Quantifying Biophilia

花时间与“自然”相处可以减轻压力的概念似乎是不言自明的。从古希腊的治疗格罗夫斯到维多利亚时代的海滨度假胜地，自然滋补品在有记载的历史中一直被使用。最近，“绿色运动”已被现代医学从业者开了处方。世界卫生组织预测，到2020年，压力将成为健康状况不佳的主要原因。如果自然的体验可以缓解这种压力，为什么不做更多的工作呢？然而，就像许多直观的“真理”一样，这一论断掩盖了一系列复杂的悬而未决的问题。最简单也是最难回答的问题是，为什么？'.在1984年的E.O.威尔逊认为，人类与野生动物的亲密关系是遗传的，是由进化压力造成的。已经有证据支持这一假设。例如，跨文化的偏好公园一样的地区，类似于我们的祖先居住的大草原，存在。如果对自然的热爱是与生俱来的，或者对我们的身心健康很重要，那么了解这些影响对人类健康、生物多样性保护和环境政策也很重要。我们正处于灭绝危机之中。例如，2004年，世界自然保护联盟报告说，四分之一的哺乳动物物种受到威胁，其中一半可能在十年内灭绝。一项估计表明，政府和非政府组织每年仅花费约10亿美元来应对危机。这一数量不会扭转下降趋势;更重要的是，我们对自然的经济价值知之甚少。许多人宣称对自然的“热爱”，并表现得好像他们认为自然有价值，而政策制定者却忽视了情感健康的好处。人的身心健康与自然环境之间的关系以及所涉及的机制是科学上的热门话题，具有潜在的深远政策意义。当环境问题被量化时，解决这些问题的政治意愿可能会更大。例如，控制氟氯化碳以保护臭氧层的成本很高，需要国际协议。科学表明，限制使用氟氯化碳的代价远远超过了不采取行动和增加皮肤癌的代价。这种管理自然环境的方法尚处于起步阶段，但同样重要。这一主题适合科学研究，但创新思维将是必要的，以计划一个定量的，实验性的方法，涉及一系列学科。这一问题在城市地区尤为重要，因为城市规划者越来越多地考虑绿地的好处。我们希望量化与自然环境相互作用的任何健康益处，例如运动。这可能会揭示进化心理学，并为生物多样性保护提供经济论据，这可能会使社会中最弱势的群体受益不成比例。这一目标当然需要定量和理想的实验方法。由于与自然环境相互作用的健康后果通常被解释为压力，压力可能是新兴研究的焦点。幸运的是，从生理学到心理测量学的一系列技术都可用于此目的，包括一种基于免疫能力（白细胞应对能力）的新方法，该方法可重复且快速地从一个针刺的血液中测量压力。在此之前，我们必须确定正确的问题和回答它们的顺序。这将是我们建议的研讨会的第一项任务。然后，我们的国际专家组将设计实验，提供证据来帮助回答这些问题。讲习班的最终目标是在一个跨学科框架内综合人类健康与自然环境相互作用之间关系的经验性措施，以制定社会和经济措施。

The notion that spending time with 'nature' can reduce stress may seem self evident. Natural tonics have been prescribed throughout recorded history from Grecian healing groves to Victorian seaside resorts. More recently 'green exercise' has been prescribed by modern medical practitioners. The World Health Organisation predicts that stress will be the leading cause of ill health by 2020. If experience of nature can relieve that stress why is not more done about it? Like so many intuitive 'truths' however this assertion masks a complicated set of unanswered questions. The simplest and most difficult to answer being, 'why?'. In 1984 E.O. Wilson suggested that human affinity with wildlife is hereditary, borne of evolutionary pressures. Evidence has been produced to support this hypothesis. For example a cross-cultural preference for park-like areas, similar to the savannahs inhabited by our ancestors, exists. If love of nature is innate, or otherwise important to our physical or mental health, then understanding these effects will also be important in human health, biodiversity conservation and environmental policy. We are in the midst of an extinction crisis. For example, in 2004 the IUCN reported that one in four mammal species was under threat and half of these may be extinct within a decade. One estimate suggests that governments and NGO's are spending only around US$1 billion per year to combat the crisis. This amount will not reverse the decline; more importantly we know very little of the economic value of nature. Many people declare a 'love' for Nature, and behave as if they attribute value to it while the emotional health benefits are ignored by policy makers. The relationships between human physical and mental health and the natural environment, and the mechanisms involved is scientifically topical and of potentially far-reaching policy relevance. When environmental problems are quantified political will to tackle them can be greater. For example controls on CFCs to protect the Ozone layer are costly and require international agreement. Science demonstrated that the cost of restricting the use of CFCs was outweighed by the cost of inaction and increased skin cancer. This approach to managing the natural environment is in its infancy, but no less important. This topic is amenable to scientific study, but innovative thinking will be necessary to plan a quantitative, experimental approach involving a range of academic disciplines. The issue is particularly relevant in urban areas, where planners increasingly speculate on the benefits of green-spaces. We wish to quantify any health benefits from interacting with the natural environment, beyond for example exercise. This could shed light on evolutionary psychology, and provide economic arguments for biodiversity conservation that may benefit disproportionately the most disadvantaged in society. This goal surely necessitates quantitative and ideally experimental approaches. Insofar as the health consequences of interaction with the natural environment are often interpreted in terms of stress, stress is likely to be a focus of the emerging research. Fortunately, an array of techniques, from physiological to psychometric are available for this purpose, including one new approach, based on immuno-competence (the Leucocyte Coping Capacity) that repeat-ably and rapidly gives a measure of stress from only a pinprick of blood. Before this can be done we must identify the right questions and the order to answer them in. This will be the first task of the workshops we propose. Our group of international experts would then design experiments to provide evidence to help answer them. The ultimate goal of the workshops will be to integrate empirical measures of the relationship between human health and interaction with the natural environment within an inter-disciplinary framework to produce social and economic measures.