Is a Blade of Grass Enough? with Nadina Galle

Nadina Galle I have managed to get myself and my one and a half year old, down four flights of stairs. And immediately as I opened the door, I am greeted by just the rush of cyclists, racing pass, mopeds, scooters, and then just beyond that, a tram, many different cars and taxis trying to overtake one another. So I grab his hand and I basically shuffle as quickly as I can to the end of the street and I turn left and immediately I’m greeted by a row of linden trees that are parked next to a big wide canal.

Michael Feigelson That’s Nadine Galle when I asked her to describe how she experienced nearby nature as a new mom in Amsterdam.

Nadina Galle And within about 100 or 200 or so paces we get to this little tiny oasis and we open the gate and there’s a little pathway that takes you through this 100 square meter site that takes you really into what feels like dense vegetation even for me but especially for my meter tall one and a half year old who is just going through this area and exploring it and touching the plants and crouching down and looking at the dirt and I can just sit and relax and breathe for a minute and he can enjoy himself.

Michael Feigelson Nadina’s story is one that I think resonates with a lot of parents. Before kids, the city is something we move through, but after kids, it’s something we start to see and feel. Speeds that used to seem normal now feel far too fast, and places that used to be close start to seem so far away.

We start to notice what’s missing, but also what’s there. Parenthood connects you to the small nature all around. Not the big parks or the places that were designed to impress, but the leftover bits, the patches that weren’t really planned but somehow ended up mattering.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent, and today we focus on how becoming a parent rewires our relationship to nature. Making us more sensitive to the life all around us, even when that life is as small as a blade of grass.

This is something about which Nadina knows a lot. As an ecological engineer, a national geographic explorer, and the author of The Nature of Our Cities, she has made a career out of using technology to measure the health of urban nature.

But before Nadina started using sensors to measure soil health and smart tech to conduct a tree census, she had a very different encounter with nature.

Nadina Galle I grew up in a very typical southwestern Ontario in Canada suburb, you know, the one where they go in and remove all remnants of the ecosystem that was there, put it in the homes and then after the fact, put in a couple of trees and then name it something like Forest Heights or Flower Meadow, some kind of ode to the nature that was their. And I always thought that was so, so crazy.

Michael Feigelson Before she ever thought about parenthood, Nadina was already noticing something most of us miss, the gap between the world we build and the world that we actually live in.

Nadina Galle And as I would be walking or biking through these neighborhoods, they would all have the same kind of cookie cutter, subdivision development, and I would walk through these and I was just like, what a strange style of urban development. So I think it was less so that connection with nature originally that fascinated me, it was more so urban development, what is up with suburban sprawl? That I just could never really wrap my head around. Why was there a grocery store a kilometer from my house, but there was basically no way for me to get there because there was not even a sidewalk to be able to walk on.

Michael Feigelson You remove the nature and then name the place after what used to be there, which is indeed pretty strange. So I asked Nadina if this dissonance was what motivated her or if perhaps there was something else.

Nadina Galle When we moved to Canada, my dad, he was like, well, we got to do as the Canadians do, we got to go camping and canoeing and portaging. And I loved it. There were just such formative memories. And one of them that really stuck out is me walking far up ahead and my dad walking behind me with my little sister on his shoulders. And all of a sudden I look back to see where they are. And almost in like a perfect quadrant, we could see bear cubs and then my dad and my little sister on his shoulders and then the mom on the other side of the path. Probably the worst thing you can do is get in between a mother and her cubs. I mean, but we got really, really lucky. We couldn’t tell if it was a black or brown bear. Now many years on, I know that there’s very different strategies you should use with both.

Michael Feigelson That’s right, if it’s brown, lay down. If it’s black, fight back. And if it white, well, you’ll see the light.

Nadina Galle We had a 50% chance of getting it right. Our strategy was to stay very, very still. And luckily they just went on their way and stumbled on and we were fine. But yeah, it’s a story that we tell because it was such a formative memory.

Michael Feigelson What’s the imprint that it left on you? Why is this particular memory important?

