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I recently moved from a place 
that had a backyard that looks like this,

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to one that looked like this.

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There are a lot of great
things about cities,

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but access to nature
isn't always one of them.

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Many days I felt like
the closest thing I got to nature

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was looking at grainy
cat videos on YouTube.

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(Laughter)

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I'm sure some of you can relate.

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Sometimes you don't realize how important
something is to you until you lose it.

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I wasn't like Woody Allen who once said:

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"I love nature, I just
don't want any of it on me."

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(Laughter)

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I wanted it on me, and I missed it.

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When I moved for my husband's job
from Boulder, Colorado, to Washington DC,

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I wasn't too happy about it.

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But I was still surprised by how swiftly
my sense of well-being plummeted.

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I got depressed,
I was anxious, I felt irritable.

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My brain felt sluggish and dull.

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I had to get used to new sounds, 
like overhead aircraft all the time,

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helicopters and those ubiquitous
leaf blowers that I hear all the time.

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But fortunately, shortly after I moved,

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I was given a dream assignment
by Outside Magazine

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to go visit the national forests of Japan

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to write about an obscure practice
called "shinrin yoku," or forest bathing.

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This essentially involves
just being on a trail:

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walking, sometimes sitting, 
sometimes just lying on a boulder

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and letting nature pour
into all of your senses.

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So perhaps imagine with me
for a minute what this might be like.

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You're sitting there and you're hearing
the birds and the crickets.

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You're smelling the rich loamy earth
and maybe the scent of fresh pine trees.

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You can feel the breeze on your cheek
and the moss under your feet.

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How do you think this makes you feel?

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Well, scientists in Japan wanted
to answer precisely that question.

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And so in a series of experiments
they sent 84 stressed-out college students

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to go hang out for 30 minutes
in these forests

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and then also to go hang out
on a city street.

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And here's what they found -

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this is me doing one of the experiments:

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A 16% drop in the stress hormone cortisol.

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A 2% drop in blood pressure.

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A 4% drop in heart rate.

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This is among the forest visitors.

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None of that happened
in the people who went to the city.

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And the people who went to the forest also
reported less anxiety and better moods,

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whereas the opposite happened
in the people who went to the city.

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So, nature has superpowers for us.

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And there's even a dose effect:

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it looks like the more time you spend
in nature, better things can happen.

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So in Japan they sent some
of these students,

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or some other people, some volunteers,

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to go spend three days at a forest lodge.

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And they found a 40% increase

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in an immune cell 
called natural killer cells

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It's critical to the immune system.

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When they went to vacation
in the city that didn't happen.

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So it's not just a vacation effect,
there's something about nature.

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I became so intrigued by this story
and by this science

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that I took another assignment
from National Geographic.

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And this one sent me to a handful
of other countries around the world

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studying this topic
to improve the health of citizens,

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sometimes even going as far as
to recommend nature as medicine.

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So in Japan, as we just saw, there are
these forests therapy trails.

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They have 48 of them.

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Korea will have 37
healing forests by next year.

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These are entire forests.

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And to go along with that,
they're training 500 healing rangers

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to lead programs for everyone,
from digital addicts to school bullies.

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The school bullies, by the way,

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take a train called "the happy train"
from the city to the forest.

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(Laughter)

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Also programs for firefighters with PTSD,

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and even prenatal women
and cancer patients,

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I mean, it just goes on and on
what they're doing there.

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I also went to Finland.

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And Finland has gone so far as
to recommend, it's a very precise country,

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they recommended a specific dosage
of nature to ward off depression.

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And what they recommend, take note:

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five hours a month of being in nature
or a little over an hour a week.

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Now, Finland is really fortunate because
it's a country covered with forests

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and coastlines and parks.

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But many parts of the world
are not so lucky.

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Already, over half of us
in the world live in cities.

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And by 2050 that proportion will be 70%.

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So making cities green and livable

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will be one of the greatest
challenges of our century.

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How can cities and civic institutions
make spaces of awe and restoration?

