G one barefoot lately? Changing human interaction with natural and built environments began arresting environmental studies scholars in the late 1970s. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan published two seminal books, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
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and Landscapes of Fear2
focused on human attitudes toward wilderness, landscape, and, to a lesser extent, interior structures and spaces ranging from subway stations to office-building lobbies. E. O. Wilson’s subsequent biophilia hypothesis3
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prompted many researchers to re-evaluate their understanding that plants and small-scale, engineered ecosystems such as parks somehow please people only on the cultural levels Tuan articulated. At the same time, however, environmental studies scholars acknowledged the fact that many Americans spend more and more time inside buildings and vehicles, and that studying people who live mostly in natural environments and traditional open-country landscapes (e.g., dairy farming and ranching ones) means studying ever-shrinking cohorts. Between the appearance of Stanley Milgram’s “The Experience of Living in Cities”5
and Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies,6
the thrust of environmental studies research has involved the built environment and focused especially on people (many of them unwell) who spend most of their time in artificial (and now virtual) space.Howard Frumkin
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does a great service to many disciplines beyond medicine by emphasizing the extent to which humans may have evolved in response to natural systems and the ways such systems promote health. Walking barefoot involves not only tactile knowing of surfaces—say, which stones are cooler than others and so indicate water beneath—but continuously rediscovering how well the unshod foot climbs rocks and trees, moves over grass, and gropes about under water, let alone feels the vibration of underground machinery. But many Americans, especially children, now rarely go barefoot even on beaches, and instead insulate themselves increasingly from the floors of their own homes and from the biosphere Frumkin explicates.Much of the biosphere is now something at which to look. Contact other than visual, say olfactory or tactile, proves so surprisingly rare that some designers seriously champion erecting plastic trees along highway corridors. Designers essentially accept widespread human insulation from the biosphere and indeed increase it by creating buildings in which temperature never changes, all light is artificial, and smells and sounds are eliminated or inserted.
Insulation originates in fear and marketing. Dissecting U.S. fears perplexes environmental studies scholars trying to make sense of traditional minor threats such as poison ivy contact and novel ones such as Lyme disease and mosquito-borne West Nile infection. Ignorance, often astounding ignorance, keeps some people away from all shrubbery and vines that might be poison ivy. A deepening inability to define degrees of risk complicates outdoor behavior. Many Americans wear beach shoes to reduce the risk of stepping on used hypodermic needles or dead jellyfish; others fear snake bite and so rarely stray off paved trails; still others will not risk getting lost in suburban woods, but few can estimate the likelihood of what they fear actually happening. Whatever the origins of incompetence and timidity, designers now accept both, and shape parks, office complexes, vacation resorts, and college campuses as nonthreatening, nonchallenging, essentially visual constructs.
Mass-market advertising and media, especially the electronic media desperate to keep viewers indoors and tuned in to phosphorescent bluish light, not only exaggerate many environmental dangers but subsist on advertising for beach shoes, air conditioners, and other goods that insulate people from all sorts of outdoor environmental stimuli. Over 4 decades, television may well have converted many Americans into indoor people fundamentally incompetent outside.
Yet scholars know that many other Americans deliberately choose continual and rich immersion in natural stimuli. Something other than the enduring legacy of the suburban movement orders the behavior of an unknown number of individuals. Eschewing urban amenities, especially high-paying urban jobs, for exurban and rural ones is more difficult to study than fears, because land ownership records remain among the last decentralized databases in the nation and because marketing researchers cannot examine Americans who avoid advertising-based media and malls. But marketing researchers, real estate agents, land developers, and environmental studies scholars now glimpse two emerging patterns.
Some well-to-do Americans will not buy houses downwind from air-polluting industries any more than they will locate within a mile or two of high-tension electric lines. Residence location results in part from careful decisions (often based on Internet-derived mapping information) involving distance from known or suspected environmental minuses. But location also results from fierce determination to live in or adjacent to environmental pluses ranging from high-altitude aspen forests to salt marshes and beaches thought to produce high-quality living, a vague phrase that connotes improved physical and mental health and sustained physical and mental well-being, the latter difficult for many Americans to describe.
On some levels brutally simple issues involving full-range biosphere contact—many runners live in rural places because they loathe breathing urban air while dodging automobiles—grow sophisticated and maddeningly complex when extended to emotional and psychological health. Scattered, again largely anecdotal evidence—collected mostly by deep-background marketing firms sniffing out a new cohort of well-to-do, happy, essentially satisfied Americans somehow immune to advertising—suggests that people remain in or move to wilderness or rural environments both to escape the stresses of high-paced urban and suburban living and to immerse themselves in “soothing” or “healthful” biospheres. Even when collated by ZIP code, U.S. Census data fail to track the vectors of people deserting metropolitan areas or, perhaps more importantly, intending to do so. The rural, sparsely populated, poverty-stricken, but spectacularly beautiful and ordinarily cloudless Colorado county of San Luis has 33,000 nonresident landowners, many of whom value its clean air, bright sunlight, and wind-whispering quiet. In a way that mystifies everyone from land use planners to real estate salesmen, a great many Americans intend moving to rural areas in the future, often for the vaguest of reasons, but in quest of something Frumkin identifies so acutely.
A handful of scholars now suspect that some sort of sensory defensiveness annoys, perhaps even afflicts, many Americans who half-consciously find themselves trapped in high-stress built environments. Too much artificial environment stimulation perhaps exhausts or otherwise debilitates. At least some Americans cannot endure the vibration on the top floors of very tall office buildings that sway slightly in the wind. Others cannot relax with video screens flickering at the edge of their peripheral vision, or read beneath fluorescent lights, or enjoy studying or working indoors when heating and ventilation systems irritate their hearing. Crowding stresses some, something frequently overlooked by educators advocating smaller classes held in standard-size classrooms: a feeling of spaciousness more than increased teacher contact may improve learning. As Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer explain in The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract,
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the typical U.S. public high school is the most crowded indoor environment Americans ever confront outside of prison. In an era when architects design windowless schools and so many white-collar workers spend hours in cubicles that frustrate long-distance vision, Frumkin explains the stunning popularity of home offices, the use of remote phones just outside back doors, and the enduring pleasure of sunbathing.Frumkin decisively advances an argument involving more than cultural spatial preferences and the contemporary significance of the biophilia hypothesis. He signals the beginning of what may well prove to be an astonishingly fruitful collaboration among the medical, design, and environmental studies communities on behalf of a public desperately seeking sustained well-being.
Acknowledgements
Author of many books, most recently Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places, Stilgoe is Orchard Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
References
Tuan Y-F. Topophilia: a study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Tuan Y-F. Landscapes of fear. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Wilson EO. Biophilia and the conservation ethic. In: Kellert Sr, Wilson EO, eds. The biophilia hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993:31–41.
Wilson EO. Biophilia: the human bond with other species. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Milgram S. The experience of living in cities. Science 1970;167(924):1461–8.
Lane RE. The loss of happiness in market democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Frumkin H. Beyond toxicity: human health and the natural environment. Am J Prev Med 2001;20(3):234–40.
Sizer TR, Sizer NF. The students are watching: schools and the moral contract. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
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© 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
