Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is George.

Man, and I'm pinch hitting for Ray Pentecost, who's traveling.

And it's my pleasure to be here today to introduce Jay Maddock, a friend and colleague from the School of Public Health.

Jay is title of his talk is Frontiers in Health, Nature and Biophilic Design Research.

Very appropriate topic on such a beautiful day.

Dr. Jay Maddock is director of the Center for Health and Nature, a joint initiative of Texas A&M University.

The Houston Methodist Research Institute, and Texan By nature.

He also serves as a Regents professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Texas A&M.

He previously served as chair of the Hawaii Board of Health and dean of the Texas A&M School of Public Health.

His research has been featured in several national and international media outlets, including the Today Show, BBC, Le Monde.

Eating Well, Prevention and Good Housekeeping.

And now PBS in Texas A&M and he has authored over 150 scientific articles and has served as principal investigator on over $20 million in extramural funding.

So let's give him a big hand and welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks, George.

Take care.

All right.

So today we get to talk about some of the frontiers, kind of where the research is at and where we're going in this whole sphere around health, in nature and biophilic design.

So what have you've kind of a little bit of a context of why I think this research is so important and where it's going.

And so I gave the Ellison Distinguished Lecture last week in horticulture and horticulture.

You know, obviously they're selling flowers people, but they had this great quote.

PJ Ellison said to me, Know what?

We want to take plants from pretty to necessary.

And certainly anyone here who's here in landscape architecture, I think that's a definitely a goal of that field to you.

And I think architecture in general is really the power of plants that we don't think about a lot.

We think about it as pretty, but we don't think about is actually essential to our health.

So I'm going to turn and talk a little bit about some of the things we're seeing in public health.

Right.

So anybody who works in public health knows obesity has been a problem for the last couple of decades.

Right.

We've seen this rapid increase in obesity.

And starting in about 2000, I worked in Hawaii.

We did this big physical activity and nutrition campaigns trying to get people to eat healthier and move more.

And, you know, Michelle Obama had the Let's Move campaign kind of this big awareness for about, you know, 2000 to maybe 2015.

And as you can see, we were not as successful as we'd like to be.

Right.

The rates just keep going up and up and up.

So problem there, what might be a related problem.

But I think something we don't typically think as we're seeing this crisis in alcohol abuse.

Right.

So 40% of men, 20% of women will suffer from alcohol abuse or alcoholism in their lifetime.

Right.

So two out of five men, one out of five women, something that we definitely don't talk about.

Source with the American Medical Association.

Right.

So a huge problem that I think is kind of under the rug.

More than eight in ten Americans report feeling stressed in the last two weeks.

So 80% prevalence of stress.

We know stress leads to a variety of diseases and fix our immune function and is really, really problematic.

And I think this one is that probably the scariest of the ones going to show we've seen this increase in these deaths of despair.

So a death of despair is somebody that commit suicide drinks themself to death, takes an opioid overdose.

Right.

And it's in that population of middle aged, white, non-college educated that we're seeing the biggest problem with 50 to 54 we've seen in women the death rate quadruple between 2020 15, right?

So it was at 25, it went to 100 per 100,000.

That's insane, right?

You don't see death rates do that in a short amount of time.

And it's saying there's something is really going on that that we need to figure out is public health.

And I think as architecture and built environment professionals, anyone who done any work with kids knows that we're seeing this rising rate of ADHD.

Right.

And if you go in, I'm actually surprised at how low this number is, because if you go into a middle school today and ask how many kids are on ADHD medicine, half the hands in the room go up.

Right.

So massive increase right in ADHD.

And this one is really scary thing for everyone who's in this class is college age, right?

Percent of population of major depressive episodes.

You can see the two bars that are shooting up are 12 to 17 and 18 to 25.

So major increases and this slide is only up till 2020.

Right?

So it doesn't really show the effect of COVID, which we know made it even worse.

Right.

