The Nature Pyramid

You need nature just like you need your vegetables. The Nature Pyramid can help you assess if you're getting what you need.

As usual, I’m writing to the soothing synthetic sound of crickets coming from my daughter’s white noise machine. I’m in my standard spot, sitting cross legged in the corner of her room, my laptop bumping up against her diaper pail. It’s not the best spot for deep thinking, but it’s what I’ve got.

Last week, I cranked up the volume on the crickets. I think that the louder crickets have had the desired effect; now, Rosie spends slightly less than an hour playing and talking to herself before going to sleep. There’s something soothing about crickets that seem to be right next to you. It transports you to a warm summer night in the woods.

Rosie’s relationship with synthetic cricket song–and the fact that all of the options on her white noise machine replicate water or animal sounds–underscores the universal truth that we need regular doses of nature to stay healthy. Yet I hadn’t come across a framework for assessing how much nature is sufficient until I learned about The Nature Pyramid. Developed by Tanya Denchla-Cobb and Tim Beatley from the University of Virginia developed in 2012, it takes the structure of the food pyramid and refashions it for nature, complete with suggested nature doses that we should try to take on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annually or bi-annually basis. (Beatley).

Via https://www.designingyourlife.coach/blog/2018/11/15/the-nature-pyramid-tj3tl

I’ve already applied The Nature Pyramid to my life. I get the daily 30 minute dose of nature through walking my dog, but my traditional route through my neighborhood wasn’t doing much for me. Inspired by Florence Williams' argument in The Nature Fix that we should seek out areas with water for our walks, I changed up my route to go by Lake Washington. The change is noticeable; I now return from my walks feeling more refreshed and creative than when I stuck to city blocks. I used to think that my wife generated more ideas on her walks than I did because she went in the morning, but now I think that her route by the water also had something to do with it.

The weekly dose of two hours in a park is one I’ve failed to get consistently since having kids–especially in the winter. But once I committed to rewilding myself last fall, I’ve gotten into the woods at least once a week. It does even more for my mental health, and that of my dog, than our recent transition to daily walks by the lake. I’ve heard coyotes (and children pretending to be coyotes) at dusk on my walks through Seward Park in Seattle. When we’re able to venture out of the city and to a mountain, the change is more profound. This is especially true for my boys, who both want to be mountaineers now that they’ve submitted a few ~2,000 ft peaks in the area. Rosie, on the other hand, screams and thrashes throughout these hikes, so we’re arranging for her to be with family or friends during the sojourns to the mountains that so rejuvenate the rest of us.

Monthly trip to a natural park isn’t part of my nature diet yet, but I’m ok with this for now. The gap I really want to close is my lack of annual or bi-annaul doses of wilderness areas with no urban intrusion. It’s been decades since I got off the grid and camped anywhere without a car. I think that it’ll be impossible to rewild my mind without having a few of these longer trips each year that trigger the three-day effect. In short, this theory posits that it takes us about three days to shake off all of the baggage of our urban lives and adjust to the reality and rhythm of the woods. (Williams) David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who is profiled extensively in Williams’ The Nature Fix believes that his best ideas came after three days in nature, and he’s done experiments which suggest that other people become better thinkers once they’ve been immersed in the natural world for a few days.

Before reading about the three-day effect, I’d planned to do my rewilding trips to the North Cascades and Elwha river as quickly as possible. Now I realize how bad of an idea that was. I was trying to optimize my rewilding like I optimize my days at work, and that won’t work. That approach may get the photo and anecdote I was looking for, but it would cost me the rewilding experience I’m actually after. Feeling inspired, I texted a buddy who majored in outdoor education and asked him to join me on a few multi-day hikes into the woods this summer. He’s in, and I’ve started to plan our trip to the North Cascades.