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Todd Burras: A prescription for those with 2020 fatigue

Ames Tribune - 11/5/2020

Experiencing political fatigue? Have what feels like a mind-numbing hangover?

Whether you voted red or blue or sat this one out, welcome to the aftermath of the 2020 election. And whether your candidate(s) won or lost or you still don’t know, the most recent election cycle has been a drawn-out and exhausting affair in a pandemic year that most of us would like to see in a rearview mirror.

Need a panacea? Or at least a placebo?

Then ask your doctor for a prescription of Vitamin N.

Vitamin what?

In his study of youth culture and his subsequent landmark book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” author Richard Louv identified a growing body of scientific research that links, in part, childhood and adult obesity, depression, anxiety and attention disorders to a lack of contact with nature.

Louv followed up with “The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age.” In it he looked at some of the restorative effects of spending time in nature, such as better physical and mental health, enhanced creativity, improved problem-solving capabilities and the strengthening of human relationships, something we could all stand to work on in a nation so politically charged and divided.

Several years ago, shortly before the release of his book “Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life,” I was interviewing Louv when he brought up the topic of nature prescriptions. In Washington D.C., Louv told me that Dr. Robert Zarr, a board-certified pediatrician at Unity Health Care, Inc., was leading D.C. Park Prescription, a program that helped train physicians to connect children to nature. Zarr had mapped hundreds of parks in the D.C. area to help physicians and parents discover nearby nature, and then was researching behavioral and attitudinal changes of both patients and health care providers.

“He started on his own prescribing nature to patients and set up a system to get other doctors to prescribe nature,” Louv said of Zarr.

Since then, doctors around the world have followed suit, sending patients outdoors to engage with nature as part of a simple treatment approach to improving the physical and mental health of people of all ages.

In 2011, Janet Ady, then an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, stood before a crowd of grassroots leaders at a gathering for the Children & Nature Network, a nonprofit spawned from Louv’s research and writings. Ady held up an oversized pharmacy bottle whose label read:

DIRECTIONS: Use daily, outdoors in nature. Go on a nature walk, watch birds, and observe trees. Practice respectful outdoor behavior in solitude or take with friends and family. REFILLS: Unlimited. Expires: Never

Ady’s point wasn’t that Vitamin N is a panacea for all that ails us, but rather an elixir for all of us who are living in the age of nature-deficit disorder.

From the pandemic to the recession to the election and everything in between, it’s been a grueling 2020 for all of us. While you don’t need a physician’s prescription for Vitamin N to give you permission to get outside, breathe, relax and decompress a bit, it might be just what your doctor would order.

Todd Burras can be reached at www.outdoorstoddburras@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Todd Burras: A prescription for those with 2020 fatigue

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