“Right now, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”
— Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction
“I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
— Søren Kierkegaard
A gunmetal sky spits warm rain onto Eglinton Street. Truck engines grumble. Brakes hiss and belch. Across the River Clyde from downtown Glasgow, the exhaust-choked thoroughfare parallels the rail corridor that runs south from Central Station and passes beneath the monolithic green girders of the M74 motorway. Lined by dodgy kebab shops, betting dens with broken windows, discount auto mechanics and graffiti-covered concrete walls, this is not a pleasant strip to stroll during the afternoon rush. At several intersections, the sidewalk is hemmed in by waist-high metal barriers, forcing me to detour laterally along cross streets before continuing south.
A solo walk through an unfamiliar swath of urbanity will usually invigorate me, no matter how unappealing the environs or weather. During the decade that I lived in Edmonton, which has among the most frigid winters of any large city on the planet, and an orderly grid of numbered streets, shifting my commute by a single block would reveal small wonders. The high-pitched song of snow under boot at -35° Fahrenheit. A magpie stencilled onto a letterbox, its speech bubble urging passersby to listen. Candles flickering inside cylinders made of ice.
I have vivid memories of walking from my sister-in-law’s house in the extreme northeast corner of Calgary, whose sprawling footprint is the size of Chicago, to a strip-mall bistro in the inner burbs, cutting through eerily empty subdivisions and industrial parks that were still under construction, sleeping bulldozers and stacks of rebar casting skeletal shadows in the lamp-lit darkness. The price of oil was soaring. Alberta had one of the fastest-growing gross domestic products on the planet. People were moving to the province from around the world. By walking through the edgelands, I got an intimate look at the seams beneath the boom.
That same year, I spent a week in Fort McMurray, the heart of Canada’s tar sands, camping on the fringe of the city and walking to downtown appointments along arterial roads with vehicles whizzing past at highway speed. “Be careful,” the young drywallers living year-round at the next site had warned. “Nobody walks around here.” I surveyed the litter in the ditches (Tim Hortons cups, cans of Black Horse beer from Newfoundland, lottery tickets) and counted pickup trucks. It was fascinating. A new frontier.
Today, however, after spending the afternoon on foot in Glasgow, I’m feeling weary and, well, sad. Which is an appropriate starting point, because I have come to the most unhealthy city in the United Kingdom to find out whether walking can really help make people more happy.
Scotland has the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe, and Glaswegians meet their makers well before the British average: men at age 72.6, versus 78.9, and women at 78.5, versus 82.7. Researchers blame this mortality gap on a mysterious phenomenon known as “the Glasgow effect.” In other words, they don’t have a good explanation. Poverty, poor diet, violence, smoking and substance abuse all play a role, as is the case in Aboriginal Canada. But even when compared to similar post-industrial cities, such as Liverpool and Manchester, Glasgow is hurting; its inhabitants are 30 percent more likely to die young. Drugs, alcohol, suicide and crime are behind 60 percent of these deaths. And all this pain has triggered a mental-health problem as well.
The Scottish Health Survey’s 2010 examination of the Glasgow effect, a comprehensive analysis that controlled for socio-economic, behavioural, biological and other mitigating factors, found that residents had a 92 percent greater risk of anxiety than people living elsewhere in the country. They also had significantly higher scores on the General Health Questionnaire — an indicator of “possible psychiatric disorder.”
There are many plausible, interrelated reasons for the differences between Glaswegians and their Liverpudlian and Mancunian cousins, a quartet of researchers concluded in a paper they wrote for the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. To be precise, they came up with 17 hypotheses, ranging from genetic and cultural scenarios to the gloomy weather and the lingering impacts of a politically motivated attack instigated by Margaret Thatcher. At least three dozen public programs have been launched to help heal the city. Beyond smoking bans and a minimum-price-per-unit-of-alcohol campaign, police officers are stationed at some schools, and dentists and veterinarians are trained to watch for signs of domestic abuse. “We took the attitude that [the problem is] so big and so complex, it doesn’t make any difference where you start,” one senior police officer told the Guardian. “Just make a bloody start.”
I’m plodding along Eglinton’s gritty streetscape, past shuttered grocery stores and fences topped with razor wire, to meet some people who have taken this message to heart: members of a health-walk program that was created to give locals a badly needed boost.
My day began on a much more bucolic note. I woke up 80 miles south of Glasgow in an 18th-century country inn. The Kenbridge, named after the adjacent five-arch granite bridge over the Water of Ken, is on the old road between Ireland and Edinburgh. Built to provide food, drink and shelter for stagecoach travellers, it did so admirably for me for two days. I was in the area to interview a man who lives in the nearby village of New Galloway, a geographer who had hiked the length of Ireland and Scotland. When we weren’t walking and talking together, I sipped pints of ale in the Kenbridge’s cozy wood-panelled pub and roamed the path between the inn and the village, letting the birdsong wash over me while standing chest-deep in the fen and willow scrub of a nature reserve.
Upon returning to the pub after one such ramble, I asked if it was safe to swim in the river.
“Aye, you can,” nodded Willie, the hotel’s maintenance man, “but you’ve got to watch out for sharks.”
“In this place,” added a bearded bear of a man, who turned out to be a distinguished Scottish historian named Ted Cowan, sitting on his regular stool at the end of the row, “most of the sharks are at the bar.”
“No, really, it’s fine,” chimed in the Kenbridge’s owner, Dave Paterson. “The last person who swam here was a Buddhist monk from Holland.”
“Did he come back?”
“She did. You’ll be following good footsteps.”
I walked upriver from the bridge, stripped naked on a stony beach and waded into the warm green water, lazing in a deep pool until a lorry rumbled by and honked.
The next morning, I stood beside the highway that ran past the inn and held up my thumb. “Nobody hitchhikes here,” I had been cautioned at the bar. Ten minutes later, a van eased onto the shoulder, and a balding middle-aged man shoved some gear aside to clear off the passenger seat. We hit construction, and Neil Stout, a picture-framing machine repairman on his way to a job in Glasgow, got an earful from his GPS when he was forced to divert off the pre-programmed direct route. “It’s a helpful device,” he said, pressing buttons forcefully with his index finger, unsure which town we were in or which road we were on, “but you lose the identity of where you are. It’s astonishing how fast the human race is losing all these skills.”
