Blending Worlds

Lynny Brown and Barton Robison create opportunities for equitable access to nature.

By Althea Sterup

Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative Partner Lynny Brown grew up in the city and had little interaction with what she thought of as nature. She says, “nature was something that other people did,” people who were more privileged and had more money. However, she remembers, “as a city girl growing up, I did have experience outdoors in the public parks or even the park outside of our apartment. We had a little green space and I would spend long summer days just digging in the sand and catching frogs and running around barefoot in the swampy, disgusting, muddy pond that probably had urban runoff in it.”

Brown wanted to be a park ranger growing up, and though that plan did not pan out, she is now an advocate for the outdoors through the Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative, an organization designed “to connect communities to the benefits that being outside and spending time in nature provides,” while prioritizing working with groups experiencing health inequities.

It proves quite difficult for some people to even visit nature. Brown says, “there are certain communities that experience more barriers or injustices in accessing the outdoors or natural spaces. For communities of color, it might not be safe to go for a run. For low-income communities, maybe there’s not a park within a 10-minute walk from their house. So there are certain communities that experience inequities as a result of centuries of economic exclusion and oppression, and being unwelcome into these natural spaces.”

The Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative work to make the outdoors accessible to everybody. Most of their current projects work to create more safe green spaces, especially for kids. Brown is currently helping to build an outdoor preschool. Preparation included visiting outdoor preschools and playing with the kids. They showed her structures they made and she was “getting to crawl through them” as well as “running through the mud with them [and] finding salamanders.”

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Barton Robison—co-Health and Outdoors Partner—holds a favorite memory of a project in which he and Brown were involved. In an effort to make the outdoors more accessible to Oregonians with disabilities, The Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative—partnering with Oregon Parks & Recreation, Adventures Without Limits, and Oregon Spinal Cord Injury Connection—hosted a camping trip for wheelchair users in 2018. Robison remembered a moment where 20 different people were out on a lake in kayaks during that trip and “it just started pouring rain on us,” he says. “But it was so cool. And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, this is my job.’”

Robison works hard to promote nature’s benefits to others, stating that “when I was in college, I had really serious mental health problems and really was struggling with coming out and forming my own identity, and ended up in the hospital because of that for a little while. So when I was kind of recovering from that... I spent a lot of time outside and just realized how important that was for my mental health, but also for my spiritual health, just to be able to be out in nature and to feel kind of a part of something bigger than myself.”

He is helping to make a green schoolyard and public park in Chiloquin, Oregon. Robison says they are building “a brand new playground for the kids at school, with a lot of natural elements like trees and native habitat added. And then it will also be open to the community as a public park during non-school hours.”

Brown is doing something similar by promoting outdoor preschools and working to give preschoolers an appreciation for nature and being outside. She says they have “been doing that by looking at policy changes” and putting “together tool kits for preschool providers to use to make their spaces more accessible and equitable, and we’re just doing a lot of networking to try and promote all the benefits of spending time outside, especially at such a critical age of 0 to 5.”

Giving young kids the ability to learn about and enjoy nature can have far-reaching effects when they are older, and can promote a healthier lifestyle. Almost all outdoor activities involve some physical exertion. According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, in a study led by Thijs Eijsvogels and Paul Thompson, “even a small amount of exercise may have substantial health benefits compared with being sedentary.” These benefits include preventing “heart and blood vessel disease, diabetes, dementia, and even some types of cancer.”

Being outside also inherently means being out in the sunshine, meaning exposure to critical vitamin D, and according to the Journal of Pharmacology and Pharmacotherapeutics, “vitamin D insufficiency affects almost 50% of the population worldwide. An estimated 1 billion people worldwide, across all ethnicities and age groups, have a vitamin D deficiency.” This can cause heart disease and high blood pressure, diabetes, infections, and immune system disorders, as well as some types of cancer, such as colon, prostate, and breast cancers. Encouraging time outside is an excellent way to reduce those numbers.

Dutch researchers in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that living close to parks, or at the very least trees, can have strong positive effects on mental health. Additionally, living without those things can negatively affect your mental well-being. They also found that the study “stresses the importance of green space close to home for children and lower socioeconomic groups” because those groups were most susceptible to the effects of the study.

Nature can also relieve stress. A study from The Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research found that office workers with windows showing forest views had higher self-reported levels of job satisfaction and lower levels of stress than did workers without that greenery. Another study from the University of Michigan looked into the effects of walking in nature as opposed to walking in an urban setting. The subjects who walked in nature performed significantly better in memory-related tasks than the other group.

Even with all these clear benefits, some people are still not receiving vital time outdoors, and it may not be entirely their fault. Some people face health inequities that make it very difficult to get to the outdoors. These also tend to be the people that need those benefits the most because they often have more mental and physical health complications as a direct result of the problems that make it so hard to access green spaces.

Even with increased efforts to make green spaces accessible to everyone, those lucky enough to venture outside don’t always do so. Societal exclusions are not the only reason that people don’t get outside, for sometimes society does not view these needs as vital. People prioritize productivity so much that they tend to ignore the body’s needs. Many would say that they are just too busy to spend time outside, even if they want to. For the busy bee, Robison stressed the importance of habit building. He said, especially lately, “we have to go to school on a screen, we have to work on a screen, but I always try to walk my dog at least once a day for half an hour. [...] and having that as kind of my accountability check has been really important.”

If everyone makes an effort to create these small changes in life, Brown says that “you start to normalize that. Taking time to chill outdoors is a thing that we should value and we should put our mental health, our physical health, and our community health probably above productivity.”

The past year has been stressful for just about everybody, but it has given many people more time to reflect on the state of their physical and mental health. Building habits centered around outdoor time proves critical, which might make navigating stressful and difficult times just a little bit easier.

Want to find out more about the Oregon Health and Outdoors Initiative? Contact Barton Robison or check out their website!

robison@willamettepartnership.org

healthandoutdoors.org