization of the western world, have major issues.

There is a growing awareness also that this set of problems stems at least in part from our alienation from nature. E. O. Wilson coined the term “biophilia” to give a name to the human love for nature, for life. We do indeed have an affinity for life itself, in all its grandeur and diversity, even though this affinity is so often sublimated in our highly technological modern culture. Wilson argues, and I strongly agree, that by re-acquainting ourselves with the natural world – hiking, camping, studying life, etc. – we may mitigate many of the inner problems we face, individually and collectively.

My fear, however, is that our increasing “technologization” may only exacerbate our separation from nature. Technology is ubiquitous now, particularly personal electronics, and this trend seems very likely to continue rapidly in coming years. I’m no Luddite, to be sure. I love my gadgets (sometimes a little too much, especially my lovely iPhone 4…) But I actively seek time in nature free from technology, and see this as a major component of my peace of mind. The marvels of modern technology are exciting, but are rivaled by nature’s marvels when we dig a little and start to understand life on our planet.

Mind and Spirit

The inner work we need to complete starts with a recognition that we are indeed special. We are the bleeding edge of consciousness in our corner of the universe. We are, as far as we know, the only game in town in terms of higher consciousness. We have, as human beings, achieved what amounts to a quantum leap in intelligence and technology when compared to all other species. We are gods unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are the kind of Greek gods who often do very unwise things and re-enact all manner of petty human dramas.

The quantum leap of human achievement has been most pronounced in the modern era, which has its roots in the scientific revolution of the 17^th Century. The advent of the modern era is generally characterized by increasing specialization. With specialization comes separation. Most people can’t possibly understand even a small portion of the totality of human knowledge today. The age of Renaissance men has long been over – there is simply far too much knowledge for any one person to gain even partial mastery. With this specialization, we have realized the fruits of technology in all their glory. But the downside has been increasing alienation – from each other, from much of human knowledge, and perhaps most importantly from nature herself.

A post-modern worldview is needed, but not the deconstructive nihilistic post-modernism that has found favor in some quarters. Rather, we need a post-modernism that recognizes our active kinship with all of nature by integrating our humanity seamlessly with the rest of nature. We are indeed special in the degree to which we have evolved great intelligence and the technological fruits of that intelligence, but we are not different in kind from the rest of nature. There is throughout nature a continuum of consciousness, complexity and of technology.

Many species use tools, technology, language – though in almost all cases these are much simpler than our human examples. Beavers are master dam builders, termites master mound builders, birds master nest builders. And in a very real sense, the sum of species on our planet created the very livable environment we humans enjoy – with bacteria leading the way in producing oxygen and many other components of our biosphere during the course of planetary evolution.

With respect to language, the more we learn about animal, plant and microbial communication, the more we realize that there is a cacophony of language all around us – we have not heard because we couldn’t understand. We are beginning to understand, however, and this increased awareness of the depth of complexity in non-human species will help create the post-modern worldview we need.

There is a growing awareness that the philosophical positions of the modern worldview are inadequate. The modern worldview evolved in part from Descartes’ dualist view of mind and matter, and later into today’s prevailing materialist worldview, which has generally lopped off the mind/spirit aspect of Descartes’ dualism and left behind only dead matter. Today’s materialists, who dominate the cultural elite in science and philosophy, believe that all things can be explained, at least in principle, by explaining the relationships between fundamentally mindless particles that are thought to comprise everything in the universe.

An increasingly popular alternative, however, is the view that mind is very much part of nature from the top to the bottom. It’s all a continuum. In this view, known as panpsychism, all of nature includes mind and matter as complementary aspects in each unit of nature. Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, William James, David Ray Griffin, and David Chalmers are just a few of the philosophers in this long tradition.

Panpsychism is just one of many possible routes to a healthy post-modernism, but it is in my view a particularly promising one because it is logically coherent, can explain the available data in many areas of science and also leads to many interesting new avenues for science and philosophy.

Ultimately, science is a process of self-discovery, whether it is inward- or outward-directed. The deep environmentalist, the deep scientist, realizes that the entire universe is our extended body and our extended mind. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis becomes simply an expanded version of self-reflection. As we seek to understand our world and seek other worlds or even other dimensions, we will with this understanding always end up staring at ourselves in the mirror. This is not a bad thing: self-reflection is to be encouraged. It is also inevitable because even if we are not consciously self-reflective, we can’t avoid interpreting literally everything about the world around us in terms of its importance to each of us. This is what it means to be a conscious being – we are necessarily self-centered.

This necessary self-centeredness doesn’t, however, have to contain the negative implications this term normally conveys if we expand our sense of self. Through learning, exploration, immersion in life and nature, we expand our sense of self. There are no real limits on this process.

This process of self-expansion and self-reflection could be a powerful cure for the numerous and pressing environmental problems we face on the only habitable part of the universe we currently know: our planet Earth. Let’s get to it.