Nadina Galle That the world doesn’t revolve around us, that there is a whole other world out there. Human beings have worked very, very hard to get ourselves into a position where we have absolutely everything under control. But I think that kind of comfort and that design safety has also removed us so far from the natural world that we’ve begun to feel that in other aspects of our lives. And I think when you come face to face with a mama bear and her cubs, it puts that into perspective for you.

Michael Feigelson Most of us don’t run into bears. I, for example, grew up in a city where pigeons and squirrels were the most common form of wildlife. In cities, everything is designed for us, predictable, controlled, safe.

If we want a different experience, something more wild, we have to look for the mistakes, not the plans. In fact, even for Nadina, memories of mama bears were the exception, not the rule.

Nadina Galle The majority of my relationship with nature was these little forgotten patches, the little ones the developer forgot about and that’s what made them so good. And I think the fact that they were little made them perfect for me as a kid to explore them because they felt like they were at my size. I think when you are able to let a child roam freely in those kinds of areas, it builds a kind of independence and skills that you just don’t get anywhere else.

Michael Feigelson What’s striking about this observation is that it is not a product of thoughtful design, but a detail that probably went unnoticed by most adults. It was scraps, small, overlooked, slightly accidental pieces of nature that were close enough to become part of her daily life. And crucially, small enough to feel like they were just for her.

Michael Feigelson You know, everybody talks about big, majestic landscapes, but you decided to focus your career on much smaller versions of nature. Can you remember when was that moment where you had this realization that that’s where you wanted to focus your attention?

Nadina Galle Wherever you live, that connection to nature is so, so, so important. And I realized that for a long time that all of these green spaces that many broader scale landscape ecologists would look over as unimportant are in fact, where all of this work needs to happen. Like I often think about it this way. Like when they started designing the first parks in the mid 1800s, when it became really clear, like, okay, this industrial revolution, for all of its pros has a big con, and that’s that it’s making our cities very busy and smelly and frankly not very nice places to be. So as an answer to that, they started building in the 1800s a lot of parks. That’s where you start to see the first parks in London, for example. The purpose of these areas was to offer rest, respite and refuge to this brand new generation of urban workers and livers. And they worked really well for that. But now, 150 plus years down the road, those same spaces have a whole laundry list of duties that they need to fulfill. Not only are they the places where you need to go for mental health, rest and respite and refuge, but they also need to be the areas that are safe havens to all of the biodiversity that we have in our cities. They need to soak up our stormwater. They need to filter all of our air quality, to sequester our carbon. They are responsible for raising the IQ of our children. Like it’s, we have a whole list of things that they now need to adhere to and be. And I think it’s fascinating to think about how you might make that happen on such a tiny, tiny, tiny footprint. These tiny, tiny, tiny footprints of green space have outsized effects on the populations that are living around them.

Michael Feigelson So you’re saying blades of grass are responsible for raising our children’s IQ?

Nadina Galle In a way.

Michael Feigelson In what way?

Nadina Galle There’s fascinating research out of Belgium that found that kids that are living or spend a lot of time near greener areas have higher IQ points, especially on the lower ends of the IQ spectrum, where it means a lot more. And this was even after accounting for race, socioeconomic status, education of the parents and all confounding factors gone, they still found this benefit. I mean, we have decades and dozens of replicated studies that show that pregnant women who live close to green space, within 50 meters ideally, give birth to higher birth weight babies. And of course, having a higher birth rate when you’re born, you know, it means less risk of diabetes, less risk with cardiovascular disease, less impacts on your respiratory system and all of these kinds of health impacts that continue throughout life.

Michael Feigelson Here’s another way to understand just how much this matters.

