Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Cristina Bufi-Pöcksteiner
Thank you.
I think it would be nice
if you all spent a little bit more time connecting with nature.
I think it would be good for you individually,
and I think it would be good for everyone in this room.
In fact, I think it would be good for all of Planet Earth.
Now, to convince you of this, I'm going to start with a story.
Forrest Carter and Asa Carter were both writers who shared a name,
but they were pretty different people.
Forrest Carter grew up in the mountains of Tennessee.
There, he connected with his Cherokee heritage and nature.
Now, other people know this about Forrest Carter,
because he wrote a best-selling autobiography.
It was called "The Education of Little Tree."
Maybe you've read it; millions of people have,
and they're touched by Forrest's good cheer in the face of challenge,
and especially his kindness towards other people.
So, one scene in the book, he describes bringing home
some sweet-smelling musk bugs to his grandmother.
He says, "When you come on something that is good,
first thing to do is share it with whoever you can find.
That way, the good spreads out."
Now, Forrest had gotten a bit wet chasing these bugs through the water,
but that was alright.
He writes, "Cherokee never scolded their children
for having anything to do with the woods."
So, beyond this book,
the people who knew Forrest Carter also described him as a very nice man.
Asa Carter seems like he couldn't be more different if he tried.
Asa Carter was a segregationist, strong anti-Semite,
and a very active organizer for the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, he's said a lot of hateful things,
and I don't really want to repeat any of them here today,
but there's one that I think you're already familiar with.
Asa Carter was actually a secret speech writer for George Wallace.
It was actually Asa Carter who wrote those infamous words that Wallace said
on the steps of the Alabama Capitol,
"Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation always."
Beyond this,
people who knew Asa Carter did not describe him as a nice man.
So, here we have two seemingly very different people,
but, in fact, they were the exact same person.
The Education of Little Tree, this best-selling book,
it was a literary hoax.
About the time that Asa Carter left the Alabama politics,
Forrest Carter turned up.
He was invented in Texas.
Now, I first learned about this story
the way I learned about lots of good stories I know,
from the radio show "This American Life,"
and this was about a year ago.
But we've known the truth for much longer than that.
In fact, in 1976,
The New York Times published an article
that convincingly showed that Asa Carter and Forrest Carter were the same person.
People seem to forget this, though.
The Education of Little Tree didn't actually get popular
until much later than this.
It was in 1991 that it topped the New York Times best-seller list,
and it was in the non-fiction category.
How could a hoax like this persist for so long?
This is a really intriguing question, there are lots of good answers,
but I want to draw out just one idea.
I think it's really easy to believe.
It's easy to believe that a character so kind as Little Tree
had a childhood that was so steeped in a deep connection with nature.
I think it's easy to believe that things like "segregation always"
get spoken from the steps of an imposing building,
whereas things like "share it with whoever you can find"
are uttered in the Tennessee woods.
I might be stretching a little bit with this story,
but, in the time I have left,
I want to share with you some social science
that suggests that people are nice in nature.
First, the Google Book's Ngram Viewer
allows you to search the text of millions of books written in English.
It allows you to look at what kinds of words were written in those books
over different periods of time.
Patricia Greenfield has used this tool to compare the last 200 years.
This is a time period where we have become much less connected with nature.
Many of us have moved from the countryside to cities.
When she looks at this period,
what she finds is that, in the books closer to the year 1800, longer ago,
you find more instances of words like "benevolence," or "duty," "give."
In the books that are more recent, closer to the year 2000,
you find much more instances of words like "acquire," "decide" and "get."
So, as we've become more physically disconnected with nature,
it seems like perhaps we're also becoming more individualistic,
more materialistic.
Now, certainly lots of good things have come with this,
but our sense of community maybe a cost.
Even when we get to those cities, the green space that's there matters.
In Chicago, some people are basically randomly assigned
to live in particular apartment buildings.
These are people living in the housing projects.
So, this is not necessarily good for them, this lack of choice,
but it's a really useful tool to social science researchers.
We can study how those locations differ.
The apartments differ from one another
in a way that's important to what we're talking about today.
Some of them have a few trees, a bit of grass outside.
We're in the middle of Chicago, this is not spectacular nature,
but this difference has an impact on people's behavior.
