Design for Wellbeing - Start with Trees

How We Shape our Environment Impacts our Health

Dr. Richard Jackson, Chair of the School of Health at UCLA and former head of the National Center for Environmental Health, says that how we shape our environment impacts our health.

He notes that our built environment in part, contributes to our current epidemics of asthma, obesity, diabetes, and depression. But unfortunately, we are not working to prevent these problems but instead, he says, we are “looking at the end of the pipeline,” the medical effects.  He states,

“We are now medicalizing the problems people are experiencing with their environment. We are no longer creating wellbeing.”

For example, when ground-level heat goes up, ozone levels (from cars) also rise. Ozone is a leading contributor to asthma, a chronic disease that disproportionally impacts inner-city areas.  Jackson notes,

“Any place where we can cool the air, we can improve health.”

So less ground-level heat and less cars will lower asthma rates! In Atlanta during the Olympic Games, people drove less, taking public transit to get into the city center. As a result asthma hospitalizations dropped by some 30 percent!

We can lower ground-level heat by planting more trees in urban areas. More trees and parks in cities will alleviate asthma rates...that sure makes sense to me.

Also trees will bring more oxygen back into the environment . This is a major factor, in my opinion, to increasing health and wellbeing. Oxygen is released by trees. They take in CO2 and release oxygen - perfect.

New evidence from ice core samples, published by NASA, show CO2 levels are higher than anything our planet has experienced in over 650,000 years. And CO2 binds to hemoglobin in our red blood cells which interferes with how our red blood cells carry oxygen to our cells. This interference dramatically reduces how much oxygen we can utilize - hence asthma ( and more).

Jackson notes that how we design our communities affects our health - “We are engineering exercise out of people’s lives” by putting places of work and living far from each other. Over the past twenty years, the obesity rate for teenagers has tripled.

Walking/biking  is to be encouraged at all costs. He notes, “Now there’s only one state where less than 20 percent of the population is obese.” [what state? I don't know but I bet it is Colorado].

Part of the solution to our health problems is to design for wellbeing.

And trees are important in that regard. I agree with Jackson when he says, “Cars are not more important than people or trees.” We need to plant the right trees in the right places and create long-term plans to keep trees healthy.

There is so much more than this - but planting trees is a great place to start.

MORE INFO

 Dr. Richard Jackson: “We Are No Longer Creating Wellbeing” 09/12/2010 by asladirt

“Built Environment: Designing Communities to Promote Physical Activity in Children,”

Also, Dr. Jackson’s book, “Urban Sprawl and Public Health: Designing, Planning, and Building for Healthy Communities”

Paul Morris on CDC’s Healthy Communities program, and how design can improve health.

 ‘Ortho’s All About Trees’ by  Jan Johnsen

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