Nadina Galle You know, we are not able to take our work and put it in a petri dish. There’s so many confounding factors and all of these different things. The urban forest itself is a really difficult thing to study. But every so often, you have tragedies in the urban forest that end up being wonderful natural experiments. And one of those was the rise of something called the emerald ash borer. It’s a small little beetle that was imported into the U.S. And in Canada. And it decimated between the 70s, 80s, 90s, like hundreds of millions of trees, ash trees across the northeastern seaboard into the midwest. It was incredible, the impact that it had. There was an increase in deaths related to respiratory illnesses and also to cardiovascular deaths, in total an additional of 21,000 deaths. And that was confounding for all other factors. So we just know that because we lost all these ashtrays, they were directly related to this in deaths. And there’s hundreds of other studies that show the impact between the urban forest, urban green spaces and public health, but this is the only one that we have where we can say, when trees die, people die.

Michael Feigelson Suddenly, I find myself looking at the trees across the street in a very different way. What Nadina is saying is that these trees are shaping what’s going on in the bodies of everyone in my house, everyone living in my neighborhood. And here’s where it got a bit uncomfortable because I realized how little I know about these trees. I don’t even know their names. Is there green? Yes. But what kind of green? And what does it actually do? This is where Nadina’s work comes in.

Michael Feigelson I wanted you to talk a little bit about your work, which is unique because you’re trying to understand how small nature is doing on a moment-to-moment or at least a day-to day basis. Could you talk about what you do as an ecological engineer and what’s been novel in your approach?

Nadina Galle Yeah, so an ecological engineer, it essentially is the study of how can we design systems and habitats and environments for humans and non-humans alike? Essentially, how can we use natural elements to solve a lot of civil engineering problems? Like, for example, constructing wetlands to deal with wastewater or planting trees to help cool our cities and deal with air pollution, for example. And a big part of that is the role of technology through something that I call the internet of nature, which is essentially this classification of technologies, emerging technologies that are specifically designed to help us map, monitor, manage, and also reconnect urbanites to nature. And one of the ways technology can really help us do that is shed light on how valuable these natural systems are, and help us come up with a better system where we can basically take their value and put that on an Excel sheet so that we have data and metrics to back us up when we go to city council and try to argue for more funding or for more regulations or for higher standards.

Michael Feigelson What does it look like to quantify and measure the health benefits of nature using technology in a city? Is there an illustration you could use that helps us imagine what that looks like in practice?

Nadina Galle I mean, there’s so many different ways, but let me give you an example that gets people kind of excited. One is that I was asked by the park authorities of Chapultepec forest. So Chapultepec Forest is Mexico City’s largest urban forest. It is the largest urban Forest in the entire Americas. It’s an absolutely massive, massive area. They love this idea of being able to quantify. The benefits, the so-called ecosystem services, the free benefits that their forest provides the rest of Mexico City with. The issue was, is that to be able to do that, you need a really good database of exactly every single tree, where they are, what species they are. How big they are, when they were planted, their health, their condition, all this information. And they had been collecting that information, except they’d been collecting it manually, which means that by the time they finished their manual surveys, mind you, this is a massive area that can take years, and oftentimes that first piece of data they’ve collected is already out of date. So we’ve been working together on something called a ‘smart tree inventory’, which is essentially when you get a LIDAR, as it’s called, base scanner, a laser invisible to the human eye, which measures the distance from the scanner to whatever it hits next, in this case the tree as it’s going around, it’s either it’s on a car, on a backpack, on a small rover, and you are just mapping, you’re creating a 3D map essentially of all of these different trees, and basically get a better grasp on not only what trees they have where and what the benefits of those trees are and being able to quantify those, but also helping their maintenance staff take better care of them. Because you can imagine it’s a massive, massive job to try to keep all those trees healthy and well-maintained so that it’s also a safe area for human beings to be in. So being able to have that kind of real-time decision-making technology can be really, really helpful. And this is something that we’ve adopted for basically every other aspect of urban life, and yet trees are just starting to come online.

Michael Feigelson So this is what she means by the internet of nature, not replacing nature with technology, but taking the nature we do have in cities seriously enough to measure.

Michael Feigelson To me, it sort of sounds like you’re equipping people with technology to go out and essentially take more accurate senses of what’s living out there around us. Is that a fair characterization of the thesis?

