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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Clemens G. Arvay. Clemens is an Austrian biologist and nonfiction writer who studied landscape ecology and applied plant science in Vienna and Graz. He centers his work on the relationship between humans and nature, focusing on the health-promoting effects of contact with plants, animals, and landscapes. With Sounds True, Clemens Arvay has written a new book called The Biophilia Effect: A Scientific and Spiritual Exploration of the Healing Bond Between Humans and Nature, where he presents fascinating research, practical tools and activities, inspiring stories, and more in this accessible guide to the remarkable benefits of being in nature.
In this episode of Insights At The Edge, Clemens and I spoke about terpenes: what they are, their important characteristic—as what Clemens calls “chemical words”—and how they could affect the future of medicine. We also talked about the idea that we are eco-psychosomatic beings connected beyond our skin, and how this realization changes our relationship with the natural world. We talked about the origins of forest bathing, and how to receive the most healing benefit from time spent in nature. We also talked about research studies on how plants and greenery accelerate the healing process, and what a biophiliac revolution in health care might look like. Here’s my conversation with Clemens Arvay.
Clemens, you’ve written a new book called The Biophilia Effect, and I think for many of our listeners, they’ll be hearing this word “biophilia” for the very first time. So what does the word biophilia mean?
Clemens Arvay: The word biophilia originally means love to nature, or love of nature. It goes back to a very famous German and American psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. He said that every human being has a biophilic force in his psyche, or in her psyche, and this biophilic force connects us with other species, with other living creatures, and we have a desire to be close to living processes in nature. If we let our biophilic force kind of flow, then it keeps us healthy, but if we disconnect ourself from nature, we will become ill.
Modern science brings the evidence now that this theory that goes back to the ’60s, when Erich Fromm wrote about it, is really, really true, and even has a biological fundament, an evidence-based fundament nowadays, and that’s great. My book is about the new science of how nature keeps us healthy, or helps us healing from diseases.
TS: So, the biophilic force inside me or inside you, that’s a force inside us that wants to connect with nature? That wants to connect with each other? I’m trying to distinguish—how would I connect to that inside of myself and say, “Oh, this is different,” than let’s say Eros, “than an erotic force that’s inside me”? Or maybe it’s connected in some way.
CA: Well, the biophilic force—it originates in our evolution; we are creatures of nature. We have been formed and shaped during millions of years in interconnection with nature, and of course this has left traces inside our soul, inside our psyche, and even inside our bodies. We cannot live without nature, so this is a fundamental thing, a fundamental force, the basic of life. No life form can live without nature.
This is why nowadays we say that biophilia is an innate tendency to connect with other species. The evolutionary biologist Edward Wilson, who was a professor at Harvard University, kind of introduced the biophilia term into natural sciences when he formulated his biophilia hypothesis. That means that nature is in our genes; it’s an innate tendency to connect with nature. We are born biophilic creatures, and all other kinds of life force that are based on that—our connection to nature is the basic of all the others, love and everything else.
TS: Now Clemens, I think that most people have an intuitive sense that being in nature, spending time walking in the woods, sitting in the forest, nourishes us in some very deep way, but what I think is unusual about your work is that you’ve collected the science that helps us understand what’s actually happening—the mechanisms that are at work. Can you go into that a bit? What’s actually happening inside of us physiologically when we’re feeling so nourished by being out in nature?
CA: Yes. What you just described is a very well-known phenomenon. We feel good in nature, we feel intuitively that nature is good for us, and like many other people I was always captured by the experience of nature. I was born at the edge of a forest, for example. But what I’m interested in as a biologist is, as you just said, the mechanisms of how nature is good for us. We know now that the effects and the impacts that nature has on us goes much, much deeper than we would have expected.
So let’s start with a very basic biochemical effect. When you enter a forest you breathe in forest air, of course, and this forest air is full of bioactive molecules derived by plants—for example, by trees. There are chemical compounds in the air that we call terpenes, and those are the most important secondary plant compounds that we know in nature. For example, trees use terpenes as a kind of chemical words to communicate to each other.
