Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. (Location 65)
• Yes, we’re busy. We’ve got responsibilities. But beyond that, we’re experiencing a mass generational amnesia enabled by urbanization and digital creep. (Location 76)
• We all want our starter castles on the corner of Prospect and Refuge. (Location 98)
• Thanks to a confluence of demographics and technology, we’ve pivoted further away from nature than any generation before us. At the same time, we’re increasingly burdened by chronic ailments made worse by time spent indoors, from myopia and vitamin D deficiency to obesity, [[depression]], loneliness and anxiety, among others. (Location 102)
• In parts of East Asia, which suffers perhaps the greatest epidemic of indoor-itis, rates of nearsightedness in teenagers surpass 90 percent. Scientists used to attribute myopia to book-reading, but it instead appears to be closely linked to time spent living like naked mole rats, away from daylight. (Location 104)
• We have gained much since the dawn of the Internet, but many experts argue we’ve also grown more irritable, less sociable, more narcissistic, more distracted and less cognitively nimble. (Location 108)
• Scientists are quantifying nature’s effects not only on mood and well-being, but also on our ability to think—to remember things, to plan, to create, to daydream and to focus—as well as on our social skills. (Location 165)
• He and his colleague Juyoung Lee, then also of Chiba University, found that leisurely forest walks, compared to urban walks, deliver a 12 percent decrease in cortisol levels. But that wasn’t all; they recorded a 7 percent decrease in sympathetic nerve activity, a 1.4 percent decrease in blood pressure, and a 6 percent decrease in heart rate. On psychology questionnaires, they also report better moods and lowered anxiety. (Location 315)
• “Well,” he mused. “In our culture, nature is part of our minds and bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.” (Location 332)
• he wondered if NK cells are boosted by “aromatic volatile substances,” otherwise known as nice tree smells, (Location 388)
• “I talk to Siri all the time!” I said from the backseat of Strayer’s 4Runner, my phone and its riveting Mappiness app in my pocket. “Don’t talk to Siri!” He implored me and the others in the SUV. (Location 434)
• good shit happens to your brain. (Location 684)
• “It’s many fingers pointed at the moon. If you look at all the different fingers, eventually you can see where the moon is even though every perspective is different. There won’t be a single piece of evidence. Science doesn’t work that way.” (Location 759)
• “Noise” is unwanted sound, and levels from human activities have been doubling about every thirty years, faster than population growth. (Location 1127)
• 83 percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states sits within 3,500 feet of a road, (Location 1129)
• The number of passenger flights has increased 25 percent since just 2002, and 30,000 commercial aircraft fly overhead per day. (Location 1130)
• 5 decibels. That’s enough to reduce the distance at which prey species can hear a predator approaching by 45 percent. (Location 1176)
• The World Health Organization attributes thousands of deaths per year in Europe to heart attack and stroke caused by high levels of background noise. (Location 1198)
• those with the asphalt views reported higher levels of psychological aggression, mild violence and severe violence than their tree-view counterparts. (Location 1454)
• the asphalt viewers also reported more procrastination behaviors and assessed their life challenges as more severe and longer lasting. (Location 1456)
• they undertook another study of children in the Robert Taylor complex. They found that those living with the barren views were less able to control impulsive behavior, resist distractions and delay gratification. (Location 1457)
• study from China that found twice the rates of myopia (nearsightedness) in wealthier, urban parts of the country than in rural areas. (Location 1705)
• As recent studies in Ohio, Singapore and Australia found, the real difference between those with myopia and those without is the number of hours they spend outside. (Location 1706)
• Finnish law operates under the concept of jokamiehenoikeus, or “everyman’s right,” which means anyone can traipse over anyone else’s land, picking berries, picking mushrooms, picking their nose, whatever. They can even camp and make campfires. (Location 1789)
• The Finns typically work eight-hour days. About 80 percent of workers are unionized. They get five-week vacations, pensions and health care, as well as one-year paid parental leave (men as well as women are encouraged to take time off). (Location 1831)
• “In other countries, you select the right person for the job and if that person gets burned out, then you find another person. Here, you keep that individual as long as possible, you keep them happy.” (Location 1836)
• Korpela has become known for studies about “favorite places” and their positive influence on mental health. In his studies, when he asks respondents to name their favorite places, over 60 percent describe a natural area such as lake, beach, park, garden or woods. (Location 1894)
• a decrease in subjects’ heart rates, in facial muscle tension, and changes in skin conductance typically occurring within 4 to 7 minutes. (Location 1910)
• lower blood pressure, lower circulating cortisol and improved mood after 15 to 20 minutes. (Location 1911)
• 45 or 50 minutes of being in nature, many subjects show stronger cognitive performance as well as feelings of vitality and psychological reflection. (Location 1912)
• for stressed-out workers, Korpela sees quick, regular visits to green space as having enormous potential to relieve the daily grind. (Location 1959)
• “a thirty-to-forty-minute walk seems to be enough for physiological changes and mood changes and probably for attention.” (Location 1960)