As we rolled past fields dotted with hay bales and 17th-century tower houses, our conversation flitted from subject to subject but never waned, as is often the case in the covenant struck between hitchhiker and driver. When I said I was here to learn more about British walking culture, Stout told me about the time an old rugby neck injury flared up and he thought he might die. Doctors had to perform an emergency cervical laminectomy. Stout had three goals before the operation: he wanted to walk out of the hospital; to get strong enough to climb Scafell Pike, the highest mountain in England; and to record an album. The first two things happened, he said. Then he plugged his iPod into the van’s stereo. A bluesy, acoustic track began, raspy lyrics sung by a guy who sounded like Eric Clapton. Stout’s album is called Humble. The song: “Heaven.” We listened in silence.
He dropped me off in central Glasgow, a dozen blocks from my hotel, a Euro-cool boutique chain targeted at the “smart new breed of international traveller … the type who crosses continents the way others cross streets,” although the “ambassador” who checked me in admitted he was Glaswegian — “Aye, I’m a local for my sins.” I didn’t feel hip enough to hang out in the lounge amid the sleek, Danish modern furniture (and sleek, modern, possibly Danish guests). Instead, I put on my boots and crossed the street.
The name Glasgow is derived from a Gaelic word that means “dear, green place.” Despite the health statistics and the drizzle, the city was far from bleak on a mild summer afternoon. There was a lively pedestrian mall near my hotel, and I ambled through packs of umbrella-toting families along an attractive waterfront promenade on the Clyde. Even the scrap iron and fibreglass riverside statue of Spanish Civil War hero Dolores Ibárruri, both fists raised defiantly skyward, seemed to speak to walking. “Better to die on your feet,” read the inscription, “than live forever on your knees.”
When the rain intensified, I ducked into the palatial Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and found exhibits on industrialization and mental health on display in adjacent rooms. On a fine Sunday morning in early 1765, a 29-year-old mathematical instrument maker named James Watt went for a walk in Glasgow Green, less than a mile from Eglinton Street. For months, he had been struggling with an engineering puzzle: how could he design a full-sized engine with cylinders that didn’t have to be cooled after every stroke? Near the wash house where women laundered their linens before spreading them on the grass to dry, inspiration struck: a separate condenser vessel for the steam. “I had not walked farther than the golf house,” Watt said later, “when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.” The next day — because it was forbidden to tinker in his lab on the Sabbath — he successfully built and tested the first model of the “modern” steam engine.
Watt’s invention sent the Industrial Revolution into overdrive. It has been pinpointed by American ecologist Eugene Stoermer and Nobel Prize–winning Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen as the start of the Anthropocene — our current geological era, distinct from times past because human activities are now having a significant impact on the earth’s ecosystems.
The shock waves from Watt’s eureka moment radiated globally, and Glasgow quickly grew to be Scotland’s largest city. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also became the site of Britain’s first purpose-built mental asylum, which opened in 1814: “a house,” according to the Kelvingrove’s interpretive panel, “with proper keepers adapted to the situation of those diseased in their minds.” By 1900, three more sanatoriums had been built on country estates on the outskirts of town. This approach evolved. Out-of-the-way stowage asylums were replaced by hospitals focused on cures, and since the 1990s the emphasis has been on care in the community.
As I exit the museum, cross the Clyde and begin my walk along Eglinton, I can’t stop thinking about connections between the two exhibits. Industrial manufacturing flourished but now sputters in Scotland, leaving a strewn field of crumbling factories, unemployment and sorrow, the seeping vapours that fuel the Glasgow effect.
Though tempted to retreat to the bosom of free, on-demand movies in my sleek hotel room, I continue south and enter the lobby of the New Victoria Hospital, where members of the walking group are meeting at 6 p.m. Seven women and two men, all wearing sensible shoes, sit on plastic chairs outside the cafeteria. Walk Glasgow coordinator Heather Macleod, 30-something with curly blond hair and a clipboard, introduces the regulars and explains the routine while we wait for stragglers. Funded by a non-profit called Paths for All and Scotland’s National Heath Service, the volunteer-led walks, which are offered in all corners of the city, year round, last about an hour. These free outings encourage people to be active and social. They’re intended to promote a general sense of well-being, particularly in parts of Glasgow where health inequalities are most pronounced. “Getting out in a group,” Macleod says, “you become part of a new community. It’s not the physical benefits that keep walkers coming out. It’s the people they meet.”
“Remember the golden rule,” Val Kennedy, this evening’s leader, a stout woman with grey hair and thick glasses, announces as we leave the hospital. “Walk and talk. Of course, you cannae stop people in Glasgow from chattin’.”
We cross a busy road and enter Queen’s Park, 150 acres of lawns, thickets and sports fields developed in the late 19th century, a Victorian response to the proliferation of crowded tenements. Mindful of Kennedy’s directive, I fall into step beside 38-year-old Ian McVicar. A large man with broad shoulders and a buzz cut, McVicar spent 18 years working in a timber yard, feeding the cutting machines and checking wood quality. “Ah was a saw-yer,” he says in a thick Glaswegian brogue, sliding his thick arm and flattened hand back and forth horizontally, as if slicing through a two-by-four. “Like Tom Saw-yer.” After his shift, he would go home and watch football on television. McVicar had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, and the routine gave him structure. When he was medically retired from the timber yard two years ago, he fell into a deep depression. Then he started walking. “Ah hae ne’er dain anythin’ loch thes afair,” he says. “Ah hae come out of mah sheel.”
McVicar, who now does three or four different health walks every week, has lost a stone and a half (about 20 pounds) since getting off the couch. He sleeps better. And he has enrolled in college-level reading and writing courses, hoping to eventually qualify for a job in the admin sector. McVicar is meeting new people, and never feels any animosity: “Afair, ah did nae caur abit anythin’. Ah am lookin’ at life deefrant noo.”
Buoyed by this tête-à-tête, I mingle. Red-haired Betty Ferry, 59, says she has a bad back and arthritic knees. Because of her weight and age, she’s not a good candidate for knee surgery. She’s tired after these walks, but, as with McVicar, it’s the kind of tired that leads to a clear mind and a good sleep. Ferry has twin daughters, as do I, and we trade stories as we leave the park and enter a neighbourhood of sandstone merchant houses long ago divided into flats.