For example, when a pest enters the forest and attacks a tree, then this tree would react with an increase immune function and release specific terpenes that carry the information for other trees that the forest is attacked, so other trees prospectively can activate their own immune function as well. This is a very well-working, communicative mechanism that keeps the big organism of the forest alive and healthy.
What we know now from very recent scientific studies that have been published in 2013 is that even our own immune system reacts with an increased function when we breathe in those terpenes from forest air. If you spend one day in a forest, afterwards you have 40 percent more natural killer cells in your blood and even the activity of those cells is increased. The natural killer cells are very important for our immune function. They eliminate viruses and bacteria from our organism, so they are a very fundamental and very important part of our immune system.
Not only that, being exposed to terpenes also has an impact on our anti-cancer proteins. They’re called perforin, granulysin, and the so-called granzymes. Those proteins are very important for our immune system to attack dangerous cells that might lead to cancer or existing tumor cells. That’s why we call them the anti-cancer proteins. Those anti-cancer proteins are also increased by just being in nature and breathing in those terpenes from forest air.
TS: Now Clemens, this is the first time through your work, through your book The Biophilia Effect, and this conversation, that I’ve ever been introduced to this idea of terpenes. When were these discovered, and what’s the science behind their discovery?
CA: This is a very old knowledge. Terpenes are well-known since decades. The field of plant sociology, so the science of the social life of plants, started in the late 1960s. Biologists [have] known for very long that plants have a social life, which is maintained in a biological way by chemical exchange of messages. It is not that kind of communication that we use—for example when I’m talking to you, it’s not like talking with words—but it’s like talking with chemical symbols or chemical molecules that carry specific information. It’s the same way that our organs use to communicate to each other.
So you can look at the forest as a kind of big communicating organism, and the trees are kind of the organs of the forest, like our organs build up our organism. Every biological system needs communication, needs the biological exchange of information to stay healthy and to maintain its function. This is, as I said, a very old knowledge of biologists, but the new thing is that those terpenes have such a significant impact on our immune system—not only on our immune system, even on the health of our heart. For example, exposure to terpenes increases the production of DHEA in our body, which is a substance that protects us from heart attacks. It’s called dehydroepiandrosterone, for those who are interested in that.
In the last years science has collected many evidences for this physical, organic impact of natural substances on our organs and on our cells. This is the new thing in it. For me personally, it was very surprising to work on that book. It changed my view on nature, my view on the forest. I enter the forest with a different consciousness now, with a different state of mind, because I understand now that all those communicative processes, all those biological processes in the forest have much more to do with my health than I would have ever expected before.
I think we are just starting to understand how deeply we are interconnected with nature, and what a big and horrific mistake it is to destroy our ecosystems. We’re now on the point that we can say it’s not only bad for the earth, it’s not only bad for our climate and for the animals, but it is really—as I said—a horrific, negative thing for us personally, for us humans to destroy the ecosystems.
For me as a biologist who was always struggling for a new treatment of nature, for a better treatment of ecosystems and animals, it is also a very positive thing to have those arguments now. Because now I can say, “Look, it is not only good for the planet or good for other beings if you take care for the earth; it is even good for you, and for me, and for each of us.”
TS: Now I want to ask you a question, Clemens, I hope you’re not offended by it, but as you were talking about the power of being in the atmosphere of the forest and the atmosphere of the terpenes, it made me think: “Well, for people who don’t have the opportunity to just go walk out and be with the trees, will our medicine of the future bring this type of secretion, these molecules, these chemical words as you described them? Can I just step into a terpene steam room or something and be exposed to them and derive these benefits?”
CA: Yes. Well, that’s an interesting question, and I can answer that. There has been a very interesting study conducted by Japanese scientists at the Nippon Medical School, which is a medical university in Tokyo, and they found out that the distribution of terpenes inside the room indoors also has a significant health effect on us.
In this case they invited their patients to sleep in hotel rooms, and half of those patients have been treated with terpenes with a vaporizer, and the other half has been treated just by vapor of water—it was a kind of placebo. What they found out in the morning was that those treated with terpenes had significant changes in their blood, as I just described: increased number and activity of natural killer cells, and increased content of anti-cancer proteins and of some other very important cells like the neutrophils for example, which are kind of first-aid cells of our immune system.
