Us Humans Need Nature

🌿 Every Moment Contains Seeds of Opportunity

“Every moment of the present contains the seeds of opportunity for change. Your life is an adventure. Live it fully.”
— John Francis, Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence, p. 65

🌿 Reading: Nature and The Mind by Marc G. Berman

I am reading/studying Marc G. Berman, Nature and The Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being.

I comment to myself (my age is showing; ignore me!) — I don’t like this author – too arrogant and self-centered and young. BUT he does have good ideas and research. I’ll take a few notes so I can give his book back to the library – and read it again later.

🌿 Soft and Hard Fascination

Berman distinguishes between:

• Soft fascination – “dreamy time – easy.”
• Hard fascination – something which “demands your attention.”

Now I’m beginning to get interested:

“Soft fascination – play – sort of a dreamy time.”

I sit outside and watch birds and lake and think about whatever.

A restorative time.

On page 64, Berman invites us to list Hard and Soft as they happen to us.

🌿 The Walk in the Park Experiment

“If they [people in this experiment] didn’t like the walk, they didn’t show improvements in mood. But they didn’t need to improve their moods or even like the walks to get the cognitive benefits from the nature walk.”
— p. 71

Even if we don’t enjoy nature, it restores our directed attention.

“Like exercise, eating our spinach and apples, or spending time with friends and loved ones, taking a stroll in the park is good for us in a deep-down, necessary way.”
— p. 71

🌿 When Trees Die, People Die

“When Trees Die, People Die… I knew all the world’s trees were in danger. Satellite data show 12 percent loss in tree cover globally from 2001 to 2022 — and that destruction will also affect human lives. This truly is a matter of life and death.”
— p. 151

🌿 Nature and Cancer

“It’s not surprising people ‘get’ ‘chemo brain’ just learning they’ve got cancer!”

He continues:

“So, chemo brain started before chemotherapy. This suggested the part of the problem with cancer, or any serious illness, is not just the illness itself, but our brain’s reaction to getting such scary news, which would likely cause attention problems. In addition, we found that one’s propensity to worry was more predictive of this pre-chemo brain than the actual severity of the cancer illness itself. For instance, someone who was very distressed about a stage II cancer diagnosis might show more attention problems than someone who was less distressed about a stage IV cancer diagnosis. So, if part of the problem with cancer and cancer treatment could be attributed to attention fatigue, could we again turn to attention restoration theory for help?”
— p. 154

(Seems totally obvious BUT if nobody is paying attention to the poor patient, then who will notice! No one!)

🌿 Another Perspective: Richard Louv

“The future will belong to the nature-smart—those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.”
— Richard Louv, Author & Journalist

I’ve asked my library for his Last Child in the Woods.

🌿 About Richard Louv

“Richard Louv (born 1949) is an American nonfiction author and journalist. He is best known for his seventh book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (first published in 2005 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), which investigates the relationship of children and the natural world in current and historical contexts.”

Louv created the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe possible negative consequences to individual health and the social fabric as children move indoors and away from physical contact with the natural world – particularly unstructured, solitary experience.

He cites research pointing to attention disorders, obesity, dampened creativity, and depression as problems associated with a nature-deficient childhood.

He gathered information from practitioners across disciplines and is commonly credited with helping inspire an international movement to reintroduce children to nature.

🌿 About Marc G. Berman

Marc G. Berman, author of Nature and The Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being (Simon Element, 2025).

“Marc Berman is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He received his B.S.E. in Industrial and Operations Engineering and Ph.D. in Psychology and IOE from the University of Michigan, and post-doctoral training at the University of Toronto’s Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest.”

Before arriving in Chicago, he was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina.

His research focuses on the relationship between psychological and neural processing and environmental factors — using brain imaging, behavioral experimentation, computational neuroscience, and statistical models to study the interactions between people and their environments.