Banding into small clusters on the narrow sidewalk, Ferry and I are joined by Kennedy, her sister. Kennedy suffers from seasonal affective disorder, which makes her want to hibernate from October until Easter. Everything feels like an effort during those dark, wet months. “I don’t take pleasure,” she says, “in the things that I usually enjoy doing.” She has signed up for aerobics classes in the past, but her enthusiasm sagged after a few sessions. She could walk on her own, but without a commitment spurring her onward, she would likely open the door and say, “I’m nae going out in that.” The group walk ensures that Kennedy will have company and get exercise. “It makes me feel like I’ve done something with my day,” she says, “and that gives me energy to do other things.”
We reach a footpath that meanders alongside the White Cart Water, a tributary of the Clyde. Purple-flowered buddleia hangs off the wrought-iron fence and red-brick wall that border the trail. The rain has dissipated into a light mist. My mood, too, has lifted — from the walking, sure, but mostly from the companionship.
The link between isolation and well-being should not be overlooked. The average household in the U.K. has 2.4 people, virtually the same as in the U.S. and Canada. Fifty years ago, it was 3.1 (and higher in North America). Increasingly, we rely on digital technology for community and commerce, and spend long stretches of time alone. In parts of the U.K., this is the biggest health issue faced by seniors. “Persistent loneliness leaves a mark via stress hormones, immune function and cardiovascular function,” Britain’s Mental Health Foundation noted in a 2010 study, “with a cumulative effect that means being lonely or not is equivalent in impact to being a smoker or non-smoker.” So, it’s not only sitting — isolation is the new smoking? Relax. Walking is an antidote here too.
Just before my trip to Scotland, Paths for All released a social return on investment (SROI) analysis of the Glasgow Health Walks program. It looked at 33 open walks (which anybody can join) and 26 closed walks aimed at hospital in-patients, people with learning disabilities, members of ethnic minorities and individuals referred by medical practitioners. In one year, nearly £50,000 was spent on staff salaries, volunteer training and other expenses. For every £1 invested, the report determined, £8 in benefits were returned to society. By making people more fit and improving their mental health, the walks helped the National Health Service and Glasgow city council reduce their spending on home care and other medical interventions, including prescriptions. In the SROI survey, more than 90 percent of walkers said they are now more confident, experience less isolation and are willing to embrace new experiences. Others reported a stronger connection to their neighbourhoods, and a better understanding of ethnicity and disability. “There is ample justification for supporting led Health Walks for the improvements they make to health and well-being alone,” said the report. “However, when other benefits they deliver are included, such as improvements in cultural awareness and inclusion, the case becomes truly compelling.”
Walk for half an hour, five times a week, says an American educational alliance called Every Body Walk!, and the endorphin boost will ease stress, anger and confusion. Going on a stroll “with good company and in pleasant surroundings” can ward off depression and anxiety, counsels the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety.
Probing deeper, scientists believe that walking could help forestall brain shrinkage and, in turn, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Better circulation in the body sends more oxygen, glucose and other vital substances to the brain. In a large study of men and women in their 70s, Alan Gow, a psychology professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to show that septuagenarians who walked regularly experienced less white-matter atrophy. White matter is a tissue that contains nerve fibres and a type of fat called myelin, which influences the speed of nerve signalling. Other stimulating behaviours, such as playing complex games or visiting friends, did not preserve the tissue as well as walking.
A healthy brain can slow the progression of both mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s, according to a paper published by University of Pittsburgh cellular and molecular pathologist Cyrus Raji. At the midpoint of a 20-year study, 299 healthy men and women in their late 70s and early 80s and 127 seniors with some degree of cognitive dysfunction were given MRIs and a written questionnaire known as the mini–mental state exam (MMSE). In the latter group, men and women who walked at least five miles a week maintained brain volume (shrinkage indicates that cells are dying) and experienced less cognitive decline, as determined by the MMSE. Among healthy subjects, six miles each week made a difference.
An estimated 5.2 million Americans had Alzheimer’s in 2013, costing the country more than $200 billion. As the population ages and more people are diagnosed with the disease, this figure is expected to rise to $1.2 trillion by 2050. It is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and the only cause in the top 10 without an effective medical treatment to slow its advance. The same demographic avalanche threatens much of the Western world. “Alzheimer’s is a devastating illness, and unfortunately, walking is not a cure,” says Raji. “But it can improve your brain’s resistance to the disease and reduce memory loss over time.” Regular exercise, such as walking, could reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s by as much as 50 percent.
We shouldn’t need another peer-reviewed article to convince us that walking is good for the brain, and that doing it in a natural environment — ideally, with friends — is even better. Academic work in this area, as one Scottish scientist told me, could be dismissed as research from the School of the Blindingly Obvious. First of all, we know that moderate exercise is almost universally good for our bodies. Second, we’re genetically predisposed to be in nature, and when we walk in a green place, laboratory evidence has shown that stress levels fall. The body’s stress response — a physiological reaction to a perceived threat, which includes a faster heart rate, faster breathing and a jolt of glucose from the liver for extra energy — is typically less pronounced in a natural setting. Remaining in a state of high alert, as one might be if on a busy street or in a bustling office all day, takes its toll. Nature can help us unwind and recharge. Still, there are dozens of ongoing investigations that could further elucidate the relationship between walking and mental health, and add precision to our understanding. So the day after my outing with Macleod’s group, I am covered in rain gear and hurrying through a downpour to the University of Glasgow’s main campus to meet a man who has promised to explain why this matters.
Rich Mitchell, tall and thin, with close-cropped hair and a soft English accent, is an epidemiologist at the university’s Institute for Health and Wellbeing, and co-director of the Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health, which explores how physical and social environments can influence population health, for better and for worse. He is also a Paths for All board member. I contacted Mitchell after reading a paper of his on the impact of physical activity in a natural environment. The study used data from the same Scottish Health Survey that painted a picture of the Glasgow effect. It concluded that regular exercise in a park or forest may halve your risk of suffering from poor mental health. If they make these activities a habit, people with ailments such as mild depression are better able to cope with what Mitchell calls “struggles in general life.” Working out in a gym or on city streets does not have the same impact. “I wasn’t surprised by the findings,” he said when the study was published, “but I was surprised by just how much better it is for your mental health to exercise in a green place.”