From that example you can see that we can bring those positive effects of plant compounds into our hospitals, for example, into our sleeping rooms, everywhere. But we have to be aware that of course all those arrangements will never have the same effect like the forest, because the forest is spiked with chemical compounds. It is full of bioactive molecules, millions of them, and of course this rich mixture has a significantly stronger effect on us than we can ever copy or in a room—that’s quite clear.
But another possibility, you are probably thinking about people who live in a big city.
TS: [Yes.]
CA: Yes. The point is that I absolutely don’t think that city dwellers—people who live in the cities—don’t have access to trees or forests, because I don’t know any city that doesn’t have city forests, urban forests, or parks that are designed like small forests or with many trees that also produce, of course, terpenes.
For example, New York City, the Central Park of New York City contains many small forest ecosystems. Of course you can go there by metro, and you can inhale and breathe in those terpenes from forest air. Chicago is the city with the most roof forests and roof gardens in the boroughs, and you can have contact through trees, for example, in a roof garden—why not? There are so many possibilities for city dwellers to have contact to trees, and I think in every city you have such an option.
TS: Now Clemens, you talked about how these terpenes are like chemical words, they’re a form of communication, and that the forest itself is an ecosystem where all this communication’s happening. Why is it important to understand the social connections in the forest? Why is that important information?
CA: Yes, that’s an interesting question too. We should think about the word “social”—what does it mean regarding plants? Plants are social beings, not in the sense of humans or animals. The sociology of plants as I described is a biological and biochemical interaction, like between our organs. If we understand this kind of social behavior and communicative behavior of trees, for example, we also understand the complexity of the forest, which we can never copy or we can never reconstruct with technical methods or anything like that. This of course gives us the consciousness of how important our forest ecosystems are.
Another thing is if we talk about communication of plants and the social life of plants, usually people are really fascinated by it, by those facts. So we can gain some attention for the forest if we talk about the communication of plants and if we base our science on that. My personal hope is that every city should have its own urban forest in the center, and every hospital should have access to forest because we know that contact to trees is very important for healing.
There has been a very interesting study in the 1970s and 1980s conducted by Roger Ulrich, who is a health scientist and architect in Sweden and Denmark, and he found out that the view on a tree from a hospital window has a significant impact on the healing process. People who had to undergo surgery were divided in groups in a hospital, and one group could see a green surface with a tree through the window, and the other group could only see simply a wall—just a wall of a building. He found out that those who could see the trees had a significantly increased healing process, that means they could be released from the hospital significantly earlier, and especially they could reduce the intake of medica[tions], of painkillers, significantly compared to the group who could only see the house wall. The complications after the release of the hospital were significantly decreased in the group that could see the tree. That means simply seeing nature or natural impacts has an impact on our organic health.
Now you might wonder about that and say, “How is that possible?” But it is quite easy to explain, because we have a very complex neurological system. We know from scientific studies from the last years that seeing the forest or seeing a tree activates our parasympathetic nervous system, and that is the nerves of regeneration and growth, which is responsible to switch us into a mode in which our cells are regenerated and our psychological functions are calmed and balanced. This is the reason why being in nature or having access to nature even works on the psychological level, but has an impact on our cells and organs as well.
This connection—this unity of our psychological level and our physical organic level connected to the ecological level—is called eco-psychosomatics, which is a term practically unknown in science, but I want to contribute in the distribution of this new science. I think the book The Biophilia Effect brings quite good fundament to contribute to the distribution of eco-psychosomatics.
TS: And if you can define that term for our listeners.
CA: Yes. There is no official definition of eco-psychosomatics—and so far there is not even an English textbook about it—but I suggest to define eco-psychosomatics as a new science in which the human organism is viewed as extended beyond the surface of the skin and highly interconnected with the natural world. That means we don’t end at the surface of the skin and our body function goes beyond, so that impact from nature like chemical substances, or also just hearing or seeing natural impacts, becomes kind of integrity function of our organism.