So even pre-COVID, we were seeing these huge increases in our young population with major depressive disorder.

Right.

And all of these things obviously relate to the money that we spend.

Right.

We can see this huge increase in the cost that we spend.

So back in the 1960, we were only spending 5% of our GDP on health care costs.

Today that's closer to 20%.

So think about that.

One out of every $5 in our country goes to pay for health care.

Right?

Are there other things that we might want to pay for instead of health care?

Sure.

Right.

It's not a great use of our money, and I think we'd much rather had that back of that 5 to 10% range.

So as a public health professional, you look at this data and you say, okay, if I have all these things happening at the same time, is there a common factor, right?

Or do we do the reductionist thing, which we typically do in public health?

Obesity we're going to do is going to be nutrition, alcohol, we're going to alcohol prevention, depression, we're going to do depression screening.

Right.

But is there a larger overriding factor?

And so we look at this thing called the social ecological model.

And I think this is particularly important for anybody in architecture.

As you'll see, the outside runs are these social structural policy systems, community level built environment, urban design type of things, right.

That affect us.

And if we want to change populations, we want to look at what's happening on the outer rungs, not the individual.

And it's not that our individual person or psychology has changed that much in the last 20, 30 years, but the society has changed dramatically.

And how is society change?

Right.

Well, I don't know how well you can see this, but if we look at this is time spent in major media, Right.

So how much time do you spend watching TV, listening to the radio, spend on your phones with print, etc., Right back in 2012, which is not that long ago, it was just over 11 hours a day that has increased steadily so that by 2022 it's 13 hours and 20 minutes a day.

So we now spend on average 2 hours more per day, almost entirely in front of a screen.

Right.

And so this has been a huge, huge change.

If you look at this and I know it's small on the screen, but the time listening to the radio has dropped, the time reading print is, I mean, almost minuscule the time in front of an electronic device, be it a laptop, be it a phone has shot up.

And so that's something that it is going much, much faster than our biology.

Right.

If you want to think about biology, right, our bodies and our brains are pretty much identical to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Right.

That's 2 to 3000 years ago.

Our phones in our pockets have come up in the last ten years.

That's a major change that we can't keep up with.

There's no way we can keep up with it.

So how does that affect us?

What does that do?

All right.

So we look at urbanization.

Also, we like to think of America, of Texas, Right?

Texas is a rural state, right?

It's not anymore.

The Midwest, a majority of Texans live in cities.

And so you can look at this, back in 1900 40% of our population in America was urban.

60% was rural.

Today, 80% of our population, America is urban.

It's 85% in Texas, which is, while we like to think of Texas rural, 85% of Texans live in cities.

And so we've changed dramatically, right?

We live in cities.

We look at American adults, how much time they spend outside.

So this is a nationwide survey.

I'm going to get back to this.

This was done in 2018, right.

But five years ago.

And they found that over 70% of Americans spent less than 10 hours a week in natural environments and more than 50% spent less than 5 hours a week right there, seven days in a week.

So if you're spending less than 5 hours, mean you're spending less than an hour a day in a green space, very, very little time, Most people spend extremely little time in nature.

This is not the way our country was, right.

We were a country that was doing a lot of farming, a lot of the things.

100 years ago, people spent a lot of time outside right.

I'm sure George and I can tell you that when we were kids, we were outside unsupervised all of the time.

And I've done this with large groups, with 150 students and said, How many of you played unsupervised as a kid?

4 hours outside and maybe three hands go up.

And certainly in my generation, it would have been just about everybody.

Right?

So we've had this major shift in the last few years.

So to address this, back in 2018, we created the Center for Health in Nature.

And so the intern George mentioned it's Houston Methodist Hospital.

That is Mark Boone, who is the CEO of the hospital, a Texan by nature, and that's Laura Bush for former first lady who started this conservation nonprofit here in Texas to really protect the nature of Texas.

And, of course, our chancellor, John Sharp.