Mitchell wanted to take me for a hike in the windswept heights west of Glasgow, which look down upon the Clyde as it widens and flows toward the sea. I saw these hills yesterday from the rise in the middle of Queen’s Park, but today they’re blanketed by thick cloud, and judging from the torrents of rainwater flowing in the gutter beside the road, the trails would be slick with mud. Instead, he opens an oversized green-and-white umbrella and leads me through the gates of the Botanic Gardens.
Born and raised in southwestern England, near Dartmoor National Park, Mitchell spent as much time as he could walking in the hills while growing up. He began his career looking into regional health inequalities. As associate director of the Research Unit in Health and Behavioural Change at the University of Edinburgh’s medical school, he spent a lot of time monitoring and measuring health indicators, and then agitating (his word) for change. “We understood that the primary drivers of these health gaps,” he says, “are the social and economic difference between people’s lives.” As stated in the World Health Organization’s 2003 report on the social determinants of health (a.k.a. The Solid Facts), “While medical care can prolong survival and improve prognosis after some serious diseases, more important for the health of the population as a whole are the social and economic conditions that make people ill and in need of medical care in the first place.”
Mitchell agitated for several years, then began to get depressed. He and his colleagues were deconstructing problems and suggesting solutions. But these recommendations, he says, “were really about a pretty radical reorganization of society and economy. Whilst I still think those things are what you need to do if you want to narrow health inequalities, the reality is, that’s very unlikely to happen, at least in a planned way. People are unlikely to vote for some massive social and economic revolution.”
If aliens landed on earth, Mitchell believes, they would quickly realize that what humanity needs is a soft transition to a “nicer” world. Yet that idea, he knows, underestimates the ability of powerful people to maintain the structures that feed their egos and wealth, and the ability of innovation and new technologies (such as fracking for natural gas) to nourish fundamentally unsustainable lifestyles. “Eventually,” he says, “we won’t be able to kick the ball any farther.” On the other hand, he adds with a grin, “maybe next week there will be a global pandemic!” Geomorphology, the study of landforms and the processes that shape them, the foundation of his training as a geographer, teaches us that most things — for instance, a river basin — change very slowly, although events like massive floods can alter our planet very quickly.
Around the time that he was coming to these realizations, Mitchell was invited by the U.K. Forestry Commission to participate in a gathering of researchers under the auspices of a pan-European intergovernmental organization called Cooperation in Science and Technology, which aims to reduce the fragmentation of nationally funded research projects by supporting a wider, continental perspective. The objective of the project that he joined was to learn more about what forests, trees and natural places could do for the well-being of Europeans. Something clicked. Looking to test his ideas in a place that had experienced a significant amount of economic decline for a long time, he relocated to Glasgow.
Research into the curative properties of nature has been gaining momentum over the past three decades. As we splash along the tree-lined walkways of the Botanic Gardens, past a 200-year-old weeping ash, thick green hedges and roses from around the world, Mitchell gives me a crash course on environmental psychology, starting with a landmark paper published in Science in 1984. “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” by American health care–design researcher Roger Ulrich, demonstrated that patients convalescing from the surgical removal of their gallbladders had less complications, shorter post-operative hospital stays, fewer negative evaluative comments from nurses and took fewer doses of analgesics if their rooms looked out onto a natural view as opposed to a brick wall.
Five years later, in their book The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective, University of Michigan psychology professors Rachel and Stephen Kaplan outlined their influential Attention Restoration Theory, which holds that people are able to concentrate better after they spend time in a natural setting or simply look at images of natural scenes. The Kaplans did pioneering research on soft fascination, a state in which the natural environment — clouds, rivers, leaves blowing in a breeze — holds your interest in an undramatic fashion. Because you are paying involuntary or effortless attention, not consciously focusing on something, it’s possible to simultaneously reflect on your surroundings and explore other thoughts. Moreover, the serenity you derive from nature can take the sting out of any confusing or troubling “cognitive residue” your mind is churning through, an “internal noise” that can muddle acuity. “All fascinations are not equally effective,” the Kaplans write. “Nature settings and activities that involve the natural environment lend themselves to restoration. Though experiences may differ in scale, they have some properties in common … they concern both the physical and the mental world at the same time.” Basically, being somewhere while doing something produces a multiplier effect, the Kaplans argue, because humans are conceptual thinkers, and are “very good at imagining themselves going places and doing things.” This is why going for a walk in the park at lunch can help you remedy a conflict back at the office.
In 2003, another American psychologist, Terry Hartig, applied this theory directly to walking. More than 100 young adults walked along a well-graded dirt road through the oak-sycamore woodland at the base of a canyon in a wilderness reserve southeast of Los Angeles. Another cohort walked through a medium-density office and retail development in the nearby city of Orange, a landscape of restaurants and shopping malls, and streets that carry an average of 24,000 vehicles each day. In addition to monitoring ambulatory blood pressure before, during and after these walks — a method that records levels at regular intervals to avoid the “white coat effect” that makes people nervous and inflates results when that cuff is pumped tight around your arm in a clinical setting — researchers had study subjects complete attentionally demanding tasks. In one, they were asked to quickly search for five target letters in a line of letters, with accuracy and speed a measure of their performance. This was a conservative assessment of Attention Restoration Theory, Hartig notes. Extreme examples of natural beauty and urban blight were not selected as the field sites. Yet the results were unequivocal. Walking in the wilderness reserve lowered blood pressure (i.e., stress) more than it did in the city, and scores on the attentional tests improved on the nature walks while declining in the urban setting. “For urban populations in particular, easy pedestrian and visual access to natural settings can produce preventive benefits,” he concludes. “Public health strategies with a natural environment component may have particular value in this time of growing urban populations, exploding health care expenditures, and deteriorating environmental quality.”
This statement meshes well with a British literature review published in 2012. Physical activity has been shown to alleviate the symptoms of people with mild depression, the paper noted, but its authors wanted to find out whether “the less vigorous activity of walking — a potentially widely acceptable and safe intervention — confers such benefit.” After sifting through nearly 15,000 studies in 11 research databases, they determined that “walking has a statistically significant, large effect on the symptoms of depression in some populations, but the current evidence … is limited. Thus, while walking is a promising treatment for depression … with few, if any, contraindications, further investigations to establish the frequency, intensity, duration and type(s) of effective walking interventions, particularly in primary care populations, would be beneficial for providing further recommendations to clinical practitioners.”
