Author Florence Williams talks trees, cities, and creativity in her new book "The Nature Fix."
You Spend 5 Percent Of Your Day Outside. Try Making It More. At a time when more than half of all people live in cities, the influence of the natural world is at a low ebb, while our understanding of it keeps growing.
For two decades, Florence Williams could sit on her porch at night and watch the alpenglow on the Rocky Mountains. Then she moved from remote Colorado to Washington, DC, and started noticing the changes.
“I felt disoriented, overwhelmed, depressed,” she writes in her recent book, The Nature Fix. “My mind had trouble focusing. I couldn’t finish thoughts … and I wasn’t keen to get out of bed.”
Williams was suffering, she says, from nature withdrawal. She spent the next three years digging into the science of how nature works on our brain. In short, it makes us more relaxed, more creative, and more socially connected. She traveled to Japan and Finland, the deserts of Utah and the urban forests of Singapore, to study just how much we stand to gain by bring nature back into our lives.…