And they really said, hey, we want you to come together and study the effects of nature on health and get more people into nature.

And so we started with E.O.

Wilson and this Biophilia hypothesis.

And really what he just says is human beings are innately connected to other living organisms.

So we are meant to be connected to animals, to plants, to nature.

And if you can think about how much research has come out in the last five, ten years about things like the gut microbiome, right?

We have this microbiome that affects a lot of our health, everything.

And if you want to change your gut microbiome, you go and spend time in nature, right?

And that repopulate your gut.

We were meant physically, meant to be in nature, but of course that's a hypothesis, right?

So whenever we have a hypothesis and this quotes from his book, the actual original quote was from 1984, right?

So back in 1984, we had a faculty member here who I'm sure George was working with at the time, Roger Erlich, and he was the founder and director of the Center for Health Systems and Design.

So you have Ray Pentecost leading as Ray is currently in that role.

Roger was the founder, and Roger did this really cool study where he looked at hospital records.

Right?

And so these are patients coming in for surgery.

And after their surgery, they got assigned to a recovery room.

And that room either had a window that overlooked a beautiful park or a window that overlooked a parking lot.

And the people that had the window overlooking the park had less post-op complications, less time in the hospital, and less painkillers like heart outcomes that he got from their charts.

Like really amazing stuff.

The crazy thing is like this kind of came out and there's been a little bit of hospital research after that, but we didn't see the huge bolus of research coming out.

So there's a lot of stuff now on daylight.

If you have daylight when you're recovering, that makes a big difference.

Hospital gardens seem to be really important and having these natural biophilic rooms in recovery seem to make a difference.

And so hospitals certainly if you're in a hospital design and you're doing this clear evidence that more nature has, our patients heal faster, it's also hit the popular press, right?

So several books last out in the Woods back in 2008, The Nature Fix in 2017, Walled Garden Mine in 2020 Vol come out.

The last show in the Woods coined this term called Nature Deficit Disorder.

And what they said is our kids today just don't get out in nature anymore.

And if we don't see this change, we're going to be in a really bad place.

That book came out 15 years ago, right?

It's a whole new generation of kids.

It actually was probably written about most of you.

All right.

You're thinking 28, 15 years ago, it would have been, you know, kids at that time, it's only gotten worse.

Other research in the nineties as we kind of come forward, urban dwellers brought to natural environments for a few days had less mental fatigue, less verbal accidents, increased problem solving, increased concentration.

So we get people into nature.

The beauty is we see changes really fast, right?

And that's really important.

And we're not waiting and waiting and waiting.

This is something we can see rapidly.

This is a brand new study.

This is my friend Erin Lago White.

She's at the university in North Florida.

And she's like, you know what?

I wonder what the power is of a bouquet of flowers.

And so she took it.

It was a study of women that worked at the University of Florida.

And they said, okay, we'd like to give you a gift.

And so you sign up, right?

And half the women were randomized and got a nice bouquet of flowers.

The other half got a nice designer candle.

Right.

Both gifts, both from the same company, both cost the same amount of money.

Right.

So she controlled for all the other stuff.

And what she found was that they both did better.

They both reduced their stress scores.

Everybody likes getting gifts, but the people that got the flowers had a larger stress reduction than the people that got the candle right.

And so showing that that that having fresh flowers actually makes a stress reduction difference, even though they're cut flowers and they die eventually.

You see this difference.

On the other hand, there's this bigger study and this is the most powerful study of something called forest bathing.

So this is it comes out of Japan.

And this was a study in Tokyo where they said, okay, we're in a randomized this group and the first group we're going to have spend the weekend in Tokyo.

The other group we're going to take out to the forest and we're going to this thing called forest bathing.

And what forest bathing is, is really mindful ness in nature, right?

So you spend your time feeling the wind on your face, smelling the different plants, looking, touching, right.

Getting all your senses involved.

And they measured this thing called natural killer cells.