Nadina Galle Precisely. And I think a lot of that just comes down to, we simply don’t know. We don’t know how important the trees are for us until we go out, map and measure them, and know. We can’t really go up against a developer to develop on that so-called forgotten field if we don’t have cold hard evidence about all of the important things that live and grow there and how the community benefits from that space not being developed. So many of these spaces simply disappear and go unnoticed because we haven’t taken that initiative to understand them better.

Michael Feigelson To encourage people to notice, to take initiative, Nadina started running what she calls bio-blitzes, where regular people, not scientists, go out and take pictures and sound recordings of the nature all around them. All of this then becomes material for a crowd-sourced biodiversity database.

Nadina Galle Using that data, so these are photos taken of all kinds of different plant species by just regular people. What they found was that if you have genus-level diversity across the plant kingdom, you have different kinds of leaves. And when you have different kinds of leaves, they’re able to host different kinds of microbes. And, when children come into contact with these different kinds of microbes, both on the leaves, but also in the soil, that can be really, really advantageous for essentially bolstering and further developing the immune system. And when you have a stronger immune system, you’re less likely to get childhood illnesses like asthma, for example, but also as this particular study found, childhood rates of leukemia, but there’s also been links made to ADHD diagnoses. All of that because children are coming into contact not just with greenery, but with different genus-level diversity greenery. But now we cart our children around in these different boxes. They wake up indoors, in their bedroom, you know, we shuffle them off in a car to an indoor daycare or to an indoor school, and then we pick them up and we take them again in our indoor box, which is our car, and we then take them to an indoor extracurricular area and then take the indoor in the house again, and that leads to shocking statistics like that in the UK, for example, that recently came out, children only spend four to seven minutes, under ten minutes, under five minutes, engaged in independent play outside on average every day.

Michael Feigelson Kind of like we had this natural vaccination from nature for a very long time and now it’s gone.

Nadina Galle That’s exactly it.

Michael Feigelson In other words, we used to get our medicine from dirt.

Nadina Galle Some of the best theories that we have is that it’s likely related to the fact that it buffers against air pollution. It lowers cortisol. If you live in a greener neighborhood, you’re more likely to move more because it’s just a nicer environment to be outside in. And if you move more and you’re outside more in your neighborhood, you’re likely to have higher social connections. So there’s all kinds of these different mechanisms. No one knows exactly for sure, but I’m… These are just theories.

Michael Feigelson I find Nadina’s theory super interesting, and I love the idea that dirt makes us healthier. My mother apparently arrived at a similar conclusion decades ago.

Michael Feigelson Hello. Hi?
Mom Hi. Hi, Mike.
Michael Feigelson Where are you?
Mom I’m sitting on a bench watching the world go by.
Michael Feigelson Yeah, what’s going on in the world?
Mom Well, I see there’s one little girl who’s collecting dandelions. Those are the only flowers I knew when I grew up.
Michael Feigelson What’s she collecting them for?
Mom I don’t know, I think she’s busy making a bouquet.
Michael Feigelson I’m actually talking to someone who studies the importance of nature.
Mom But children already know about that.
Michael Feigelson Did I know about that when I was a kid?
Mom Sure, of course.
Michael Feigelson How, how could you tell?
Mom Well, you were always interested in grass.
Michael Feigelson How did my interest in grass express itself?
Mom You would touch it, feel it, roll around in it, just like, just like Louis, my dog.

Michael Feigelson My mom remembers me being completely fascinated by grass, which admittedly sounds like a low bar for wonder. But Nadina would probably say that’s exactly the point.

Michael Feigelson Do you think it’s fair to say that becoming a mother makes one more sensitive to our ecological environments to the habitats that are very close to us?

Nadina Galle Oh, absolutely. When you become a mother and you have babies and young children and toddlers, you know, your world becomes so much smaller temporarily, but it does become so much smarter. And there’s nothing wrong with that because what you care about most in the world is, you know you’re operating on his or her scale. And that’s a beautiful thing, but I think it opens up your eyes to. The so-called nearby nature, the nature within a 500 meter radius of your house. Because that is what your life consists of in those little tiny habits.

