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A Green Quality Talk with Tiffany
Dear Tiffany,
Thank you for showing me your office. I like your collections on the cubicle wall, especially the mini doll Elsa, your favorite Disney character. I am inclined to think whether this warm and fuzzy feeling emitted from you and the cubicle has something to do with your office location.
From Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel (1812) to Disney’s first animated Snow White (1937), all the whimsical stories seem to happen in the woods. That made me curious: what was in your mind when walking in the nearby Mattie J.T. Stepanek Park? Or where was your mind when you stared at this Elsa doll at your desk?
E.O. Wilson, an American biologist, thinks humans are hardwired to seek a particular scene in the natural realm that is calming and restorative. Ever since his most influential work, “Biophilia,” published in 1984, many environmental psychologists began drawing more connections between human behavior and the surrounding environment. Rachel and Stephen Kaplan were part of them. They further defined Wilson’s notion and backed up with the “Attention Restoration theory,” in which involuntary attention, the kind of attention we give to nature, is effortless, like a daydream or a song whispering in our mind.
In 1993, the Russian artists Vitaly Komer and Alexander Melamid hired a professional polling firm to determine what people from various countries like to look at. The poll result suggested that most people preferred a “Savanna-like” view. They all depict a similar landscape, such as “open fields with few trees and shrubs in the near distance, perhaps some wildlife and bodies of still, clear water.” Much scientific literature also suggests mental health is affected by access to certain chosen green qualities. Modern landscape architects have also included the “prospect and refuge” theory and tried duplicating the ideal landscape associated with human innate desires.
Whether it’s “Savanna-like,” a “prospect,” or a “refuge” feel of landscapes, these green qualities have been used as a “golden standard” in recent epidemiological studies. A research article published at BioMed Central analyzed a…