So natural killer cells are a part of our immune system that fight cancer.

So our bodies all the time, right, are developing little nascent tumors.

And when your immune system is working really well, it tends to get rid of almost all of these right.

And when it's not doing well, some of those sneak through them may get cancer.

Right.

Which we all would love to avoid.

And so you can see in the control group, nothing happened with natural killer cell activity.

In the intervention group, they saw a change in natural killer cell activity at day 1 to 1 day in the forest.

They see a change.

They see it again at day two.

At the end of the weekend.

They see it a week later and it's significantly higher at a one month time point.

So one weekend in nature where we're mindful can improve the functioning of our immune system a month later.

That's amazing, right?

Next study, this is what's called an ecological study.

We go out stage and screen to look at data and to see what's happening.

So they found that people with high risk exposure to green spaces had an 8% lower risk of all cause mortality.

Right?

So after controlling for other factors, if you live in a neighborhood with a lot of green space, you are 8% less likely to die.

Right?

So we call a heart outcome in public health, Right?

Pretty straightforward.

If I was a real estate agent, I'd be selling property based on like, you're going to live longer if you live here, Right?

Pretty strong.

Some of the work that we've done, we were working with the Houston Parks Board.

They had this public private partnership to put in 150 miles of linear trail throughout Houston.

So if you've been in Houston, there's the bayous and the by user kind of the water draining area.

So adjacent to the bayou, they build these walk bike trails that allow you to get to downtown Houston.

Maybe ten, 15, 20 miles without ever passing another car or a traffic light because you're off grade.

Right.

Incredible in terms of transportation, but also accessing nature.

And so we were interested to say, does it actually affect health?

And so we looked at zip codes that had 30% or more of their population within a ten minute walk of one of these bayou greenways.

And we use the Texas inpatient inpatient hospital data.

So again, a hard outcome.

They know if you came to the hospital or not, 93% reduction of those communities and obesity related admissions, 77% in ischemic heart disease, 71% in heart attack admissions.

So huge reductions for the communities that got these trails right.

So overall, there's a ton of benefits that have been documented spending time in nature.

And I won't read all these, but you can see things like reduced diabetes and obesity that are ADHD improves in congestive heart failure outcomes, better blood pressure, better sleep, better eyesight, etc..

Right.

A ton of incredible benefits.

So this talk is about the frontiers in research.

What are some of the problems that we have right now with data?

So we look at the data they do.

Most of the studies are what's called ecological.

Ecological is a single slice in time and many factors affect who lives there.

So if I take green neighborhoods, right, green neighborhoods might be that people are selecting I want to live in this neighborhood because it's much greener.

I'm going to live in this neighborhood because is where I can afford to live.

Right.

And so ecological like we did with Bayou Greenways, people already lived in those communities and we can't attribute the actual effect to the Greenway, just the fact that those neighborhoods were lower.

The other one that we see a lot is what's called short term experimental.

This shows very short term effects on health most 50 minutes to an hour.

So a lot of these are go out walking green space for 15 minutes.

Other person's going to walk in a gym for 15 minutes and I'm going to compare what happened.

We can show that and we can show people has less stress, better mood.

Right.

What's really hard to do is these long term experimental, right?

I can't say, George, I'm going to randomize you to go live in a city with no green space and I'm going to randomize somebody else to live in this place with a ton of green space.

No, because you got to choose where you're going to live, Right.

So that we can study is about as long as I've seen an experimental study.

So really what we need is these quasi experimental studies, these more longer term.

And so I'm working right now with a group in Fort Bend County that's putting in an Agora hood.

So an agora hood is a neighborhood built around a farm, and they're putting in a pond instead of a swimming pool.

So it's got all these nature elements.

It's also got a lot of other great design in terms of mixed use, new urbanism, walkable community areas.

And we're looking at people that move there.

We look at people that come to open houses that are interested and then either decide to move there or not.