Mitchell is advancing this research front. Green space can reduce stress in deprived communities, he documented in a 2011 experiment that relied on salivary cortisol measurements, which are easily obtained by asking subjects to spit into a test tube. The body’s stress response is driven by the adrenal glands. By looking at levels of cortisol, the main hormone produced by the glands, scientists can get an accurate chemical picture of how people are feeling. This was an exploratory study, with a limited sample size, and the results were modest. But, as Mitchell points out, making a small impact on a large number of people can be very important.
Picking up where that paper left off, he has launched a major project seeking empirical evidence on how walking can help people cope with the friction of daily life. Conducted with colleagues from throughout the U.K., the £950,000 study will assess the psychological impacts of Forestry Commission Scotland’s Woods In and Around Towns (WIAT) improvement program. It is an attempt to determine whether contact with nature has stronger impacts on people who are confronting financial, domestic and other difficulties. Healthy and fit middle-class people might really enjoy time in nature, says Mitchell, but they won’t necessarily get massive tangible benefits from a walk in the woods, just as athletes won’t get into better shape from a half-hour daily stroll. On the other hand, an activity like this could have a profound effect on someone who is poor and unhappy. “That’s of real interest to me,” he says. “It’s so hard to tackle the problems that these sorts of people face. We’ve tried loads of different things, and nothing has worked really well.”
The WIAT project is tapping into a Forestry Commission program to improve the urban woodlands in communities that are in the bottom third of Scotland’s socio-economic rankings. The chosen areas, says Mitchell, are “scrubby, nasty, hard to get into, threatening, maybe a bit dangerous.” Paths and signage and other landscaping will make them more welcoming. There are three intervention sites and three comparison sites, matched according to woodland and demographic characteristics; all are neighbourhoods in cities with long histories of economic decline, and all are located in Scotland’s central belt, which runs between Glasgow and Edinburgh. (Their locations are secret, for now.) After the improvements, promotional programs will be launched in the neighbourhoods around the intervention sites. Guided walks and other activities for families and children will be organized, and leaflets and other materials will be distributed, encouraging people to venture onto the trails. The control sites will be left alone, although they could receive funding for improvements at a later date. The stress levels of more than 2,000 people who live within one mile of the six woodlands will be measured. Subjects were surveyed in 2013, before the improvements were started; a year later, after the work was done; and will be surveyed again in 2015, following the social intervention phase.
“What we’re looking for is a change in the levels of stress in these communities,” says Mitchell, as well as whether people actually use the woodlands, and whether their general orientation to nature has changed. “It will be really interesting to see what the results are. Because on the one hand, you have reasonably strong evidence from non-real-world studies about what sorts of changes will occur. But these are communities that are facing a lot of difficulties. What should we expect?
“We’re asking quite a lot of nature,” he adds. “We need to be careful not to overestimate what it can achieve. Nature is not a magic bullet. But for some people, it can be quite transformative.”
United States Air Force medic Sharon Smith flew into Iraq on a C-130 turboprop with the 1st Marine Division during Operation Desert Storm. Twenty-three at the time, she patched up American combat casualties and injured Iraqi prisoners on the front lines. More than 20 years later, she tears up when talking about what she saw. “Sometimes it’s just really difficult,” she says, her voice breaking. “You come back … damaged.” So she decided to take a very long walk.
In the spring of 2013, Smith and 13 other American war veterans set out to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, a 2,180-mile-long footpath stretching from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Katahdin, Maine. They were supported by a program started by Sean Gobin, an ex-Marine who had completed the trail the previous year. After two tours of Iraq and a year in Afghanistan, Gobin had four and a half months to kill between retirement from the military and the start of grad school. A tank officer on the 350-mile-long firefight from the Kuwait border to Baghdad in March 2003 — “made it to the capital,” he recalls matter-of-factly, “toppled the regime” — he also played Russian roulette with IED-planting insurgents in Fallujah for seven months. Although he did not see a psychiatrist or psychologist, Gobin was concerned about the “death spiral” he had watched fellow vets fall into upon returning home.
Soldiers go back and forth between domestic normalcy and the ugliness of war, then become civilians for good and sometimes lose their ability to activate the mental switch that helped them focus on the job during each deployment. Traumatic memories play in a loop. Cynicism festers. Vets pull away from family and friends. They obsessively recheck doors and windows whenever they hear a strange sound at home, and sit with their backs to the wall at restaurants. There are flashbacks and angry outbursts. Emotional numbness. Guilt. The anguish, regardless of whether it’s diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, becomes internalized. Some self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. The problems get worse.
Since 2001, more than 2.5 million American men and women have returned from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and around 20 percent suffer from PTSD. Although smaller in scale, the stats are similar in the U.K. and Canada, where four veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan committed suicide in a single week in late 2013. PTSD, which was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, can affect anyone who experiences trauma: victims of rape, child abuse, car accidents, natural disasters. “The risk of exposure to trauma has been a part of the human condition since we evolved as a species,” says the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “Attacks by saber tooth tigers or 21st-century terrorists have probably produced similar psychological sequelae in the survivors of such violence.”
But soldiers are particularly susceptible. “War drains your faith in humanity,” says Gobin. “You come home, disassociate and disconnect, and live in a world of grey.”
As a kid, he had cruised up and down the east coast in an RV with his parents, camping in national parks on the shoulders on the Appalachian Trail. He read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, a definitive account of the monotony, challenge and ecstasy of hiking under a heavy load day after day after day. “Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot… . The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know,” writes Bryson. “Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, ‘far removed from the seats of strife,’ as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”
Gobin was ready to trudge. Fellow ex-Marine Mark Silvers, his trail-mate, wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail as a fundraiser, so the pair planned informal gatherings at Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) posts in towns along the route to collect donations for disabled soldiers. At some stops, 200 people showed up. At others, they spent the evening throwing back cheap whisky and trading war stories with a couple of old-timers. Descending Mount Katahdin, they had pledges totalling $50,000, which were put toward the purchase of three handicap-accessible vehicles for seriously wounded veterans.
Gobin and Silvers were overwhelmed by the reception they received in trail towns. Locals offered meals and drives to help them run errands. Vietnam vets shook their hands and said, “I know what you’re going through. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” On the trail, they hung out with other thru-hikers, most of whom were vastly different than the type of people one encounters in the military, an important part of the socialization process for soldiers with PTSD, who might otherwise avoid contact with strangers. Physically, they got into great shape. Daily 15-mile hikes are more gruelling than anything you do in the military, says Gobin, and a lot of people let themselves go after discharge, gaining weight and losing self-esteem.