If we look at our self as extended beyond the surface of the skin, then we have this eco-psychosomatic view on the human organism. It is nothing less than the logical consequence of psychosomatics, because psychosomatics, which is already established, views the human being as a composition of the mental or psychological layer connected to the physical layer, and both of them cannot be separated. But eco-psychosomatics goes one step further and understands that we are also interconnected with the natural world, and that this connection can also not be interrupted without causing a lot of harm for us.
TS: Now the Ulrich study that you shared with us about looking out at a tree and greenery from a hospital bed, and how this increases the speed of healing compared to someone who’s just in a sealed-off brick room—really interesting nine-year study that you write about in The Biophilia Effect. You also mention that even if somebody can’t look out a window, that even if they just see a photograph of a natural setting, that that has some level of benefit. I thought that was very interesting.
CA: Yes, there are many, many scientific studies that prove that seeing nature things on photographs has a calming effect on us, and the content of stress hormones in our blood decreases. This is really interesting because that means that even people who are really sick and ill and cannot leave their homes or their hospitals have a chance to connect to those natural healing forces by, for example, watching nature scenes, hearing the sounds of nature, and so on.
This is also quite understandable, and we can explain it quite well because we know that those impacts from nature that we just hear or see, as I just described, activate the parasympathetic nervous system—the nerves of regeneration and growth. This is not really surprising because, as I just said, we are eco-psychosomatic beings. We are a part of nature, and nature has shaped us, has formed us. Our unconscious mind knows very well which impacts of our environment are good or useful for us, and which are unhealthy for us.
For example, the stressful city life is identified as a kind of danger by our unconscious mind, by the so-called reptilian brain and the limbic system. They are responsible to permanently monitor our environment and switch us into the mode of, for example, fight or flight when we are in a dangerous situation. We know that modern life with the hectic urban life, for example, activates these mechanisms too often and too much. Nature things, being in nature or watching nature things, helps us to activate the nerve of regeneration and growth—the parasympathetic nerve system. So especially when we live in the city, in an urban center, in a metropole, it’s very useful for us to calm down and to help against stress diseases.
TS: Now one of the things I noticed, Clemens, as I was reading The Biophilia Effect is that I started looking around me, out of the windows of my home, and I’m fortunate—I live in Boulder, Colorado, in very natural environment. I started looking at the trees, and the sky, and the rocks, and I had this different appreciation because I was hearing about all of these studies, scientific research that you document in your book, and I was experiencing the life pulse of nature. But what I noticed then is later in the day, not that many hours after, I forgot about it and I was kind of back in my everyday, focused consciousness if you will, thinking about all of the things I had to get done. I’d lost that connection with that glowing, vibrant force. What do you suggest to people so that they can stay connected with that sense of resonance with the life force of nature?
CA: Well, this is a good question, and the answer is that you have to experience nature on a regular basis. What I personally do, I go to the forest every day. I get up in the morning at 6:00, and the first thing I do is I go out to the forest. So this activates my biophilic force every day, again and again, and this strengthens my connection to nature.
Of course not everybody can do that because not everybody has access to a forest every day, but you can go to the forest as often as possible. You could find your personal, special places there that you prefer, then you could take photos of them and you could put them on the wall at home. The first thing when you wake up in the morning that you see is one of those photos, for example.
Imagine that you always remember this place in the morning. You can go there and record the sounds of the trees when the wind blows through the crowns of the trees, or you can record the voices of the bird song, or the water, whatever, and you can listen to it during the break at work, for example, or in the morning during breakfast. So you can bring those biophilic experiences into your everyday life, and this will strengthen your personal connection because it will always recall your memories of nature.
For me personally, that helps a lot. There are scientific studies that have shown definitely that the sound of nature, the recorded sound of nature, has a significant positive effect on our psyche, even helps people with depression to get into a better mood. People who can see nature scenes of the wall at their working space, for example, report about stressful events and about burnout significantly less and more seldom—can you say that? More seldom? Is that correct?
TS: Sure.
CA: Yes? Than people that don’t have those nature scenes in their office. We have a lot of studies from Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who are environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan, and they have proved in several studies that looking out of the window from the office and seeing a tree or seeing nature scenes has a significantly positive effect on your work, and on your concentration, for example, and the attention that you can maintain during your work. So I think that we should plant trees and plants in front of our office windows, for example, or even if that’s not possible at least plant trees into the office—potted trees, small trees, and plants that we like—so that we are surrounded by plants and by biophilic impressions all day long.