So quasi experimental design their physical activity, their nutrition, their nature access and their social connectedness and health outcomes and saying, does this actually make it's the strongest design we can have because we can't randomize people to nature or not over a 510 year span.

So that's the first question is how do we have better design?

Look at the benefits.

The second question we run into is what is nature?

All right.

You can look at these two pictures here in this one, my old hometown in Hawaii.

You'd walk out to the beautiful waterfall.

You'd be like, this is amazing.

All right.

The other one is a landscape parking lot.

It's got trees, it's got some plantings, right?

Some bushes and flowers.

Are they both nature?

I think most people that I've talked to you and say, yeah, that they're both nature.

But do we believe there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between the two of those?

Yeah, I think so.

I'm certainly much more restored when I'm at that waterfall than I am when I'm in the parking lot.

I appreciate the parking lot has plants instead of one that doesn't, but it's not that have the same effect on my body.

Yeah.

So we look at this thing of the spectrum of nature contact and this looks at how frequently we get things and what's the spatial scale, right?

And so knowing that having we have a couple of plants here on the, on the coffee table.

Nice.

It's something, right.

And I'm going to see it when I'm speaking here.

Everyone in the class is going to see this on a very regular basis.

I'm probably not going to get to big band on a regular basis of spatial scale, Big band, huge frequency, very small.

Right.

And so trying to figure out what do we actually need in terms of the health benefits.

And so here's one of the micro ones.

Indoor plants, right?

We don't think about plants a lot, obviously.

I spoke to horticulture folks last week, so it was important to talk about plants.

Rooms densely filled with plants have 50% less mold and bacteria in the air than rooms without plants.

So huge difference in air quality, right?

They mitigate excess carbon dioxide in the air.

And then most plant species effectively remove substances, including benzene, formaldehyde and tricycle ethanol.

All right.

So huge changes on that micro scale.

If we think about that for anybody designing spaces, right, either landscape architecture or putting in buildings and thinking about green walls and some of these other things, they actually make a real difference in air quality and can affect things like sick building syndrome and other issues.

So we move into this question then of what parts of nature do we actually need?

And let's break it down to the five senses.

You know, we can obviously be full in nature, but that's not always available.

So we might want to think about site.

Right.

And I showed you the study out the window right from the hospital window.

We know that site makes a difference is probably the strongest effect for most people.

Right.

And so pretty clear having a good view out of your window makes a difference.

Much less evidence, though, if we get the restorative effect from photos, from artwork, from screensavers.

It seems like it's true, but we don't know to what extent and how do we compare that to real nature.

Right?

And so there's a lot of questions to be answered around site and can we build in.

So the poem's been working on a study looking at virtual windows in hospital rooms, right?

We have a lot of hospitals that have been designed and they don't have an outdoor view.

And if you don't have an outdoor view, can you put in a virtual window?

And how does that affect you compared to a real window?

Second one, it sounds right.

We know that nature sounds appear to be beneficial in the areas of mood and stress, Right?

And there's a lot of questions, though, on is it matched versus mismatched?

What sounds of nature or better for people?

Can they be recorded too?

They need to be real.

You know, what level of decibels is good for people and can we put this into an environment?

And actually, if I had bird sound playing in the background, would that actually lead to more relaxation in the classroom?

We don't know that yet.

So fairly easy studies to do, but the research still needs to be there.

Smell.

You know, there's a lot of connection to memories and smell.

There's some mood connections.

You know, we kind of have an idea of some of these things.

So.

So are you.

It's one of my students just did a randomized trial in the Human behavior lab and she use sight and smell.

And she did find that smell was significant in improving performance, but not as strong a sight.

But it was an independent predictor.

And there's this ongoing research on TURPIN.

So turbines are a set of chemical that gets put off by plants.

And so there's a question if the set of chemicals actually make a difference in love themselves.

Touch There's very limited research on touch, right?

And this can include things like feeling that breeze on your face.

