It seems pretty intuitive: Immersing yourself in a forest can be a form of therapy. But what about after living through a devastating wildfire where that forest burned? That’s exactly what’s being done for survivors of the record-breaking 2018 Camp Fire in California — and it seems to be working.
It’s called forest therapy, or forest bathing. And it’s well documented to have real benefits — both mentally and physically.
Rebecca Randall documented it all in a recent piece for High Country News, and she joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
REBECCA RANDALL: Forest therapy traces back to the 1980s in Japan. It was called shinrin-yoku. And doctors in Japan began studying the benefits of being in the forest. Today,
forest therapy in the United States, a lot of the forest therapy guides are trained by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy. So if you were to go on a forest therapy walk, you'd have a guide and you'd probably be maybe a dozen other people with you and you would be invited to notice some of the things around you.
The questions would be aimed at engaging all of your senses. So it could be, what do you see, what do you smell? What do you hear, what's in motion around you? And then you would just have time between each of those questions to kind of notice and reflect on the question.
You could decide like I think I wanna touch the dirt or I want to, you know, feel the grass on my hands or you could decide that on your own and then you would be invited back to share with a group if you felt inclined. And you could do anything like you could be sitting on a rock the whole entire time or you could be wandering and walking around. Really the whole experience is guided, but it's up to you to decide how you're gonna respond.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, so, OK , so it's this very kind of visceral experience that people are guided through to connect with their senses with the moment. And as you mentioned, there, there's been real research into this about the benefits it can provide, dig into that a little bit more for us and tell us about what they found.
RANDALL: Like, for example, doctors found that improved immune system function could happen when you're exposed to the phytochemicals found in coniferous forests. So just like the, you know, the things that trees are kind of giving off the chemicals that trees are giving off. So just literally being around them. So that's why you kind of hear the term forest bathing as the ways of interpreting shinrin-yoku.
GILGER: That's so interesting. So, it's beyond the sort of mental therapy kind of things about, like, you know, living in the present or understanding the things that are happening now. It's, it's, there's physical things happening here.
RANDALL: Yes. Yes. There's physical things happening by just being present in the forest. So it's not, it's not necessarily all of the things that you are doing as you participate. I think what the Association for Nature and Forest Therapy are kind of trying to take it deeper and address the broken human nature relationships that we might have and to help people to reconnect with nature or remember the connections that we have with nature.
GILGER: So in this piece for High Country News, you're looking at forest bathing or forest therapy in this very specific and really interesting context, which is how it's being used for survivors of wildfires there in California. Tell us a little bit about that.
RANDALL: Yeah, back in 2018, after the Camp Fire, the director of the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve, Eli Goodsell, he just saw a need to help people reconnect with their environment in the place that they live because people who had experienced that fire, many people lost their homes in that fire or maybe you even just, you know, had weeks of smoky skies or you had to help a friend park their RV in your driveway or some other kind of impact that the whole community kind of experienced this together.
So he felt that people needed to reconnect with nature and start to love where they lived again. So he applied for a grant to train guides and they began offering those walks I think in 2021.
GILGER: Tell us a little bit about how it's worked for those people. You spoke with some of them profiled a few here. Is it successful? Are they feeling less fear, anxiety, et cetera.
RANDALL: Yeah. In the surveys that they have, 92% of participants agreed that they felt more connected to nature. 87% felt less stressed. 85% were less anxious. One of the people I talked to Jessie Raeder talked quite a bit about the way that she has benefited from forest therapy over the years and she's kind of a repeat repeat person. Sometimes people like it and they just keep going well.
GILGER: I mean, these are folks often who have really seen wildfires do awful things like they lived in the forest. I'm guessing they loved them at some point and then experienced this really traumatic thing and this helped them get past it. Talk a little bit about the kind of trauma that they experienced in the forest.
RANDALL: Yeah. I mean, the thing that stuck out to me the most was when I talked with social worker, Kate Scowsmith, who was a case worker for the survivors of the campfire. She herself lost her home as well, but she managed the case work for all of the survivors. So she was constantly meeting people who were very traumatized.
One story she told me was that there was a woman who had her home rebuilt and then didn't want to move back there again because she was afraid of the trees around her and thought that, you know, I don't think I can move back. So even though she took all the steps and had her home rebuilt, she still had a lot of trauma around moving back to paradise.
GILGER: Yeah, that makes sense. OK. So let's talk about this really interesting idea that you brought up a couple of times here that people talk to you about, which is this idea that forest therapy or bathing kind of repair the broken relationship between humans and nature, right?
And this is broader than a wildfire because we're in this climate change world in which a lot of people are experiencing more natural disasters, more extreme heat, more extreme weather in general and, and that kind of relationship is probably being broken more often.
RANDALL: Yeah, Blake Ellis, the eco therapy program manager talked quite a bit about this with me. She said that she sees forest therapy as a climate adaptation, not just a disaster response and that really stuck with me. So we can see forest therapy as something that communities could implement just because we're seeing increasing climate disasters and impacts from climate change. Not just when something happens and that forest therapy might be a way to help adjust our reaction to what we're experiencing.
But also I think that in an environment like in Chico, California, where there are increasing wildfires, but also wildfires are a part of that ecosystem. And we know there will be seasonal wildfires, they're just becoming bigger and becoming mega fires. So wildfires need to happen in order for the ecosystem to be a healthy functioning system.
So there's also an element of forest therapy being a way to connect with nature as it is and sort of adjust our expectations of what the forest can be for us, if that makes sense. They are looking at now doing forest therapy alongside prescribed burns for that very reason.