Tam Hunt wears a few hats: He’s a renewable energy policy expert and lawyer living in Santa Barbara; also a Visiting Scholar in the Psych. Dept. at UCSB; and a Lecturer at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, also at UCSB. His avocation is thinking. And writing. Between thinking and writing, there’s reading. 

The views expressed in ecoView are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Ecology Global Network. EGN does not verify the accuracy or science of these articles.

What’s your current health status; is it as good as it could be?  Are you living in the radiant vitality and healthy functioning of the Wellness Zone?

To answer these questions, first we have to define what we mean by health and disease. Health can be defined as a positive state of wellness, vitality and wellbeing. Health is not merely the absence of an official medical diagnosis of disease.

The Health-Disease Spectrum: Inner Ecology In Dynamic Balance

Like any other ecosystem, the inner ecology of your body exists in a state of dynamic balance that fluctuates and changes in a continuous process. At what point does a state of health become a state of disease? There’s no hard line dividing health from disease, but rather gradations of wellness and disease along a spectrum. Using this ecological model can help to clearly understand what will move us one way or another along the health spectrum into the Wellness Zone of vibrant health and vitality.

In the simplest terms, your place on the health-disease spectrum is determined by the dynamic interplay of just two factors: stressors and resiliency. What moves us up or down the spectrum is the amount and severity of stressors on our inner ecosystem relative to the strength of our innate vitality and resiliency. To get into the Wellness Zone’s high levels of well-being and functionality, remove or reduce stressors and restore or strengthen resiliency.

In this model, we don’t just strive to eradicate symptoms, but to acknowledge them as warning signs of ecosystem stress and imbalance. If symptoms, like pain and dysfunction, are the smoke alarm, don’t just turn the alarm off! Find the fire and deal with what’s causing it, change the conditions that feed it. No one would propose avoiding treatment for symptoms, but it’s not enough to get you into the Wellness Zone; that requires focused action to identify and then eliminate or reduce system stressors, while simultaneously building up your internal resiliency.

The Stress and Resiliency Factors

The two Stress and Resiliency Factor lists can serve as an intuitive and immediately practical guide to action. Consider which of the 6 Stress Factors and the 6 Resiliency Factors you could act on to move into the Wellness Zone.

How To Get Into The Wellness Zone

To get into the Wellness Zone of your personal ecosystem:

• Reduce or eliminate stressors to your system

• Build or strengthen your resiliency.

Study the 6 Stress Factors in the chart below. Any form of distress exerts a downward pressure on your inner ecosystem. Consider which ones are affecting you the most. Are you in pain from poor posture or chronic poor ergonomics, inflamed from allergenic exposures, hormone balance disrupted by environmental toxins or emotional stress? What can you do to minimize or eliminate the impact?

Next, consider how to build and strengthen your ecosystem resiliency. Since you can’t ever have too much vitality, the issue here is deficiencies, not getting enough of what your body needs. Assess the 6 Resiliency Factors and rate your status. Are you deficient in certain nutrients, adequate exercise, rest and fresh air? How are your fulfillment levels regarding work, relationships and social life?

No matter where you are, no matter what’s happened, you can always move toward the Wellness Zone. Since there’s really no final wellness destination, as long as you’re moving forward, taking steps, large or small, you’re on the right track. It’s the consistent daily activities that can make the biggest difference. Did you get outside today and move your body? Did you eat any fresh green veggies? How about your sugar consumption? Choose one simple action you can take today to move into the Wellness Zone.

Aerobic exercise is any activity that increases your heart rate and respiratory rate, the kind that feels like work and makes you huff, puff, and sweat. Aerobic exercise does not just mean aerobics, the classes offered at most health clubs and spas. Aerobics classes are one kind of aerobic activity; there are many others, including running, some kinds of walking, cycling, swimming, cross-country skiing, jumping rope, dancing, and climbing stairs.

Aerobic exercise conditions our hearts and arteries and respiratory systems. It increases stamina and general fitness. It promotes cleansing of the blood by stimulating circulation and perspiration. It gives a sense of strength and well-being, in part by releasing endorphins, the opiate-like molecules in the brain that can make us high, happy and more tolerant of discomfort. It increases the flow of oxygen to all organs, enabling them to work more efficiently. It burns calories, undoing some of the damage we do by eating too much. It strengthens the immune system. It reduces stress. It lowers serum cholesterol. It tones the nervous system. It is the type of exercise most people need to concentrate on first.

With all those benefits, how could you not want to?

Read more articles and information on exercises for well-being in Dr. Weil’s Exercise and Fitness section.

This illustration shows the body sites that will be sampled from volunteers for the Human Microbiome Project. Courtesy NIH Medical Arts and Printing

According to a growing body of new research investigating the human microbiome, who we are, biologically speaking, is much more diverse than we thought. The emerging findings indicate that our biological integrity and identity are intrinsically tied to the bacterial ecosystems, the communities living with us. Rather than an individual, separate body that is all “human,” the research indicates that we are more like a multi-organism ecosystem. “We need to start thinking of ourselves as super-organisms,” says Dr Julie Segre, senior investigator at the US National Institute of Health.

