Scientists: Nature is good for us
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Oil prices soared over $100 a barrel again this week after the Iran-backed Houthis claimed strikes on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and another tanker caught fire near the Strait of Hormuz. It was an escalation of the U.S.-Iran conflict in which Iran has repeatedly demonstrated that it can choke off the world’s access to a major source of crude oil and send gas prices soaring.
In response to the energy shock, China – the world’s biggest oil importer – has done something that surprised outside observers: It cut its oil imports by almost a third.
How did China do that?
“It remains a mystery to most of the market,” The New York Times reported last week (gift link). “China is widely thought to have the world’s largest stockpile of oil, but it does not appear to have pulled much from the aboveground stores that analysts can monitor via satellite. And while its refineries have been processing less oil than usual during the war – and the country banned oil-product exports early on – that doesn’t fully explain the huge drop in imports, either.”
Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Finnish research group CREA, shared a partial explanation last week: Electric vehicles are reducing China’s oil dependence.
“EVs displaced an estimated 1.4 [million] barrels/day in the first half of the year, up more than 40% year-on-year,” Myllyvirta wrote on Bluesky.
EV adoption is also cleaning up Chinese cities: “China’s traffic-related air pollution levels dropped sharply after the Hormuz crisis, as fuel consumption fell and EV use surged,” Myllyvirta wrote.
In addition to investing in EVs, China has built out a rail network that Americans can only dream of. Speaking of which, if you’re looking for a bleak laugh – or 15 minutes of dunking on Elon Musk – check out this YouTube review of the Las Vegas Loop.
– Sara Peach, Editor-in-Chief
The government killed this nature study. Scientists finished it anyway.
Dr. Neha Pathak reports:
Most of us sense it without being told why: A walk in the woods or an hour in the park leaves us calmer, clearer, and restored. Increasingly, modern science agrees. A growing body of evidence links time in nature to better physical and mental health – and a major new effort is working to document exactly what that evidence shows.
That effort is called the Nature Record, and its survival is a story in itself. It began as the National Nature Assessment, a federal undertaking modeled on the long-running National Climate Assessment and mandated by a Biden-era executive order. The project had reached an early public-comment draft when the Trump administration canceled it. Rather than abandon the work, the authors decided to finish it independently under a new name.
Howard Frumkin, a physician-epidemiologist and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, led the assessment’s chapter on human health.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Yale Climate Connections: When you dug into the evidence for the health chapter, what were the biggest takeaways or trends you saw?
Frumkin: The first key message is that, in general, nature contact is good for people; it’s health-promoting. The second is that those benefits are unequally distributed across society. Some of us have much better or easier access to nature than others. It’s an equity issue, because poor people and people of color disproportionately tend to have less access to parks and high-quality park programming, through the legacies of redlining and other historical trends.
But it’s not just that conventional form of equity that’s important. People with disabilities have difficulty accessing natural places. Older people have difficulty because too many parks lack accessible trails and shade, and children often lack access because safe, easy access to green space is rare in many communities.
Another trend is more screen time and less green time. People are spending less time outdoors. On the other hand, there are some emerging technologies that may facilitate nature contact, such as Merlin [the birdsong identification app], which may help deepen people’s appreciation of nature, and there’s reason to think that being more familiar with it deepens nature connectedness.
Yale Climate Connections: If the evidence that nature helps is solid, how much do we actually know about why – and about how much nature is enough?
Frumkin: One of the most interesting parts of this is that although we have pretty solid evidence that nature contact benefits health, we know precious little about how it works. So you may walk through a forest and benefit from seeing the natural beauty of the forest. We have lab evidence that T cells do better after contact with natural compounds than they otherwise would. It may be that the benefit comes from the fact that you’re walking through the forest with friends, and social contacts in natural settings are soothing and restorative. It may be that natural settings call on us just to get out there and take a walk, and the physical activity is a really effective promoter of good health.
Not knowing the pathways and mechanisms of benefits makes it a little difficult to prescribe. And we don’t know a lot about the varieties of nature and which ones are more or less effective. Do you need trees, or do shrubs do the trick? Do you need immersion, or viewing nature out the window? Do you need the real thing, or might virtual nature provide some of the same benefits? Do you need to get out every day, or does a few times a week suffice? So these are a lot of questions we still need to try to answer.
The potential benefits of nature contact are strong, much less expensive than pharmaceuticals, free of side effects, and don’t need to be prescribed by a licensed healthcare provider. The cost-benefit implications are potentially enormous if we get it right and understand best how to optimize those benefits.
Yale Climate Connections: As a physician, I hear a real fear of nature from patients: ticks and mosquito-borne disease, allergies, wildfire smoke, and extreme weather – and climate change is heightening those risks. How do you balance nature’s benefits against these threats?
Frumkin: Rarely in life can you eliminate risk altogether, but you can manage risk.
The risks of being outside: Well, there’s a risk of sunburn – but we can manage that risk with sunblock and with protective clothing. The risk of ticks – that’s a real risk. But we can manage that risk: inspecting ourselves after we’ve been in tick-infested areas and using bug repellent to keep the ticks away. So for each risk, we can reduce the risk by managing it well.
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Your moment of hope
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