TS: Now you mentioned, Clemens, that first thing in the morning you get up, you take a walk in the forest, and you feel this activation of the biophilia effect in you. What does it feel like to you? Describe it from the inside, not in scientific terms, but as a feeling.
CA: It is a very strong feeling of identity. I feel to be a part of this ecosystem. For me it has a very strong and important spiritual complement, because what is spirituality? Human spirituality is to seek of our roots. Where do we come from? What are we? If I experience nature every day, for example, then I always connect, reconnect with my roots, with my origins. As I said, the experience of the forest is connected to my identity as a human being.
It’s quite interesting if we look back to Albert Einstein, the big and famous physicist, who wrote that the experience of nature was one of the most important forces in his life that helped him—not that helped him. How would you say? That, yes, that helped him doing his research with all of his heart. He, for example, called himself—or the kind of spiritual feeling that he had, he called this feeling “cosmic spirituality.” That means feeling as a part of nature, feeling as a part of this ecosystem of the universe. He was a physicist, so he was very interested in the universe.
But let’s break it down to the forest, let’s look at the forest. If we enter a forest we can feel a part of it. This is a very strong feeling, and especially nowadays in our life when we are disconnected from nature. Maybe this is the reason why we kind of lose a part of our identity and why so many people are seeking for new kinds of spirituality, and often in some cases that leads them up the garden path.
Because you know, not all of those offers that we can find regarding spirituality are really helpful for us, but if you go back to nature, back to your roots, this is a very honest thing. The forest doesn’t lie [to] you, the forest doesn’t cheat on you. If you go back to your roots you have the direct connection to the force of life, to the biophilic forces in the forest that are also the source of your own biophilic forces.
That’s the point: you can find the biophilic force in yourself and you can find the biophilic force in the forest, in the trees, in every animal, and this is what connects the whole network of life, the community of life forms, and we can feel a part of that. This is a really strong spiritual feeling for me that gives me the feeling of my identity. Yes, that’s how I would describe it.
TS: Very good, very helpful. Now you describe in the subtitle of your book that we’ll be exploring the “healing bond between humans and nature,” and what we’ve been talking about is how by being in a forest, by experiencing nature in a photograph, how we’re affected, how we’re changed, how our nervous system is affected, et cetera. What are we offering as part of that bond to the natural world? What are we offering as humans?
CA: That’s exactly the point. Well, there is a discussion going on beyond biologists regarding the biophilia hypothesis. Are we really a biophilic species, or are we a biophobic species—the opposite? Destructive, we are destroying the planet, and that’s for commercial reasons. We are destroying the forests, we are destroying our ecosystems. I must admit that we cannot say that the relationship of us humans to the natural world is balanced, because we are destroying more than we give. That for me personally, it’s quite interesting to see, to observe—that single humans, individuals, are almost always biophilic; they like nature, they like being in nature. They always describe how beautiful the forest is for them.
But as a species, as a society, we often behave biophobic, which means destructive to the natural world. This is a phenomena which we should overcome, I think, because responsible for this is the psychology of collectives. We grow up and we are educated in a school system that teaches us that we have to be economically successful, and that we have to study something which is useful for economy, and many people believe that they should study something that the system wants them to study.
I often heard that, “Well, you can study biology, but you know, biology is not something that you can live from economically,” and I never listened to those voices. But I know many people who have been impacted deeply by teachers, for example, and also by parents, and who believe that they rather shouldn’t study or learn something that they really want to learn from the bottom of their hearts, but rather something which is economically sustainable. This dominance of the economic view instead of the ecological view is responsible for why we behave destructive. But as I just said, every human being, or almost every individual of us, is biophilic. So there is the potential for a biophilic society for the future.
But I can answer your question only in that way that I say yes, well, we don’t give back very much to nature. We rather take something, takes lots out of it, all the resources, but we don’t give something back. The point is also we are destroying and using the resources of people in Africa and South America, for example, for our food production, for our livestock farming. From an ethical view, from a social view, this is really a horrific thing. I’m hoping to contribute to an ecological change, to a shift in our society, an ecological turn of our society, towards an ecological society that takes care for the planet, for the other people, for the animals, for the future of the planet of Earth. But we’re talking about the future and I know very well that even if biophilia is a beautiful thing, our species doesn’t behave like a biophilic species.
