Quantifying Biophilia

花时间与“自然”相处可以减轻压力的观点似乎不言而喻。从希腊的疗伤小树林到维多利亚时代的海滨度假胜地，在有记载的历史中，人们一直开着天然补品。最近，现代医生开出了“绿色运动”的处方。世界卫生组织预测，到2020年，压力将成为导致健康状况不佳的主要原因。如果体验大自然可以缓解这种压力，为什么不采取更多措施呢？然而，就像许多直观的“真理”一样，这一断言掩盖了一系列复杂的未解问题。最简单也最难回答的问题是：“为什么？”1984年，E.O.威尔逊提出，人类与野生动物的亲和力是遗传的，受到进化压力的影响。已有证据支持这一假设。例如，存在着对类似公园的区域的跨文化偏好，类似于我们祖先居住的大草原。如果对大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将是重要的。我们正处于一场灭绝危机之中。例如，2004年，IUCN报告称，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，各国政府和非政府组织每年仅花费约10亿美元来抗击这场危机。这一数量不会扭转这种下降趋势；更重要的是，我们对自然的经济价值知之甚少。许多人宣称热爱大自然，并表现得好像他们为大自然赋予了价值，而政策制定者却忽视了这种情感上的健康益处。人类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，并可能具有深远的政策意义。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，为保护臭氧层而对氯氟化碳进行控制代价高昂，而且需要国际协议。科学证明，限制使用氯氟化碳的代价超过了无所作为和皮肤癌增加的代价。这种管理自然环境的方法还处于初级阶段，但同样重要。这一主题适合于科学研究，但创新思维将是规划一种涉及一系列学术学科的量化实验方法所必需的。这个问题在城市地区尤其相关，那里的规划者越来越多地猜测绿地的好处。我们希望量化与自然环境互动带来的任何健康益处，而不仅仅是锻炼。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不成比例地受益。这一目标当然需要量化的、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，压力很可能成为新兴研究的重点。幸运的是，从生理学到心理测量学，有一系列技术可以用于这一目的，其中包括一种基于免疫能力(白细胞应对能力)的新方法，这种方法可以重复快速地从一针血中测量压力。在这样做之前，我们必须确定正确的问题和回答这些问题的顺序。这将是我们提议的研讨会的第一项任务。然后，我们的国际专家小组将设计实验来提供证据来帮助回答这些问题。讲习班的最终目标将是在一个跨学科框架内综合人类健康和与自然环境相互作用的经验措施，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.