Is that important, right?

Is it like if you're driving in a car and you're looking at plants and stuff, do you get the same benefit if you roll the window down?

And I think whenever we you know, I drive for the window down, I feel better.

You know, that little bit of breeze and stuff, It's kind of nice.

We don't know how much that affects and how important that is in these things.

And then we've got this question right now, which we're starting to look at experimental science.

How does nature affect people with blindness?

Right.

If sight is not there, do they get the benefits through the touch and the smell and the sound?

And so we're really interested in trying to see for people with sight impairment how it affects and then taste, because I needed to do all five of them.

Certainly there's a huge literature on the benefits of consuming fruits and vegetables.

So eating edible plants, it makes it very clear benefit on our health.

And then the question of virtual nature, right in places where it's hard to get outside with summer we went through in Texas, it was 108 degrees and 12 degrees.

It was not pleasant to be in nature, right?

People that live in inner city areas where it may not be safe and they may not be near by nature or when the days are short in the winter and it's dark at 5:00.

Does virtual nature actually work to improve our health and how does this look?

And we have a VR lab and we're testing a lot of these questions.

We did complete a pilot study of this crossover.

So get Methodist, we took oncology patients who were coming in for their infusions and they got all three conditions at different appointments.

So the first one was that standard hospital room that we've all been in, right?

Stark white, nothing in their TV screen right.

So and some old sitcom from the eighties.

Second one was a biophilic room.

They came in.

There were plants all over the room.

All right.

Third one was a VR experience.

So they got to put on the VR headsets and play around in nature while they were doing.

And they found that both there is improvements for both Biophilia and VR above the control room.

There was no difference in the two of those, but they were better in mood in the experience and it's something that's really unpleasant.

People saying, You know what, that made a lot more easier for me to get through.

And so important.

The next research question we have is how much nature do we actually need?

And I think that's an important area.

This is a paper that came out in 2019 that shows this is a cross-sectional self-report study.

Right?

And you can see there's an increase of the 2 hours a week in both mental and physical health.

Now, cross-sectional self-report, terrible design, right?

Really, really weak in terms of design.

This study was published in Nature, which is one of the best journals in the world.

It shows you how far we need to go in this research.

But a cross-sectional self-report study modeled in the nature, right?

So we have these questions of how do we validly and reliably measure individual nature exposure?

If I was to ask you, how much time did you spend last week in nature, would you know the answer to that?

That's hard to get.

You can kind of maybe figure out outside and then you get that question of what is nature is a walking by that parking lot doesn't count.

If I was tailgating in Aggie Park, you know, how much does that count?

Right.

And so how do we figure these things out?

How do we develop surveillance measures for time spent in nature?

How do we know if the country is doing better or worse than it was doing?

If there are health disparities in time spent in nature?

And how do we develop guidelines?

How do we actually tell people how much time should they spend?

So a couple of little starting answers on these.

This first one is a group that I work with out of Oregon Health and Sciences University that's created an app This is free in the App Store.

It's called Nature Dose, and it will actually track how much time you spend in nature.

So it's GPS located and it can tell when your phone is outside.

You have to be with your phone and it can also tell when you're in a green space.

So it actually gives people data and we can get that data from within the study so we know how much time people spend in nature.

So that's like a big one.

This came out within the last year in terms of surveillance.

The CDC collects a whole bunch of surveillance data right?

We grow as Factor surveillance survey, Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the National Nutritional and Health Examination Survey.

And so I've been starting talking some conversations with the CDC physical activity branch, and they have agreed to start including nature questions on their ongoing surveys.

So for the first time ever, we're going to have ongoing data that 2018 slide that I showed you with 50% of people spend less than 5 hours.

That is the only nationwide data point that we have right now.

So this is a huge deal and also analogous to physical activity around 1996 was the first phase like tivity guidelines getting in 150 minutes a week of physical activity is the recommendation.