TS: Now obviously you’re making an important contribution and standing up and speaking for the natural world in your work and in your writing. I’m curious, when you’re just being and you’re out in the woods, you’re in a forest, do you have a sense of communicating yourself and giving back to the natural world in some way? What does that feel like?
CA: Yes, that’s a very strong feeling and I’m absolutely not alone with that. I’m sure that many people know the experience [of] how good it feels to behave in a way that doesn’t cause too much harm to the environment and to other species. I can give you one concrete example. When I sit in the forest and I listen to the bird song, it really makes me so happy knowing that I don’t kill animals for my food, for example. This is a very important topic of my life since I was 13, and now I’m 37. That means for 24 years, 25 years, I’ve been a vegetarian, and in the last years even vegan. I don’t kill animals for my food. This is a thing that really strengthens to my connection to the animal kingdom. It gives me a good feeling in the forest to meet foxes, deer, squirrels, birds, knowing that as much as I can, I don’t destroy or harm the animal kingdom.
I think that the trees in the forest are very interesting, and really I have a lot of respect for trees, and we should protect them as much as we can. What really brings consciousness into the forest are the animals. The animals are the most conscious entities of the forest, in my perception. If you meet animals in the forest, it’s a good possibility to question your own behavior, for example, when it’s about treating animals. I’m sure that the most people who listen now have already thought a lot about animal ethics and our treatment of animals, but if you look at the world we must say that animals are really treated in a very unethical way. I really hope in the future that I can somehow contribute to a shift towards a more humane treatment of animals as well in the future.
That was just one example how we can try to give something back to other species: not killing them, not destroying them, not putting them into cages, not eating their meat, for example—a very important point for me personally, which has a lot to do with biophilia. Biophilia means love to other species as well, and those are the animals, for example.
TS: Now one of the things I read in your book The Biophilia Effect that I had never heard before, in addition to being introduced to terpenes, I was introduced to this idea that trees have a way of clicking their roots. It’s sound that might be inaudible to the human ear, but there’s actually a clicking sound in the root systems, and that’s also a form of communication among trees. How was this clicking sound detected?
CA: It’s a kind of clicking or crackling sound, which has been detected by—you know, the point is now I’m not an English native speaker, I actually don’t know really an English word for—
TS: You’re doing great, Clemens.
CA: It has been detected by special technical equipment that can identify those sounds.
TS: How do we know what the clicking represents?
CA: It’s a wavelength that the human ear cannot hear, but there are of course machines that can identify those noises.
TS: Is there any sense what it means? What these clicking sounds are representing?
CA: No, we don’t understand this yet. This is a big question of biology—what exactly those clicking sounds mean. It is quite obvious that it is a kind of communicative process. Not only those clicking sounds, there is a network of fungi in the forest, which is called mycorrhiza—probably many people might know this word—and this is a symbiosis of plants and fungi. Those fungi connect to the roots of the trees and they connect all the trees of a forest to each other. Trees can kind of send nutrition and other compounds through this network of mycorrhiza, and biochemical, bioactive molecules like the terpenes that can be found in the forest air in a volatile form, but also in a liquid form or in the form of a molecule in the mycorrhiza.
So there are many channels that plants can use to communicate to each other. The mycorrhiza, the clicking sounds, the volatile substances, the terpenes in the forest air. But honestly I just want to distinguish that kind of communication from the communication of animals and humans, because that kind of plant communication—and this is really a big misunderstanding. People often think it is that kind of communication that animals are able to do. It is a different kind of communication; it is a biochemical, biological communication like our cells use to communicate to each other.
Our cells have the same or very similar biological, biochemical ways to communicate to each other, to transport information from one cell to the next cell, and so can our organs too. Our organs can communicate to each other with biochemical substances, and this is extremely important to maintain the function of an organism. That’s why I say the forest is a kind of organism, and the plants and trees are somehow like the organs of the forest.
