Let's spend more time outside

Binyamina, immodest green, and an accidental prison experiment

Lots of people are starting to wonder about the long-term effects of Covid-era isolation. Especially for young children, disconnection from others is threatening to impair social skills for the long haul.

True, connection to other people is essential. But what about our natural habitat?

Over Shabbat, a friend suggested that I escape Tel Aviv for a day to Binyamina, a small village north of Netanya established by members of the Third Aliyah in 1922. “It’s always good to have one foot in and one foot out,” she said, joking that she had already put down a down payment for a house there in 5-10 years.

I asked her what to do up there. “Go get off the train and see where that gets you. Bring your scooter and your lock.”

It took some very intentional pushing and planning to overcome the inertia of never leaving the Tel Aviv bubble (a dangerously easy thing) but I pushed myself and went up there today.

In addition to the scooter and lock, I brought my camera and a notebook.

How I adore pastoral life: rusty tricycles in the yard, epic trees with millions of roots and trunks, and tables with olives and pomelos for sale at the end of dirt driveways.

Oh, and the lush, deep, soft, immodest green.

In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari identifies disconnection from nature as a key source of anxiety and depression. Consider this study:

In the State Prison of Southern Michigan in the 1970s, there was…an experiment. Because of the way the prison was built, half of the prisoners’ cells looked out over rolling farmland and trees, and half looked out onto bare brick walls. An architect named Ernest Moore studied the medical records for these different groups of prisoners (who didn’t suffer in any other way) and he found that if you were in the group who could see the natural world, you were 24 percent less likely to get physically or mentally sick.

It’s kind of shocking, no?

And the trends around our exposure to nature don’t look promising. We are becoming a more and more urbanized species. To risk sounding like a mom, so many kids and teens are already living in the metaverse.

Says Hari, paraphrasing the biologist E.O. Wilson:

“A frog can live on land—it’ll just be miserable and give up. Why…would humans be the exception to this rule?”

Indeed, the second creation account illustrates how God formed man from the dust of the Earth. For thousands of years, humans lived most of their days outside.

When the Haganah established an underground bullet factory disguised as a laundry service in 1945, they set up a UV lamp to provide workers with vitamin D. That we biologically need a vitamin from sunlight is pretty telling, I think.

May we all spend more time outside.