It now appears that these microbial communities are a fundamental part of who and what we are. “This is the second genome - the bacterial genomes as well as the human genomes, all of that is part of the true genetic content of a human.”

What is a Biome?

A biome is the total community of life occupying a major ecological zone or region, like a rain forest, desert, mountain range, fresh water marsh or a coral reef. A microbiome is a newer term, referring to ecological communities of microorganisms living in certain regions. The human microbiome is the collective genomes of all microorganisms present in or on the human body, from our skin to our lungs, from our mouth to the uro-genital tract. The biggest human microbiome ecosystem is in the gut.

Biologically, we live in a collective with microbial communities, trillions and trillions of them, without which there would be no cellular life. All species alive on this planet share in this common symbiotic relationship with microbial communities. Microbial organisms are nature’s master recyclers, like miniature chemical factories, changing one form of organic matter into another. At a very basic level, they break organic matter down to smaller molecular components, such as turning dead plants and animals into re-usable building blocks, which are then reassembled in different forms as needed by other plant and animal species. All plants and animals rely on the routine metabolic processes of microbial organisms to live.

Advances in Research

This digitally-colorized scanning electron micrograph (SEM) depicted a small grouping of Gram-negative Sebaldella termitidis bacteria. Recently, “the genome of ATCC 33386 S. termitidis was recently sequenced as part of the U.S. Department of Energy - Joint Genome Institute’s (DOE-JGI) Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea (GEBA) project. Image CDC/Janice Haney Carr

The National Institutes Of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project in 2007 with the mission of studying these organisms and their role in human health. Powerful advances in gene sequencing technologies have opened up new possibilities, allowing researchers to study microbial communities as they exist in their natural habitats within the human ecosystem. This is significant because we can’t really get an accurate picture of their role by culturing them in a petri dish. The population, diversity and activities of these communities fluctuate with changes in our inner ecology, so to better understand them we must study them as they exist in nature, as part of the entire human ecosystem.

As the microbiome research progresses, the scientific thinking about the role of bacteria in human health is moving way past the simplistic view of bacteria as either pathologically dangerous or harmless squatters along for the ride. We’re learning how closely our bacterial communities are involved with the regulatory and information processing systems of our nervous system, endocrine and immune systems. There’s a continuous conversation, an ongoing non-stop stream of chemical signaling between our cells and systems and the bacterial communities living on us and in us. Our bodies are listening, talking and responding to the communication from these communities. It turns out we are dependent on them for a whole slew of vital activities; like breaking down fiber, assimilating vitamins, and keeping our skin supple and protected.

Our Health Depends on Ecosystems

Human Gut Microbe (Enterococcus faecalis) The bacterium, Enterococcus faecalis, which lives in the human gut, is just one type of microbe that will be studied as part of NIH's Human Microbiome Project. Courtesy United States Department of Agriculture

We are now discovering how much our own health depends on the health, diversity, and balance of these communities. Imbalanced bacterial communities are implicated in all kinds of health conditions, including: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, various gastro-intestinal disorders and even Alzheimer’s.

The study of the human microbiome has become an international collaboration. As the research findings come in, an entire new paradigm of human health is emerging. The more we discover about our relationship with these microbial communities and their role in human health, the more it seems that we are a biological community living as a collective, an ecosystem of organisms. In this paradigm, health is seen as an expression of ecosystem diversity, resiliency and balance. Consider the implications. If who we are biologically is a collective ecosystem, what does that imply for us psychologically and culturally?

Resources and links:

Discover Magazine: The Ecosystem Inside
Seed Magazine: The Deep Symbiosis Between Bacteria And Their Human Hosts Is Forcing Scientists To Ask: Are We Organisms Or Living Ecosystems?
Wired Magazine: The Wired Atlas of the Human Ecosystem
NIH Microbiome Project: Impacts on Health
NIH News: NIH Launches Human Microbiome Project
The NIH Common Fund: Human Microbiome Project
International Human Microbiome Consortium

Videos:

The NIH Human Microbiome Project
Vincent Young MD PhD from The University of Michigan discuss the NIH program to catalog the bacterium that normally live with the human body.
Gut Bacteria and Health
(this is also a downloadable mpeg4)

Audio:

Radio Interview with Dr. Julie Segre, senior investigator at the US National Institute of Health

With humor, Roger Doiron encourages people to grow their own “subversive plots,” their own vegetable gardens. He states that “To keep up with population growth, more food will have to be produced worldwide over the next 50 years than has been during the past 10,000 years combined.”

And one way to provide that additional food source, is through privately-grown vegetable gardens. Whether a backyard plot or converting the front lawn into a vegetable garden, he believes kitchen gardens will be a key part of the solution and they also represent a cost-effective investment.

About Roger Doiron.