But it is not a kind of communication like I want to call my publisher and tell them that I’m feeling sad today, “Please help me, send me somebody to help me,” or something like that. In the media they often draw a picture of plants kind of chit-chatting with each other, and as a biologist it really causes strange feelings inside me when I hear that. It is not that kind of communication that animals are capable [of], because animals are really able to communicate in a social way. This is different; it’s really a social process between animals or between us and an animal.
I would for example make that example. My organs are communicating to each other using biochemical substances, biochemical molecules like the trees, but I wouldn’t say that my organs are consciously communicating in a social way to each other. But I would any time say that a dog is communicating in a social way to another dog or to a human being, for example, or a cat, or a pig, or a cow, or whatever. This is so important for me because we should respect plants and we should understand that they are incredible creatures. Really, it’s unbelievable how mysterious the life of plants can be, and how little of it we understand nowadays. But we should not mix it up with the communication of animals and humans—it is a different level.
That’s why it’s important for me always to mention also the animals that live in the forest, which are—the level of consciousness is a different level of consciousness. I don’t want to say it’s a higher level of consciousness, but this individual experience lives in a human or in an animal, but plants don’t have—in my personal experience—they don’t have this individual experience, this feeling that you have inside. Plants are more collective; they’re collective organisms. This is a very important thing.
We have an anthropologist in Germany, he’s called Wolf-Dieter Storl, and he was a lecturer in the United States for decades. He’s a very spiritual person, he’s a friend of mine, and he writes books about plants. But he also distinguishes the level of consciousness that you can find in an animal or in a human being from the consciousness that you can find in a plant. He always says—I’m not so familiar with spiritual terms, I’m a biologist, but very open-minded—but he explained to me his view of the world, and he said that the soul of the plant surrounds the plant and is collected to a kind of collective spirit of the plants. But the soul of a mammal—for example, a pig, a cat, a cow, and a human being—the soul of us is inside us. This makes, also from the teachings of some spiritual people, quite a big difference.
TS: Now what I’m imagining here as we come to a close in our conversation is that somebody’s listening and they’re excited to go for a walk, and be outside, and really connect with the natural world, and feel into the social collective, and maybe they’ll run into a squirrel or who knows what kind of animal. What are your suggestions for that person to absolutely open up, and receive, and get the most out of their nature experience?
CA: Well, I think that you should develop your own and personal individual approach to nature. Some people might like to meditate in nature, for example. What I personally do is that I’m going to forest bathing, which is a practice of ancient Asia, of ancient China actually, and it’s a way to connect physically and mentally to the forest. I just want to say one thing. Forest bathing is now a quite well-known term, and everybody believes that it goes back to a Japanese tradition, but this is not true. It goes back to a Chinese tradition, which is called sēnlínyù. This is a very old tradition—2,500 years old, as old as the teachings of qi gong. Those old masters of qi gong 2,500 years ago developed exercises to take in, or to absorb, the qi of the forest, as they called it—the life energy, the energy of life. Only in the 1980s the Japanese authorities kind of overtook the term of forest bathing from the Chinese culture. Nobody knows that, I just want to say that.
This is my personal favorite, sēnlínyù is my personal favorite—regarding biophilia, I mean—and I practice it since 20 years. I was taught qi gong, tai chi, and sēnlínyù by the Chinese master of kung fu, who was born in the south of China but is now a teacher in Austria at my university. Since that, I’m involved in sēnlínyù in the original forest bathing. This is my personal approach when I want to have a really, really deep experience of nature, because it is a meditative state but it is connected to movement. Very slow movements, calming movements, sometimes quite exhausting but still calm and very well-balanced, harmonic movements. Those movements are designed in a way that, regarding Chinese tradition, you are taking in the qi of the forest, the energy of life that the forest contains. But you’re not only taking, you’re also giving energy, so it is a kind of circle. Those exercises are really great, as I said, it is a kind of meditation but it’s also physical exercising, and it gives me a very strong experience of nature.