We don't have any kind of recommendation for nature yet and I think we need to get that's a huge frontier in this area and something we need to study.

And then the question is how do we get more people into nature right?

I'm a huge hiker.

I spent a lot of time on the trails in the state parks, national forests and everything.

Often I'm alone, which is sad.

That picture right here, if you don't recognize that, you recognize that Thoreau, It is not Thoreau's Pond.

So you would think you're up in New England, right?

That is Double Lake and it's about an hour from here.

yeah.

See, it's actually between us and Houston.

And so we actually that's part of the same Houston National Forest.

It's not that far away.

And you can see how many people were there with me that day.

It's empty, right?

But we actually had these spaces nearby.

We may not know about them, but we do have them as a study or article, I suppose.

New York Times 2021 to measure inequality.

Map the trees in the city.

All right.

Because I'm sure this certainly you guys have talked about redlining in your classes, right?

So redlining where areas that were drawn where they wouldn't give loans out into, are they typically had black communities and said, you're not living here, we won't give you a loan, you're going to live in these communities.

Those neighborhoods today still have less tree cover and less mature tree cover.

And so you're seeing this ongoing health disparity and certainly wealthier neighborhoods are greener right.

This is a study that I did about 17 years ago.

Now.

We did leisure time for that actually in parks in diverse communities.

So we were in Chicago and in Tampa.

We did predominantly black, Hispanic and white communities and we just did observations and measured everybody that was outside during these times.

And so that's Chicago.

That's Tampa.

We found that 70% of people in Tampa were sedentary compared to 51% in Chicago.

Right.

So I was doing just physical activity research at the time.

And so I said, okay, that's the paper that's done right.

We figured it out.

We put these assets in and you can see Chicago much more Agora, the basketball courts and everything, picnic shelters in Tampa.

Then I was a visiting professor at Wuhan University in China, and I used to always say, you know, I'm at this big city in China that no one's ever heard of.

I can't say that anymore.

I'm not for the best of reasons, but everyone knows Wuhan now.

And we actually went out to a city called Nanchang City, and China's about 4 million people.

It's about the same size as Chicago.

It's got about the same number of parks.

We ran the exact same methodology there, right?

We observed 75,000 people in the parks in Nanjing compared to only 5000 in Chicago.

Parks are used so much more in China.

But what we found that was really interesting is that half of the people in parks in China were older adults.

Every study that's been done in the US and there's been a dozen or more has found less than 10%.

And so I've written about this in a couple of places, but you can see that picture there.

That does not look like an American park, right?

That looks like, you know, maybe maybe Central Park or Boston Commons that are old parks kind of before the turn of the 19th century.

But they built parks for adults in America.

We build parks for children, right?

No mountain.

So there's no mountain.

Yes.

No, that's true.

But we built we built parks for children, right?

We build playgrounds.

We build basketball courts, we build baseball diamonds.

And we don't really build facilities for older adults.

And so we don't see them in our parks.

It feels like this is not a space for them right on the other end, though, when we build parks for kids, they tend to be very safety focused, right?

We're going to put in that that weird kind of thing that you step on and it's kind of But we get rid of all the plants, right?

So there's a movement now going on looking at these things called green schoolyards, where they build plants into the schoolyard and.

They find the kids get more physical activity, vigorous physical activity, less sedentary time.

And the most important thing if you're trying to get these into schools is they are fewer fights, right?

So if you've ever worked with a vice principal and you come in, you say more physical activity like discrete, sedentary time, kids are going to fight less.

sign me up.

I want that right now.

Right.

Because the vice principal sits there all day just taking care of all these disciplinary things.

And if you can have less kids fighting, you've got something that they want.

Now, as a school study that we published or we I'm sorry, it's currently under review, we've presented we looked at childhood experiences in nature.

Right.

And so we created a scale and we asked people up and about the age of 12, how did you spend your time?

And one of the scales was domestic.

So riding your bike, playing with friends and doing stuff in your neighborhood.