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The city of Wellington, New Zealand, 
has made a space of awe

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by designating and signposting
a snorkel trail very close to downtown,

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where you can just jump
in the water, swim around,

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and she things like octopus,
and butterfish and seahorses.

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How cool is that?

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Seattle offers low-tide walks

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where children love to see
sunstars and moon snails.

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In Singapore there are parks 
interspersed with public housing projects

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so that people from all over the city
have access to nature.

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And the city also encourages
architects and developers

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to incorporate butterfly-loving
vertical gardens

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into corporate and residential towers.

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When my cab driver
dropped me off at this hotel,

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he said how handy it was
I was staying here,

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because I could just wake up
in the morning and start grazing.

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(Laughter)

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The University of California at Berkeley
has created a space of awe

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by protecting one of the tallest
hardwood groves in North America.

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And this is great because the students
can go here to recover from stress

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and psychologists at the University
can study it happening.

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So one way to do this

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is they sent students go look up
at this grove of trees for one minute

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and they also sent another group

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to look up at a building
on campus for one minute.

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And in a clever bit of trickery,

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a research assistant dropped a box of pens
in front of each subject.

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So guess who helped her
and picked up more pens:

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people in the forest
or the people looking at the building?

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If you guessed the forest,
you are correct.

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And it only took one minute
of them feeling awe

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to behave in a more generous way.

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So it looks like time outside in nature
can also make us more creative.

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When we spend time outside
in beautiful places,

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a part of our brain called the subgenual
prefrontal cortex quiets down.

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And this is a part of the brain

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that's associated with negative
self-involved thoughts.

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A researcher at Stanford
made the nature connection

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when he sent a group
of subjects to go walk

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in a beautiful park
in Palo Alto for 90 minutes,

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and he sent another group
to go walk in a city street,

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and then he imaged their brains.

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And it was only the people
who walked in the park

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who experienced this beneficial change.

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So nature can be so helpful
to us in so many ways.

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It can also make us creative
in small doses.

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For example, here's Facebook,

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and hi-tech communities
all over are now figuring out

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that if they incorporate green roofs
and trails into their very structures,

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that this can benefit their business.

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We've known this for a long time.

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Everyone from Aristotle to Beethoven,

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to Darwin, the Brontë sisters,
Wordsworth, Einstein,

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the list goes on and on,

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so many people attribute
walking in these beautiful spaces

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to being critical
to their creative process.

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What happens, though, when we spend
even more time in nature,

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as far as our brains and our psychology?

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We know that physiological changes happen,

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which we saw with
the natural killer cells.

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But what happens
on a more psychological level?

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This was something I was fascinated
to actually witness,

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when I met a woman named Tania Herrera.

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She had just returned
from two tours of Iraq,

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and she'd been badly injured in rocket
grenade fire and also by a car bomb.

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She'd experienced a bad concussion,
she'd lost the use of one of her arms.

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She experienced seizures, 
anxiety, depression.

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She had trouble performing
simple tasks and even reading.

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She never wanted to leave her house,

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because she felt like
she was a prisoner in her own body.

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But when she'd been young, 
she'd participated in a program

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to take inner-city kids out into nature.

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And she'd remembered
that that had given her some comfort.

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So she signed up for a six-day river trip
down the Salmon River in Idaho.

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She and her other fellow warriors
on this trip paddled and swam,

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and slept under stars and talked
in the camp, around the campfire.

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And I had the privilege of watching
them emerge from cocoons of sadness

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to full-bodied full-sensory survivors
helping each other,

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relishing their new friendships
and the possibilities ahead.

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She said to me:

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"When I'm home I feel overwhelmed,
there's nothing to brace on,

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and I'm overwhelmed
by bad thoughts and feelings.

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When I'm out here life is simple,
there's something to brace on,

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there are good thoughts,
there is balance."

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Wilderness advocate John Muir understood
the power of wilderness

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to help heal our psyches.

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He wrote:

NOTE Paragraph

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"Between every two pine trees, there is
a door leading to a new way of life."

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There is a simple recipe to improve
the quality and meaning of our days.

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And it's to open Muir's door.

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Go outside, go often.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)