“A long-distance hike reveals character,” he says. “People have bad days. You’re dealing with your own struggles, the weather, the terrain. How you cope with that and interact with other people facilitates personal development. If you’re in a group, you try to help others when they’re down. That helps you regain a sense of camaraderie, that feeling of being on a mission, which gives you a sense of purpose again.”
Mostly, though, hiking all day every day, week after week, you attain soft fascination. You relive your combat experiences 100 times each day while in this soothing state, and you have time to process the memories. “Out in nature for so long,” says Gobin, “you have a chance to think about what’s important, about what you want to do next. Toward the end of the trail, I realized how beautiful the country is. The colour came back to my life.”
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the not-for-profit that manages and maintains the footpath, was watching his fundraiser. The organization was looking for a way to honour the memory of Earl Shaffer, a World War II vet who, in 1948, became the first person to thru-hike the route that officially became the A.T. when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Trails System Act in 1968. Shaffer had served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the South Pacific. He told a friend he wanted to “walk off” the sights and sounds of battle, and did the trail in five months, without a guidebook or any of the lightweight gear that walkers depend on today. The A.T. Conservancy contacted Gobin, and his Warrior Hike program was born. Its aim is simple: help veterans struggling with PTSD turn a corner on their trauma.
Gobin built a website and a schedule for the 2013 thru-hike, organizing stops at VFW posts as he and Silvers had done. Within two weeks, 13 vets applied, men and women ranging in age from 26 to 50. Like Sharon Smith, all met the program’s criteria: they needed help. Gobin called every outdoor company and retailer he could think of, asking them to donate tents, backpacks and other gear. The supplies were sent directly to Springer Mountain, and he drove down from the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, hiking with the group for the first two weeks before returning to campus for year-end exams in his MBA program.
The weather that spring was terrible. Storms blanketed the trail with snow in the mountain ranges of North Carolina. Then it rained for weeks. Norovirus swept through the group. One hiker got kidney stones. Another needed an emergency appendectomy. When they reached New York, a heat wave hit. The humidity was crushing. Some veterans made poor decisions, and very quickly learned from them. They were drinking and partying and falling behind. And then they asked: What am I getting out of this? Maybe drinking isn’t important. Maybe doing something bigger than myself is more important.
“It was pandemonium,” says Gobin, who coordinated the walk from his home, stuck on the couch with his laptop. In the end, only Smith and five others completed the hike. The reasons people dropped out varied, from injuries to spouses needing them back. Still, when asked in a follow-up survey how the experience improved their mental well-being, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being “immensely,” Warrior Hikers reported an average score of 9.5. Smith cherished the opportunity to spend time alone with her thoughts and the support she received from the people she met along the way.
The program expanded in 2014. In addition to the A.T., Gobin sent groups onto the Pacific Crest Trail and Continental Divide Trail, which together comprise the Triple Crown of American long-distance hikes. He also partnered with Georgia Southern University psychologist Shauna Joye and PhD candidate Zachary Dietrich. Both ex-military themselves, Joye and Dietrich spent a couple days on the A.T. with walkers and, afterwards, provided tele-therapy counselling. Their goal was to help vets recognize PTSD triggers and learn coping techniques.
All that time walking slowly with no distractions, says Dietrich, allows people to get deep into their own headspace, to diagnose problems and, with proper guidance, to devise solutions. An avid hiker, accustomed to solitude on his home trail, the Knobstone, in southern Indiana, Dietrich knows the power of the “green blur” that settles in after a few hours alone in the forest. Research has found that thinking about a traumatic event can be therapeutic, adds Joye, although this can be a bit of tightrope: too much rumination can be detrimental to recovery. Hence their decision to provide counselling to Warrior Hikers, to lean on the formulaic nature of cognitive behavioural therapy (i.e., there’s not much talk of dreams) to help men and women forget about the stigma around “shrinks” and the military’s doctrine of macho stoicism. Ultimately, they will publish a paper examining the benefits of long-distance hiking for veterans with PTSD. And though it’s not practical to think that thousands of vets will spend six months walking, there are hundreds of 40-, 50- and 60-mile-long trails throughout the United States. The possibilities for shorter excursions are endless.
Seriously injured soldiers cannot hike, so Gobin is looking at adding a cross-country bicycle trip and maybe a paddling expedition down the Mississippi. He has also been talking to a DEA agent — first-responders, including firefighters, experience a lot of PTSD — and someone who runs a shelter for women who have been victims of violence. “There’s a whole other segment of society that could benefit from this,” he says. “It’s bigger than just veterans.”
Depression and anxiety are often dismissed as luxury disorders, as First World problems. If you are worried about when you will next eat, or where you will sleep, or who might attack in the night, your brain is probably too busy for existential dread. This is not entirely true. Although rates of mental illness in the U.S. are among the highest on the planet, in 2012 the World Health Organization reported that more than 350 million people globally suffer from depression, the leading cause of disability worldwide. Relative disparity is one of the causes, according to Ron Kessler, the Harvard Medical School professor who led the WHO’s research. If your house is worth $400,000, but all of your neighbours live in million-dollar mansions, you may feel inadequate. If you have one goat and your neighbours have a flock, same thing. But there are other factors — like our sedentary lives. “Preventing depression increasingly appears to be a question of movement,” Sarah Goodyear writes on the Atlantic’s CityLab website, “the kind of movement that humans evolved to perform and that is eliminated from everyday life by machines, hired labor, and automobiles.”
Inactive mice are more anxious than mice with exercise wheels in their cages, according to a Princeton University study. The runners demonstrated a greater willingness to explore — a sign of confidence — and their brains produced more of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which helps the animals remain calm. When dunked in ice-cold water for five minutes, a bath that mice do not enjoy, the active mice recovered more quickly from the stress than the sedentary control group. These results corroborate studies that show how exercise reduces anxiety in humans, says Princeton psychologist Elizabeth Gould. For instance, a Swedish experiment which determined that people engaging in two hours of light physical activity (walking, gardening) each week had a 63 percent reduced risk of developing depression. And they support the declarations of experts such as John Arden, the director of mental-health training at American health-care provider Kaiser Permanente: “Walking is the cheapest and easiest way to get relief from depression.”