The other one was wild hiking, fishing, camping, etc.

and we found that the wild experiences predict your time in nature as an adult where the domestic ones do not.

Right?

And so really says we need to encourage these wild experiences among kids if we want them to be active as adults.

And some of these were 50, 60, 70 years later.

Right, George?

I mean, you can think about I mean, I do a lot of wow, when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time outside, now it predicted long term, you know, kind of set the kids up for more time in nature.

This is my son.

He's a freshman in college.

He loves the fact that he's a six year old pictures of it's like, could you please stop using my kid pictures like now.

So preventative.

So there's a lot of programs right now in Scotland.

Doctors can prescribe nature as part of their job.

In the UK, they have a program called 30 Days Wild, Expensive by the government to get people out into nature.

Talk about a couple of us ones, David Sabatier, who I know fairly well, Shannon's poem called Walk with a Dog, and he just said, Hey, we want to get people out there and we want to get them.

We want to get them to know their physician.

And then what they found is the doctors went out into into parks, and so it ended up being a nature intervention, a long way to get to know your doctor intervention.

My friends at Parker X, America and I are doing a study right now with their doctors.

They have 1300 physicians across America that have signed up to prescribe nature and park visits.

And so we're really looking at how do we do that more effectively.

We recently I just got funded from the Department of Defense to try to get active duty military and their family into nature, looking at prescriptions and also partnering with Blue Star Families and Wellness Inquiry Boys and Girls Club Atlanta to provide programing for active duty military.

Such an important, you know, high stress and certainly their families.

One thing I want to mention is the building design is, you know, certainly it's an architecture class.

I give talks on nature all over the country.

Right.

And I think this that where do you think that competition is?

And you want to guess where that competition is?

You know.

Yes.

And a hotel you want to guess the country here?

Anybody want to guess the country?

China?

No.

Anybody want to try?

Try anyone?

Norway.

Norway?

No.

Point is could be anywhere in the world, right?

It's in Barcelona, Spain.

All right.

So here you go.

You go to this wonderful conference in Barcelona and you end up there and you go, Well, that stinks.

I'm inside.

And I do all these nature conferences and they're like, Well, we can't have windows.

It's impossible.

We won't be able to see the screen.

Right?

So the one next to it, I don't know how.

I guess that's last week in the Agrilife Center, right?

So it was been in the Agrilife Center Nos.

It's all windows.

It's beautiful.

It's a gorgeous facility.

It's here on campus.

Right.

And you can see the windows behind me and you can see I can see out here all of the plants in front of me do what I need for the building.

It's the Agrilife Center.

It's the Jo Kimbrel Agro Agrilife Center at the same place.

They have a little beautiful park.

It's right next to Aggie.

The gardens.

The gardens?

Yes.

And so wonderful.

And they did it and did the architecture right on it.

And clearly you can see my screen.

I love the shot because you can see my screen, but yet we were surrounded by nature.

And then the gardens are right there.

I mean, what a restorative, amazing environment.

And then the all the podium and everything is covered in plants so we can do this, right.

The other thing we're doing because, you know, I complain a lot school, public health, we've had this awful green space, right?

And so since I got here eight years ago, we've been trying to get that renovated.

We brought out the architecture landscape architecture class to actually do the designs for this.

And then it was a master's student that actually did the final design.

We finally got it funded by the Aggie Green Fund, and they're going to finish hopefully by the end of the month.

And this incredible you can see the one that's from October 3rd and they've been a lot more plants and since then that'll be a full on green space with a hammock garden up.

Sorry, grow a pollinator garden and picnic tables with shade and electricity so that people can spend their breaks between classes outdoors.

So looking at retrofitting, how do we put these things in in these spaces?

Make sure that nature is is nearby.

And so thank you guys for your attention.

Appreciate it.

Definitely have, I think, a few minutes for questions.

Right.

We have a quarter of all right.

So thank you