People who live in the apartment buildings that have a few more trees,
a bit more grass,
they report lower levels of aggression on questionnaires.
Questionnaires are one thing.
We see the same result in police data:
there are more property crimes, more violent crimes,
in those apartments that lack that green space.
So, again, it seems people are nice in nature.
Even beyond getting rid of some of these unpleasant things,
aggression, crime,
it seems like nature might also contribute to positive things.
There's a group in France that has studied hundreds of pedestrians
in a beautiful urban park.
What they do is they target a pedestrian,
then one of them quickly walks over in front of that person
and they accidentally drop a glove.
Another researcher is hanging back about 50 meters to watch what goes on.
They vary one other important thing.
They target people either just as they're about to enter the park,
so these are people who've just walked a bit through the city,
or they target people who are just leaving the park,
who've spent the last couple minutes just walking
through this beautiful urban nature.
What they find is that, on the way into the park,
people stop to pick up that glove about 62 percent of the time.
On the way out of the park, that you've just experienced some nature,
people then stop to pick up the glove about 79 percent of the time.
So, again, people seem nicer in nature.
My research group and I have wondered,
"Could we extend findings like this to cooperation?"
And the reason cooperation is important is because it helps us create a bridge
to the environmental issues and to sustainability.
As an example, consider a lake, full of valuable fish.
Commercial fishermen need to decide, "How many fish will I catch this year?"
For every fish I catch, I can sell it, I can make some money.
But, if we collectively catch too many fish,
they won't be able to spawn, there'll be no fish available to catch next year.
So, it's in everybody's interest
to manage this common resource in a sustainable way,
so we have fish long into the future.
As an individual, it's a little bit tempting to cheat,
like, "Will the population really collapse by taking only a couple extra fish?"
Or even if I'm committed to harvesting in a very sustainable way,
how do I know that somebody else won't come along and take all the fish? OK?
Most environmental issues follow this same kind of logic,
and when things go poorly, we call it the tragedy of the commons.
My research group was encouraged by research,
like the kinds of things I've been sharing with you so far today.
We started to wonder,
"Could the very thing under threat, our natural environments,
could those be part of the solution?
Could nature help us avoid the tragedy of the commons?"
We brought this question into the psychology lab.
We ask our participants to come in, to fill out some questionnaires,
and then we randomly select for them a video to watch.
One of those videos is nice.
It's an architectural tour of New York, some stunning architecture.
The other one comes from BBC documentary "Planet Earth,"
gorgeous nature.
Again, both pretty stunning images;
one, very urban; the other, very natural.
After the videos,
we ask our participants to enter a computerized fishing simulation,
and this fishing simulation is very much like the example I just shared with you.
It starts with an ocean that has 50 fish.
For each fish the participant harvests, we pay them 10 cents.
We also have them do this over a series of seasons
and, between each season, we allow the fish to spawn.
So that is, we add a new fish to the ocean for every two fish that remain uncaught.
Our participants are playing in groups of four,
but we actually have the computer simulate the other three people,
and the computer fishes in a way that's relatively cooperative and sustainable.
When we compare those two groups,
we find that the people who had watched the New York City architecture video
harvest more fish on average in each season
compared to the people who saw the Planet Earth nature documentary.
When we look over many seasons,
we see that the people who saw the New York City architecture documentary
that their oceans did not last as long;
the simulation lasted fewer rounds than people who saw the nature documentary.
Another way to out this:
after 15 seasons, if you saw the architecture video,
there's about 51 percent chance that your ocean went extinct,
but the people who saw the nature documentary,
about 71 percent of the time they fished sustainably.
We've repeated this experiment with a few variations.
We've compared nature videos to things besides New York City,
to geometric shapes.
We've also looked at unpleasant representations of nature
in built environments.
And, across these studies, we see a pretty consistent pattern.
People seem nicer in nature.
They behave more cooperatively, they fish more sustainably,
when we expose them to nature.
So, our results add one more to this list of findings
that suggest that people are nicer in nature.
But I hope we can go on beyond just nice here.
I hope that this link to cooperation
is a way that we can apply findings like this
to important environmental problems that we have today,
things like global warming.
For us to tackle these problems, we need broad buy-in,
we need to work together, we need to work collectively,
and trust that every is onboard.