Mark Norwine knows this territory better than most. In April 2013, after a series of suicides at Missouri high schools, the 54-year-old bullying-prevention coordinator at a non-profit mental-health coalition embarked on a 200-mile walk across the state on the Katy Trail, one of American’s longest rails-to-trails conversion projects. Norwine, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years earlier, stopped to talk at schools in small towns along the route — communities that lack the resources to address mental-health concerns among teenagers. Even if they had the capacity, there is still a taboo to overcome.
When he was growing up, nobody talked about cancer, Norwine says in one packed school gym, a scene captured in the documentary film about his journey, Walking Man. Then AIDS received the silent treatment. Today, even though unchecked mental illness heightens the risk of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, poverty, prison and homelessness, we tend to not talk about it openly. “‘Tough it out,’” says Joseph Parks, the chief clinical director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, summarizing the prevailing attitude in rural areas. “‘We’re individualistic out here. Every man for himself.’ That ideology is good for business, but not for somebody who is depressed and thinking about killing himself.”
Throughout his life, Norwine surfed the peaks and troughs of depression. He lost his job frequently and had trouble finishing anything. After a string of sleepless nights, delivering newspapers on a dark highway, he almost died in a car crash. Working with troubled teens became part of his therapy. At each stop on the walk, he broke the taboo. He told students what symptoms to watch for and where they could seek help. Like Stanley Vollant’s audience, the kids listened.
Norwine’s son Eric, who has also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, joined Mark on the trek. The condition is hereditary — a couple of cousins shot themselves. It will likely always be part of the Norwines’ lives. But physical activity keeps it at bay. Mark’s sneakers are as important as his pills. Going for a walk every morning on the streets around his suburban St. Louis home gives him strength to face the rest of the day, to get through the dark winter. And in the spring, on the green ribbon of the Katy Trail, travelling with his son, and a purpose, Mark felt the stirrings of Rebecca Solnit’s three-note chord. After 17 days, for one of the first times in his life, he finished what he started.
“I don’t know what my future holds,” Eric, now in his mid-20s, says at the end of the documentary. “But what walking with my dad has taught me is that if I grow up to be anything like him, I think I’ll be okay.”
Duke University neuroscientist James Blumenthal was one of the first to study the impact of exercise on depression. His groundbreaking research in the late 1990s demonstrated that activities such as brisk walking relieved the symptoms of major depression just as effectively as drug therapy, and that sustained exercise prevented the pain from returning.
In one experiment, 156 patients were divided into three groups. Men and women in the first were treated with the antidepressant drug sertraline, better known by its trade name Zoloft (more than 37 million Zoloft prescriptions were written in the U.S. in 2011 — 13 million more than Prozac, but 10 million fewer than the anti-anxiety drug Xanax). Patients in the second group took the same dosage of sertraline and exercised three times a week for 45 minutes: 10 minutes of warm-up, half an hour of walking or light jogging, a five-minute cool-down. Group three just exercised. After 16 weeks of supervised treatment, patients in all three cohorts showed similar improvement. Eighty-three, distributed evenly across the groups, were declared free from depression. But when Blumenthal checked in with those patients six months later, with no additional treatment in the interim, 38 percent of people in the medication-only group had relapsed, as had 31 percent in the medication and exercise group, while only 8 percent in the exercise-only group had slipped back into depression. “One of the positive psychological benefits of systematic exercise,” Blumenthal and his co-authors wrote in a paper about the experiment, “is the development of a sense of personal mastery and positive self-regard.”
Walking can do more than boost confidence. It has been shown to promote new links between different parts of the brain, and to stimulate the growth of neurons and their ability to transmit messages. This can improve our memories and our ability to focus on complex ideas — it helps our brains navigate the intellectual puzzles of daily life.
Seven hundred miles northwest of Duke, at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chuck Hillman’s Neurocognitive Kinesiology Laboratory uses electroencephalography (EEG) and functional MRI (fMRI) to look at brain activity during exercise. The brain’s cells communicate through electrical impulses; electrodes attached to the scalp can capture an EEG recording. Blood flows into parts of the brain that are in use, and fMRI measures neural activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Hillman, whose PhD is in clinical psychology, is most interested in childhood health. One of his studies, published in 2005, was the first to use neural-imaging tools to investigate connections between fitness and cognitive behaviour among kids. Verbal and math test results, as well as other performance measures, all improved with exercise. Treadmills and stationary bicycles in classrooms have been shown to help children concentrate and learn. He wanted to know why.
The 2005 study found that aerobic fitness was linked to behavioural performance in preadolescent children. In the decade since then, Hillman’s work has confirmed that there is a causal relationship between brain activation and walking. In one experiment, children walked moderately for 20 minutes without breaking a sweat. EEG images showed a burst of activity in the prefrontal cortex while they walked, and the neurons continued firing for at least an hour after they stopped moving. The prefrontal cortex manages a function called executive control. Essentially, it governs our ability to remain focused, our working memory and our cognitive flexibility. Executive control helps students pay attention, retain and manipulate information, and multitask. The prefrontal cortex lights up when we walk, and we are better able to perform complex tasks. Hillman, who has authored nearly 100 papers, has shown that even a single 20-minute bout of exercise can improve the scholastic performance of students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
In the United States, the No Child Left Behind policy, an act of Congress that ties school funding to the achievement of basic academic skills, has led 44 percent of administrators to cut gym and recess time in favour of more reading and mathematics. As a result, in 2011, nearly 60 percent of students did not attend a physical education class in an average week. “That’s completely the wrong message,” says Hillman. “We need to be adding more physical activity. Not only because we have an obesity epidemic, but also because it’s very clear there are benefits to cognitive function, memory and learning.” By serving on committees with organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences, he strives to get his data and similar findings into the hands of policy-makers, “to enhance their understanding that physical activity is important not just for physical health but also mental health.
“People always say to me, ‘That’s obvious. Exercise is good for the brain.’ But how obvious is it? And if it’s so obvious, how come there’s no concern for people’s brain health, outside of concussions? You don’t hear, ‘I’m concerned about your brain, so let’s go get some exercise.’”
