Can the Absence of Trees Effect Our Health?

October 20, 2014 

   Yesterday, a friend I was visiting lamented about the trees on the lots next to her. She was not happy that they were being removed. 

   It got me thinking about their purpose. These trees looked dry, overgrown and messy. Are trees just supposed to just look pretty or do they play a role in the environment and our well being? 

   Will the removal of them effect anything, I wondered? I love going for walks through the forest down to marine terrace and out to the ocean. Listening to the critters in the forest, birds in the trees and the sounds of the trees bowing in the wind make me feel like a kid. Nothing I have to do. I can wonder and daydream for as long as I like. Clearing my head with every deep breathe of refreshing ocean air and the smell of pine. I have fond memories of childhood campouts in beautiful forests, exploring new areas with my dad and sister as if we were the first to find these trails, ending with a fire in the pit for warmth and s'mores in our bellies.

What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. 

-- Mahatma Gandhi

Trees and Well Being

   Trees add beauty to our environment and are beneficial to our mental and emotional health. Seeing them and being among them can create feelings of relaxation and well being. They serve as a barrier from a harsh environment creating sense of privacy, solitude and security. Researchers Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who teach psychology at the University of Michigan, found that nature and trees gave office workers a lift even if all they could do was see it through a window.

   The beautiful colors, shapes and textures give us a wonderful feeling of being alive. Changes in the color of the leaves in many parts of the world designate a change in season. Different fruits that ripen and the flowers that bloom add enticing smells and flavors to the new season. These happy feelings contributes to decreases in levels of the stress hormone cortisole.

Trees and Clean Air

   Trees remove gaseous pollutants by absorbing them through the pores in the leaf surface. Particulates are trapped and filtered by leaves, stems and twigs, and washed to the ground by rainfall. The carbon is stored in their roots and trunk. According to AmericanForests.org a single tree can absorb 10 pounds of air pollutants a year and produce nearly 260 pounds of oxygen which is enough to support two people.

   A study by Dave Nowak and Eric Greenfield of the U.S. Forest Service's Northern Research Station, and Satoshi Hirabayashi and Allison Bodine of the Davey Institute directly links the removal of air pollution with human health. U.S. Forest Service scientists and collaborators calculated that trees are saving more than 850 human lives a year and preventing 670,000 incidents of acute respiratory symptoms.

   According to Mark Loeb of Infectious Disease Division at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, exposure to air pollution may increase a person's susceptibility to pneumonia by interfering with immune defenses designed to protect the lung from pathogens. The value researchers placed on the human health effects of the reduced air pollution is nearly $7 billion every year. 

Trees and Clean Water

   Trees also do an incredible job at filtering water. Where we live on the California central coast, with riparian forests of oak and other hardwoods, trees anchor what would be otherwise loose soils. Instead of rain water running off in eroded watersheds, trees foster the absorbtion of it to recharge aquifers. And trees help prevent erosion and flooding when rains are overabundant.

Trees and Climate Change

   Scientists are very concerned about deforestation of large amounts of trees in places like the Amazon River system and the islands of Indonesia. Trees are vital to slowing down the greenhouse effect, the result of excess gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other gases, which magnify the heat of the sun on the surface of the earth.

   Trees absorb CO2, removing and storing the carbon while releasing the oxygen back into the air. In one year, an acre of mature trees absorbs the amount of CO2 produced by 26,000 miles of driving a  car.

Some did-you-knows:

...in one year an acre of mature trees can provide oxygen for 18 people?

...post operative stays are shortened when patients are placed in rooms with a view of trees and open spaces?

...long-term exposure to traffic pollution independently increased the risk of hospitalization for pneumonia and doubled the risk of hospitalization in seniors ages 65 and older?

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Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

-- Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)