Now, I know that nature is not a panacea here,
but I do think that being exposed to nature
can nudge us in the right direction,
when we're making these decisions about sustainability,
about being cooperative.
We have to keep in mind
that our emissions, all of our emissions, our policies,
that these are all the result of many, many small decisions.
Now, I'm sure that everyone in this room is very nice.
I think that you're probably all behaving in very, very sustainable ways.
But maybe you have some friends, you know, who remain unconvinced.
They might even think that cooperation is for suckers,
"What's in it for me?"
Well, if saving the world is not enough for you,
there are still excellent reasons to spend more time in nature.
People who live near a green space, they live longer,
they're happier, they're healthier.
If you're in the hospital and you have a view of nature out of your window,
you will probably spend less time in the hospital,
you'll probably require less pain medication, while you're there.
Taking a brief walk in nature can restore mental fatigue.
You perform better on attention tests after spending time in nature.
A bit longer periods of time in nature,
this is associated with increases in creativity.
Perhaps best of all, nature is really conducive to good moods.
There's an impressive study done in the UK.
They collected over one million mood reports,
and they did this with smartphones
because those smartphones could record the exact location of people
as they reported their moods.
So, I've suggested to you we've become a bit disconnected from nature
and the data board us out,
but, proportionally, there are not so many time periods in nature.
When you collect a million reports, there's plenty to show very convincingly
that time spent in nature was associated with better moods
than time spent in other places.
I would like to ask you to spend some more time in nature.
Do it in the next couple of days.
I am not asking you to plan an extensive backwoods camping trip.
Just a few minutes in a nearby park will do.
Are you convinced? Like, does this sound like fun?
Oh, OK, I can stop then.
Maybe, though, if I don't have every single one of you,
I want to talk about one more piece of research.
Happiness researchers have found out that people are not always very good
at knowing exactly what will make them happy.
Now, oftentimes, we're looking at big, major events,
and we find that they don't have
the large impact we think that they will have.
So, for example,
when Carleton's men's basketball team just won the national championship,
you might have thought I would be static for weeks.
But, as it turns out, when you get back to the day to day life,
that pride fades pretty quickly.
And in contrast to these big events,
sometimes everyday, mundane events, we take these things for granted,
we underestimate how much these impact our happiness.
Given our disconnection from nature,
I think that this might be one of the things that we're underestimating,
that could have an impact on our happiness, that we're ignoring.
So, to test this idea, we did another study.
We got some students to meet us at the Psychology building,
and we told them that we were going to take them on a walk across campus.
Again, we split them into two groups.
Some of those students, we were going to take on a walk
and never take them outside.
We'd walk them through the tunnels
that connect all the building on Carleton's campus.
Oh, I know -
(Laughter)
Other people, we told them, "We are going to take you on a walk outside,
on a path along the Rideau River,
very close to those same buildings, but in this nearby, nice nature.
Before we went anywhere,
we asked people to predict how they thought they would feel
going across campus.
After we took those walks, we asked them,
"How did you actually feel? How did you feel on your walk?"
When we compare the results,
we see that the students did think
walking outside in nature might be a little bit better.
They might experience more positive emotions there.
But that difference is much smaller than the actual difference in their mood.
When they actually went on the walk,
they felt a lot better if they were in nature compared to indoors.
Again, we've repeated this experiment, we've done it in slightly different ways,
we've asked different people to make the predictions,
completely different people who went on those walks,
and again, people who predict positive emotions vastly underestimate
how much better it is to take a walk in nearby nature.
So, with this in mind, I'm going to ask once again:
please, spend some time connecting with nature.
It will make you happy.
It will make you happier than you think it will make you.
(Laughter)
I want you to be happy.
But, you know, I also have an ulterior motive.
I'm hoping that spending a little more time in nature,
that might make you a little more nicer, too.
Now, that might be good for the people around you,
but I believe it might also be good for all of Planet Earth.
If that nature makes you nicer,
in a way that makes you make slightly more cooperative decisions,
the kinds of decisions that support sustainability
and good environmental behavior,
well, that could be really something.
When we think about the environment, there's a lot of negative messages,
a lot of doom and gloom, a lot of reasons to be concerned,
but what I'm talking about here today is a happy path to sustainability.
If we spend more time connecting with nature,
I think we can have happier people and a healthier planet.
Thank you.
(Applause)