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Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

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Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#241

Post by doix »

neoromantique wrote: post #168
swah wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature is also against walkability when it puts frigging hills on my way! Also the weather is way too agressive near the equator... I can endure it with sports clothes but not before work. Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.

That’s just excuses though, people cycle even in Norway where it’s below freezing most of the year

I find it much easier to do exercise in the cold than in the heat. In the cold it's just a matter of having the right gear and layers. In the heat, there's nothing you can do. It'll be extremely hot, you'll be sweating like crazy and get tired quicker (or at least I do).

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#242

Post by throwaway894345 »

pharmakom wrote: post #149
throwaway894345 wrote: post #6

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebuttin…

We can better maintain mountains and forests by having dense living areas for most people. There should be good public transport links from these areas to national parks. The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.

Suburbs aren't typically replacing forests, they're typically replacing farms, and we have far more agricultural land than we need (we produce a huge surplus of food) that we aren't managing well in the first place. We can and should protect existing nature, expand our national parks, and incentivize the naturalization and public access of existing private lands; however, we can do this without packing everyone into dense urban cores.

According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#243

Post by Soapysmith »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #6

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebuttin…

As someone who lives in a suburb, every time I visit a city and go to a city park I always am like "is this it?" Access to nature is far greater in the suburbs and it is not even close.

I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#244

Post by closeparen »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #6

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebuttin…

My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature.

If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#245

Post by Soapysmith »

vkou wrote: post #21
throwaway894345 wrote: post #6

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebuttin…

The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car. If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour…

From my extensive experience of a few different suburbs, neighborhoods are often separated by large stretches of nature. Perhaps we have a different understanding of what a suburb is, but they absolutely contain way more nature than any city.

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#246

Post by throwaway894345 »

closeparen wrote: post #244
throwaway894345 wrote: post #6

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebuttin…

My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature. If I could hav…

Suburbs are just one of many alternatives to dense urban life--it's not a dichotomy (that's a popular misconception in this thread). Moreover, there's no law that suburbs have to be a desert of unwalkable strip malls and stroads--indeed, there's a lot of variety among suburbs. I completely favor improving our suburbs and cities--that's not incompatible with wanting to be closer to nature. :)

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#247

Post by wbsss4412 »

baby-yoda wrote: post #233
supergarfield wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do high density without block housing! Many European cities are good examples of this. Paris, for instance, has very high density because it's packed with mid-rise (~7-8 floors) buildings[1]. Another good example is the section of Manhattan between Midtown and Lower Manhattan, which is also primarily mid-rise and very dense. Apart from that I do think it's true that block housing separated by large parks (as…

I agree re: European examples but my argument there is many of these cities developed over long time periods with stable growth in population, stable industry etc, whereas now it seems like the idea is to simply explode urban housing capacity asap, which leads to the block style or high rise glass and steel. and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this…

The issue is that people want to explode housing capacity ASAP in relatively limited geographic areas within cities. If mid rise was actually broadly incentivized, it wouldn’t be that challenging to rapidly increase that stock.

Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#248

Post by germinalphrase »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #230
ryukafalz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can’t completely disentangle those things. But providing services to far-out communities takes a disproportionate amount of resources; if we pretend that it doesn’t and make it seem just as cheap as living in urban areas, we’re just encouraging more people to move out there who don’t need to. We’ve already got a ton of crumbling infrastructure and that’s in part because we’ve built too much of it to possibl…

I'm not sure "we built too much of it" as much as we failed to anticipate or account for trends such as urbanization. Anyway, it's probably more productive and less prone to chauvinism to frame it as prioritizing high value/cost infrastructure rather than morally upright urbanites subsidizing lazy, freeloading rural people (I'm exaggerating here for effect, but that's often the tone that this framing conveys whether…

Does the argument require all this bellyaching when it seems as simple as “only urban residents should pay for urban services” and “only rural residents should pay for rural services”?

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#249

Post by closeparen »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #246
closeparen wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature. If I could hav…

Suburbs are just one of many alternatives to dense urban life--it's not a dichotomy (that's a popular misconception in this thread). Moreover, there's no law that suburbs have to be a desert of unwalkable strip malls and stroads--indeed, there's a lot of variety among suburbs. I completely favor improving our suburbs and cities--that's not incompatible with wanting to be closer to nature. :)

Suburbs are what actually trades off against pro-urban/pro—density though. No one builds a dense city in a rural area. They do build suburbs there, and then those suburbs face pressure to become denser.

I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.

Re: Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

#250

Post by germinalphrase »

playpause wrote: post #143
koboll wrote: post #95

I wonder if this title isn't a bit backwards. We are creatures that emerged from nature; being in nature is baseline to us. A better way to phrase this might be "being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people".

I imagine your comment was meant with a bit of humour, so don't read too much into the following! But it got me thinking about optimism and pessimism. The HN post title (at time of writing): > Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people Yours: > Being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people It's just "Things could be be…

We are (of course) also taught to be this way. So much of our education focuses on deconstructive and critical thinking versus constructive thinking.
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