In my book The Biophilia Effect, I have described a few of those exercises. But there are many, many other possibilities. For example, you can lay down on the soil and just relax and imagine how your body is becoming heavier and heavier, because this has an effect on your muscles, which is proven. The imagination that your arms, for example, are becoming heavier like a weight, has the effect that your muscles will relax very deeply. This is called autogenic training. Another possibility is simply to walk through the forest and open your senses—your eyes, your ears, open yourself for the smell of the forest—and just try to identify as many different sensations as you can, intensifying your sensation in the forest, which is very useful because the forest is full of sensations. Yes, there are many ways. I think you should just find your personal and perfect way.
Another way to experience nature very intense is the biophilic training, as I call it. I always say the biophilia training—that means I go to the forest for sports. Don’t go to the fitness center. There are no terpenes, there is no fresh air, and the movements are not natural. Go to the forest. For example, every second day I take my mountain bike and go to the forest. I drive up the mountain in the forest, then I get off the bike and start a little bit of off-road running, which is great for your muscles from your feet to your head. Everything is trained on such a natural terrain in a very intense way. Then I find a tree, or I find a heavy stone, or a heavy branch of a tree, and I kind of make some strength exercises.
This is my way of connecting to the forest in a very intense way. I think there are so many possibilities. From the meditative way to the biophilic training, you will find your own personal approach, I think.
TS: And Clemens, I just have—
CA: Let me just mention one more thing, which is really important. Just one more thing. We know from scientific studies that our imagination has a significant impact on our body function, on our organic functions. For example, there has been conducted a very interesting study in which people were asked to imagine their neutrophils, which are a very important part of our immune system, to become very sticky. Because neutrophils are the first-aid cells of our body, that means they are transported by the blood, and whenever there is an event—like, for example, a pathogen intrudes into your blood and into your body—those neutrophils have to be there very fast. That means they have to stop themselves in the blood flow and get out into the tissue. For that, they’re using sticky substances, adhesive substances, and those molecules help them to connect to the blood vessels inside and pull themselves out into the tissue that needs help.
Those students in this study were asked to visualize their neutrophils to become more and more sticky. They did that for a week or something, and in the end they found out that those people who made those visualizations really had a significantly increased content of those adhesive molecules, those sticky substances, in their blood. Those who just were only sent to meditation, and to relaxation, and so on—they didn’t have those changes. This is a very strong proof that our imagination has an impact on our organic function.
What I often do, or what I often recommend in my seminars to people is that they can support the biophilia effect in the forest by visualizing the terpenes being transported from the trees to their nose, for example, or to their mouth, and then being transported into their lungs when they breathe in, and especially visualizing the effect. However you visualize your natural killer cells, or your anti-cancer proteins, you can probably support the effect of forest air by visualization. This is also a way to connect to the forest in a very intense way, because the forest anyway activates your fantasy, and it’s very interesting after those exercises to ask the participants about what kind of pictures the forest brought up in their mind. Usually they visualize the terpenes as some kind of misty fog in the forest that comes to them, or as a kind of something magical.
One person visualized the terpenes as a kind of biomass that was taken into their blood, and their organism was a kind of compost, a very natural compost. That was quite interesting. This compost was kind of activated by the terpenes from the forest air and then this person, she felt warmth in her body. She said how her whole body became warmer and kind of activated this compost function. That was a very interesting picture, I had to smile about that.
The forest activates our fantasy, and if you want—if you’re open minded for that—why not try to visualize the process of the intake of forest air, of terpenes, and the effect that they have on your immune function? This is the reason why I also described a few fantasy exercises in the book, and why I describe several scientific studies that prove that fantasy has an effect on our body function.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Clemens Arvay. He’s the author of the new book The Biophilia Effect: A Scientific and Spiritual Exploration of the Healing Bond Between Humans and Nature. Clemens, I know you’re in Austria right now as we speak, and have taken the time for this conversation together, and I’m so grateful to you for your great love of the natural world—your activated biophilia. Thank you so much.
CA: Thank you very much. I just want to say: I’m not a native speaker, everybody could hear that, but I hope you’re satisfied, and I hope that the listeners are satisfied. I gave my best. It was great to talk to you. Thank you.
TS: I feel very satisfied, and I feel your deep love, and your activism, and your generosity. Thank you so much.
CA: Thank you very much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
