“Forest bathing” gives health benefits — what about other ecosystems?

Can we widen research on the health benefits of nature?

Photo by Mary Hammel on Unsplash

A few days ago I drove back to my home in the Rocky Mountains from the prairie and farmland of eastern Montana. We’d spent a few days at a rented cabin on American Prairie, a kind of public-private initiative that seeks to preserve 3 million acres of grassland and restore the plants and wildlife of the native prairie. It’s a stunning place of sagebrush, bison, cactus, coyotes, and utter quiet. I spent a couple of days listening to western meadowlarks in the early morning, watching the Missouri River meander on by down below, and tracking thunderstorms as they scrolled past the landscape that gives my home state its name: Big Sky Country.

There’s no internet or cell phone service at this cabin. Going off-grid and out of service like this is something I try to do on a regular basis. It’s become a crucial aspect of both my mental health and ability to fill the creative well.

Returning from this offline sabbatical on the prairie involved driving several hours through low-population-density farmland, the homestead-speckled acreages where my mother grew up. It reminded me of a question someone asked when I was speaking at an outdoors conference a couple of years ago. We’d been talking about the measured benefits of shinrin yoku, the “forest bathing” practice that came out of Japan several years ago, and they asked, “What about grasslands? Can those have similar benefit?”

Considering that most of the research on forest bathing is, understandably, about trees, it’s a great question. I live in a pine forest-smothered part of Montana, in the mountains, but the vast majority of the state is former or current prairie and grassland. What kinds of health benefits can those landscapes profer to humans? Has anyone tried to measure them?

Forest bathing has been shown to reduce cortisol (which contributes to stress) levels, even after less than an hour in the woods. It also lowers blood pressure and improves immunity. Researchers in Japan found that a weekend in the woods resulted in health benefits that were still measurable up to a month later, and researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have found that even living near forests results in people with healthier…