There was a series of articles in this past weekend's Globe and Mail travel section talking about the health benefits of walking in the forest. The author cites a news report that reads, "Japanese scientists have discovered that the scent of trees, the sound of brooks and the feel of sunshine...can have a calming effect". After which the author states, "It takes funded research to discover the glaringly obvious?" Fair enough. But there was another study cited that was more compelling: "At Japan's Nippon Medical school, a 2004 study observed men on a three-day hike among cedar, beech and oak trees in Iiyama, Nagano. After the first day, tumor fighting cells increased over 25 per cent. By the second day, and a longer walk, the anti-cancer cells jumped more than 50 per cent".

The modern scientific materialist mind, understandably, demands evidence based research, and I'm glad these kinds of studies are coming forth. When I was an environmental studies student in the 1990s, we had to struggle to put forth the perspective that things like forests had anything more than instrumental value to be sold in the marketplace. Studies like this break open the partiality of that view. The postmodern philosophers gave the environmental philosophers a lot of heck too. For them our experience of "Nature" (if there is such a thing they said) was considered as solely mediated by social constructs. It left open the question of what the real experience of 'nature' really was or could be. But these studies seem to point to some other, more fundamental connection between the human organism and being surrounded by the same surroundings its had for 99.999999 (etc.) of its history. Biophilia? Who knows. Perhaps better to just walk out into the glaringly obvious.