The Green Space: Mental Health Benefits from Forests
For many in our urbanized world, we spend most of our lives inside. In fact, the EPA reports that Americans, on average, spend 90% of their time indoors. According to polls, Americans have never been as anxious as they feel now. Anxiety and increased levels of stress can be attributed to a number of environmental factors; however, evidence suggests that time spent in forests can be a natural solution.
Forests provide a suite of benefits including cleaning our air and water, providing wildlife habitat, and all the forest products we rely on. However, there are other key benefits that impact our minds, as well as our bodies. Forests provide a relief from the stressors of our fast-paced world. A place to get away from the traffic congestion and pollution. These green spaces also encourage an active lifestyle through outdoor recreation activities, such as hiking, biking, paddling, and bird-watching. A recent study reported that adults spending at least 120 minutes per week outside felt in, “good/very good health and high well-being.”
Agriculture, logging and forestry have the highest levels of self-reported happiness — and lowest levels of self-reported stress — of any major industry category, according to The Washington Post. This could be due to a phenomenon called “biophilia” - defined as, “the innate human instinct to connect with nature and other living things.” Biophilia is a benefit we see in innovative mass timber buildings. We can all agree that spending time outside is a key piece to a healthy lifestyle.
Of the U.S. South’s 245 million acres, nearly 86% is managed by private landowners. Small, non-industrial landowners have an average size tract of 29 acres, with 59% of landowners owning between 1-9 acres. For many of these landowners, their tract of land is a piece of their heritage - a way to protect the resource they love. They know how to steward the land because they’ve seen the mismanagement of past generations and carry a strong passion for their land. These landowners need financial incentives to keep forests as forests. With the rising pressure of urbanization, landowners are having to make tough decisions that could cost up to 23 million acres of the South’s forest land.
Keeping Forests is illuminating landowners and bringing innovative, market-based solutions to them. Whether it's a bird-watching tour or hike through pine stands, private working forest lands can provide us the green space to reclaim our mental health and reconnect with nature.
Linked Resources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44097-3
https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/gtr/gtr_srs178.pdf
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/maria-mccain/bringing-outdoors-benefits-biophilia
https://www.thinkwood.com/blog/biophilic-design-a-boon-for-corporate-culture
Zach Clifton
Keeping Forests Communications Specialist
Zach supports Keeping Forests via its partnership with the Georgia Forestry Association. Zach and the other communications staff at GFA lend support to the partnership both strategically & tactically.