• The science-based concept is that three hours per week for twelve weeks in a woodland program can reduce symptoms of [[depression]] and increase sociability, physical exercise and self-esteem. (Location 2077)
• Over recent decades we have come from dwelling in another world in which the living works of nature either predominated or were near at hand, to dwelling in an environment dominated by a technology which is wondrously powerful and yet nonetheless dead.” (Location 2170)
• if you want to be happy, there is a simple, scientific formula: “get married, get a job and live near the coast.” (Location 2227)
• if you are depressed or anxious, social walking in nature boosts your mood, assuming you’re walking with people you like; if you want to solve problems in your life, self-reflect and jolt your creativity, it’s better to go alone, in a safe place. (Location 2228)
• “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice,” he wrote. “Up! The world (perhaps you now look upon it with pallid and disgusted eyes) is full of zest and beauty for you, if you approach it in the right spirit! Out in the morning!” (Location 2254)
• “It just shows you how starved they were for social interaction, for connection.” I had to wonder if he was projecting his usual technology-has-ruined-young-people bias, but the fraying of social skills is increasingly documented by researchers such as Sherry Turkle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our capacities for empathy and self-reflection do appear to be challenged—even atrophying—as our digital interactions replace analog ones. (Location 2510)
• During the release of oxytocin, the vagus nerve may trigger an electric, humming sensation in the upper back. It’s like getting electrocuted by love. (Location 2615)
• A large meta-analysis of dozens of studies concluded that physical activity in school-age children (4–18) increases performance in a trove of brain matter: perceptual skills, IQ, verbal ability, mathematic ability, academic readiness. The effect was strongest in younger children. (Location 3072)
• early social skills matter more than academic ones in predicting future success. (Location 3075)
• The academic students made initial gains; but by grade four they had fallen behind their play-based peers on every scholastic and socioemotional measure used. (Location 3079)
• Preschoolers in the United States average just 48 minutes of exercise a day in their schools, even though the recommended level is 2 hours, (Location 3081)
• 30 percent of third-graders get fewer than 15 minutes of recess a day, (Location 3083)
• Of that 48 minutes, only 33 minutes is outside. (Location 3083)
• 39 percent of African-American students had no recess compared to 15 percent of white students. (Location 3084)
• Jane Clark, a University of Maryland professor of kinesiology calls toddlers “containerized kids” as they spend increasing time in car-seats, high chairs and strollers, and then shift into sedentary media consumption. (Location 3085)
• In 2004, 70 percent of U.S. mothers recalled that they had played freely outside themselves when they were children, yet only 31 percent allowed their children to do the same, despite a drop in crime since then. (Location 3090)
• 1970s, their children’s “radius of activity”—the area around the home where kids are allowed to roam unsupervised—has declined by almost 90 percent, (Location 3092)
• While 80 percent of seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school in 1971, by 1990 fewer than 10 percent did so. (Location 3093)
• two-thirds of schoolchildren do not know acorns come from trees. (Location 3094)
• Preschoolers are the fastest-growing market for antidepressants in the United States. (Location 3102)
• More than 10,000 American preschoolers are being medicated for ADHD. (Location 3103)
• childhood obesity rates have tripled (Location 3106)
• allergy and asthma rates have increased dramatically in the U.S. (Location 3106)
• nearly one in ten children has a vitamin D deficiency. (Location 3107)
• two-thirds, another 50.8 million, are considered vitamin D “insufficient.” (Location 3108)
• rickets, a disease caused by lack of vitamin D, which had been virtually eradicated, has begun to show up in pockets of the U.K. and America. (Location 3110)
• Cities are often the most creative, wealthiest and most energy-efficient places to live. City dwellers typically experience better sanitation, nutrition, education, gender equality and access to health care, including family planning, than their rural counterparts. (Location 3152)
• Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off [[depression]], let’s go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves. Basically, we need hits from a full spectrum of doses of nature. (Location 3168)
• this country spends 200 million Singapore dollars per year “to develop scenery,” as Yeo put it. That equals .6 percent of the national budget, five times the share the National Park Service gets from the U.S. federal budget. (Location 3192)
• if you add up the forest preserves, the pocket parks, undeveloped land and the manicured street trees, half of Singapore’s 276 square miles is under some sort of green cover. (Location 3203)
• “we try to achieve a goal that 80 percent of people live within 400 meters of green space,” Yeo said. “We’re pretty close. Now we’re at 70 percent.” (Location 3214)
• I TOOK AWAY two big lessons from Singapore. For greenery to truly seep into all neighborhoods, there needs to be a strong governing vision. Second, urban nature will serve us best when it’s allowed to be a little bit wild, at least in spots. (Location 3260)
• the counties that were hit by the borer suffered 15,000 additional deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 more from lower respiratory disease. (Location 3283)
• Go outside, often, sometimes in wild places. Bring friends or not. Breathe. (Location 3317)