The Unsettling Outdoors. Russell Hitchings

Chapter One A Wager and a Strategy

      A Wager

      If we want to understand the likelihood of future societies having regular beneficial contact with living greenspace, we should examine how outdoor experiences are handled by people in their everyday lives today. This is the first wager of this book. My suggestion is that, if we ignore how widespread social practices can serve to discourage people from a fuller engagement with the outdoors, a certain kind of environmental estrangement could become increasingly entrenched.

      The Argument

This first chapter tells the story of how I came to make the above wager. It begins with some reasons for encouraging greenspace experience in everyday life. Then it considers why, despite the various benefits that have been linked to this experience, many people may be turning away from it. With that prospect in mind, I consider how a particular combination of concepts could shed a useful light on how this process is embodied. This chapter is therefore partly about existing studies of beneficial greenspace experience and how they handle the social trends that stand to shape the future of this experience. But it is also about how a particularset of ideas might help us to reconsider the challenges involved in tackling these trends. Here I am interested in how certain strategies for studying the relationship between humans and nature could be combined with a focus on how people are drawn into patterns of everyday living. The overall aim is to set the scene for a battle between the various apparent benefits of spending time with plants and trees and a series of commonplace social practices that could be separating people from them.

      Greenspace as Home

      Being near plants and trees appears to provide people with various benefits. One of the most arresting and influential studies to suggest this compared the recuperation rates of hospital patients with different views. The required information was already being collected by the hospital, but by looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes, Ulrich (1983) found that those patients who looked out onto areas of greenery recovered more quickly. Though this study couldn’t tell us too much about the mechanism involved, clearly there was something about seeing living vegetation through the windows of their wards that helped some patients to get better sooner. Another well-known study suggested this experience can also benefit those who are not yet ill. Moore (1981) found that prisoners with cells facing internal courtyards use medical facilities more often than those overlooking fields further beyond. So, being able to see greenery may prevent health problems as well as speeding recovery once they have been medically addressed. We have also seen how, for residents of city estates, being able to see trees and grass from their apartment windows appears to help them handle the various challenges they are facing in their lives and even reduce aggression levels (Kuo and Sullivan 2001). Other field tests have shown how contemplating vegetation can reduce blood pressure (Van den Berg, Hartig, and Staats 2007) and improve mood and self-esteem (Pretty et al. 2005). A recent study to build on what is now a fairly well-established tradition of identifying and enumerating the benefits that greenspaces can bring to people suggests that spending time in these spaces can reduce the cravings of those who are trying to overcome various addictions (Martin et al. 2019). These are just a few examples (see Keniger et al. 2013, for many more). The point, however, is that, if we allow ourselves to see humanity as a collective whose members continue to share the same essential attributes, there is a lot of evidence for the benefits of being around greenspace.

Why is this? One of the leading arguments is that being near to living vegetation provides a valuable form of psychological restoration (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Kaplan, Kaplan and Ryan 1998). The suggestion here is that simply looking at greenery can help people to mentally recharge themselves since contemplating the intricacies of vegetation can temporarily beguile us in a manner that allows us to transcend our immediate worries before returning to our tasks refreshed (Kaplan 1993; Han 2009). Another possibility is that this experience naturally neutralises the stressed feelings that many of us may otherwise increasingly harbour (Ulrich et al. 1991). Some even work with the assumption of a fundamental connection between humans, plants and trees such that our history of co-existence instinctively inclines people to seek out the reassuring familiarity of environments that contain living vegetation. This leads directly to the ‘biophilia’ hypothesis (Kellert and Wilson 1993), understood as the innate attraction to natural processes that humans may possess. The contention here is that dwelling within, and profiting from, certain living landscapes was fundamental to our development as a species. We should therefore be unsurprised to observe a positive response from people today. For example, some have explored how this filters through into a preference for looking at particular species of tree and how, within that, the trees that helped us to prosper in earlier evolutionary times are those that we still most like to see (Summit and Sommer 1999). We could take this to mean that a desire for greenspace experience is hardwired into humans. Either way, and regardless of whether we buy into this idea or not, these studies, when taken as a whole, suggest that people can benefit in all sorts of ways from exposure to these environments, if they are given the chance.¹

      Tempting People into Parks

      What should be done with this knowledge? If we now consider how societies have most often thought about the right response to these findings, a common next step is to turn to the provision and design of public parks and gardens. This makes sense. If most of us now live in cities, if researchers know that being in and around greenspaces can benefit people, and if one of the tasks of good government is to ensure the inhabitants of a planet whose humans live increasingly urban lives have access to the services that are good for them, then city parks and gardens become an obvious focus for policy. In line with this argument, a lot of effort has gone into thinking about the forms of park provision that stand to produce the maximum social benefit. In doing so, effective landscape design and urban planning has come to seem like the obvious means of putting these ideas into practice. Indeed, the path between studies of greenspace experience and suggestions about what should be done with their findings is now fairly well trodden. And it commonly moves from an argument about benefits to an interest in the most effective means of designing and planning the most visually attractive and welcoming city greenspaces.²

Recent examples include a study in which Chinese citizens were shown urban scenes (from those with lots of concrete to those with more vegetation) in an attempt to identify how public greenspaces could be most effectively designed to reduce stress (Huang et al. 2020). Then there is a consideration of the value of features like colourful flowers based on how people in British parks and gardens respond to different pictures of plants (Hoyle, Hitchmough, and Jorgensen 2017). Another example is an exploration of the extent to which ‘actual’ or ‘perceived’ biodiversity in the greenspaces experienced by French residents impacts most positively on their wellbeing (Meyer-Grandbastien et