In the U.S., 11 percent of children between the ages of four and 17 were diagnosed with ADHD in 2011, up from 9.5 percent in 2007 and 7.8 percent in 2003, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ADHD is the second most common long-term diagnosis among children, trailing only asthma. More than half of these children — about 3.5 million — are on medication. Pharmaceutical companies earned nearly $9 billion from the sale of stimulant drugs to Americans in 2012. They fund comic books that market the meds directly to kids. “Medicines may make it easier to pay attention and control your behavior!” says a superhero subsidized by the multinational Shire. One of its main products is Adderall, marketed not only as a way to control ADHD but also to boost academic performances, a claim backed by studies funded by Shire. And now adult ADHD is a growing market for drug companies; almost 16 million prescriptions were written for Americans in their 20s and 30s in 2012, a dramatic rise from 5.6 million in 2007. Psychologist Keith Connors, a pioneering ADHD researcher and an early advocate for the recognition and pharmaceutical treatment of the condition, has done an about-face. “The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” the professor emeritus at Duke told the New York Times. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”
In 2013, a British company called Intelligent Health, which works with public and private partners to counter inactivity, conducted an experiment in which 2,500 seven- and eight-year-olds began walking to school. Eighty percent of the children reported that they felt calmer and were better able to focus on their lessons. Family doctor William Bird, the company’s director, believes that something this simple could help wean us off Ritalin and other drugs used to treat ADHD, which cost England’s National Health Service more than £30 million in prescriptions every year. “Chronic stress leads to inactivity and creates more chronic stress,” he wrote in the Economist. “Chronic stress leads to the desire to consume high calorie foods since the body thinks it is preparing for a bad time ahead. Chronic stress increases the need for immediate gratification of smoking, alcohol and drugs as a way to cope with this never-ending anxiety and low grade fear.”
In his book Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses, Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking explores a brief epidemic of hysterical fugue, or compulsive wandering, that broke out in Europe in the late 1800s. Albert Dadas, a part-time gas company worker in Bordeaux, France, “deserted family, work, and daily life to walk as fast as he could, straight ahead, sometimes doing 70 kilometres a day on foot,” according to the notes of his physician. “In the end he would be arrested for vagrancy and thrown in prison.” (The condition is also known as dromomania — from the Greek words for running and insanity — or, in French, automatisme ambulatoire.)
Dadas walked obsessively, without any apparent motivation or destination. Reports of his journeys set off a small wave that spread to Italy, Germany and Russia. Hacking labels hysterical fugue a “transient mental illness,” its incidence restricted to a specific place and time, in this case less than 25 years. Mad Travelers argues that some ailments, including ADHD and chronic fatigue, could be the products of an “ecological niche” — and that we may be laying the temporal groundwork for other “mental illnesses of the moment.”
My obsession, in this light, can be seen as more than a Luddite’s flight from mid-life ennui. It could have been spurred by the conflux of rabid consumerism and technological utopianism. By the acceleration of the Anthropocene. Discord at work and a torn meniscus were only the final straws. And I am not alone.
The helpful spiders of Google Alert, which scour English-language news sites around the world and send me a daily email with dozens of links to stories related to walking, invariably uncover people on long treks, on every continent except Antarctica. (Most of the headlines, mind you, are about the television series The Walking Dead, and about pedestrians hit and killed by vehicles while walking beside American highways.) Many dromomaniacs walk to raise awareness about a particular disease, or to raise funds for a worthy cause. Others walk to lose weight. To remember a deceased child. To forget a bad marriage. For adventure. For some, it’s a spiritual pilgrimage — another subject for a later chapter. But I suspect there might be a little bit of pathological wanderlust behind each journey.
Nearly 30 percent of Europe’s adult population experiences at least one mental-health problem every year, it is estimated, and the annual cost of poor mental health in Scotland is £10.7 billion. Epidemiologist Rich Mitchell calls this the biggest public health challenge on the continent. “That’s why the potential for contact with nature is so important,” he says. “It’s very hard to think about how you can tackle that level of population health problem from solely a service base, such as doctors prescribing things, or people being treated in some sort of formal, clinical way. I don’t think that type of approach would be sustainable.”
Although Mitchell believes the publicly funded care provided by Britain’s National Health Service is “brilliant” for acute problems like heart attacks and car crashes, he feels that it stumbles when dealing with chronic health issues, particularly those associated with an aging population, especially for people who have several things wrong with them. Like Dr. Michael Evans in Toronto, he doesn’t have much confidence in the ability of the pharmaceutical industry to steer us clear of these long-term problems: “My standard, cynical line is that basically what they want is for the population to be sick enough to need their medicine but not to die. Because once they die, they stop being a source of money. Some of these chronic health issues are a pharmaceutical company’s dream. Clearly, there’s a profit motive. That’s what capitalism does.”
The most basic goal of his research, on the other hand, is to introduce the idea that contact with and activity in nature could improve public health and, potentially, “narrow the health gap between rich and poor people.” He wants to constantly feed this possibility into the minds of physicians, health-care planners and anybody else remotely concerned with population health. The Woods In and Around Towns project is intended to serve as a litmus test of these ideas — to find out who benefits from activity in a natural setting, who doesn’t benefit and how benefits can be equalized. In the long run, he hopes his work can influence urban planning, landscape design and policy, all in the name of encouraging contact with nature and designing urban places that enable healthy living.
Mitchell has been keeping an eye on our whereabouts as we walk. My executive control has been maxed out trying to follow the arc of his research and avoid puddles while staying on pace with his long stride. No green blur for me today. After circling the Botantic Gardens, we follow a footpath alongside the rushing River Kelvin, which drains the hills north of the city. The path leads us back to the University of Glasgow campus, where he suggests we retreat to a café to dry off. One of the best things about interviewing people while walking is that you invariably end up at a pub or coffee shop.
Inside, we remove our rain gear and sit down with cappuccinos. I tell Mitchell about my mood improving after talking to others during the health walk the previous night, and he agrees that going for a “blether” with friends is one of the unsung benefits of walking. Still, the Health Walks program is a baby step toward addressing the problems in a city that he calls “the sick man of Europe.” Parks and trails may help address Glasgow’s woes, but another of Mitchell’s goals is to challenge people “who believe that nature will save everything and everybody and all you really need to do is get people out there in the park or the woods or the mountains and everything will be all right. Because that’s just not true.”
He leaves me with one more caution: “Walking can be seen as egalitarian, as an activity that fosters equality. But I think you have to be careful. Inequalities do persist around who is choosing to walk, what environments are they walking in, what’s the purpose of their walking. I think we need to pay attention to that. Though I’ve yet to see a study that says walking is detrimental for you.”