Michael Feigelson So as a mom and a scientist, what is a big enough nature to matter? What’s the smallest we can get to that, you know, we can really feel the impact of on our body?

Nadina Galle I mean, I think on a spiritual level, you can get pretty far with a blade of grass, for sure. I think in terms of health benefits, I think you’re looking at, you know, an intervention, at least a hundred square meters for like a good tiny forest intervention. These days we know that your zip code matters a lot more than your genetic code. And I think those social determinants of health, as it’s called in the research, just become so much more critical, both as a new parent, but especially for the health and well-being of your new child.

Michael Feigelson Which all sounds so big and very much out of our hands. But then there are these moments where the solution is surprisingly simple.

Nadina Galle There’s this great project out of Philadelphia, the Land Care Project, where basically they said, hey, we have a lot of really vacant lots and they are areas where a lot of crime happens, so if you feel like you live next to one of these lots, let us know, and via the Landcare Project, it was this grant, they would spend just $1,500, that was it, to basically just go in, clear out any debris or scrap waste or whatever that was there. They would put down some grass and then they would leave and that was it. But the community noticed that even just after those interventions, there was like a 30% decrease in gun violence in those areas. There was an increase in people just feeling overall a lot more safe. And because of that, people of the community were attracted to those green areas and they started doing their own thing, putting in community gardens, putting in picnic tables and it became a really important so-called third place for the community to come and hang together. So there there is so much possible, people just have to want to do it and honestly just roll up their sleeves and get dirty, but even that process could be so good for you. So see it as a health intervention.

Michael Feigelson So when my daughter tells her friends to touch grass, she’s actually prescribing legit medicine. And not just for kids, for parents too.

Nadina Galle Dr. Katie Hull at the University of Bristol designed this five week outdoor program with the Mother Nature Project. I think they tested it with some 30 mother infant pairs. So these were women that were freshly postpartum and they invited them in these weekly, it was for five weeks. These weekly forest bathing sessions, which are essentially guided sessions in a forest, can be an urban forest, it doesn’t have to be anywhere crazy. And what they found, again, was that depression went down, anxiety went down. Well-being went up. They also reported having better sleep, which anyone who is postpartum knows how important that is. They had more confidence. They felt like they had a stronger bond with their baby, more social connections. And yes, nature was the therapist in the sense that nature was doing the work. But it was also just about being able to connect with other mothers and being outside and having that safety in numbers. I think that made this project so, so impactful. So that was kind of the pilot and it’s now moving forward towards a full NHS trial, which I think is very, very, very exciting.

Michael Feigelson I love this idea of nature as a therapist, but there’s another slightly less accredited expert in this space, a kind of park ranger who can guide you in your exploration of the smallest forms of nature, your child.

Nadina Galle I think it’s a universal thing that, it’s not until you have a baby or a toddler that just the stuff that they pick up on, a birch, ladybug, grass, toddlers don’t yet have this idea of like hierarchy. So like everything has like this equal importance to them. So they see a ladybug and that is their pure and intentional focus is on that little living organism and watching it and moving it. And man, like think about the last time. You spent more than a second thinking about a ladybug, right? And I think there’s something so beautiful in that, and there’s so much, it’s like, we need to be more mindful, we need meditate more, and we need be more present and in the moment. There’s so many of that advice coming around. It’s like spend a day with a toddler and they will teach you the meaning of living in the movement. It’s incredibly powerful, but I think in order to get there with that blade of grass, I think you do need to open to it, versus if you’re standing on the cliff of the Grand Canyon. Have to really not really have a soul or a heart to be like, meh, I’ve seen better.

Michael Feigelson Which leaves me with an idea. Maybe the problem isn’t that nature is hard to find, but that as we get taller and older, it becomes hard for us to see and even harder to feel. Maybe the problem is that we’ve trained ourselves not to notice nature, unless it fits our adult definition of spectacular.

Give us a canyon, a mountain, something worth photographing and we’re in awe. Give us a patch of grass five minutes from home, we probably walk straight past. Until maybe we have a child and suddenly you’re late for everything because someone is spelunking the cracks in the sidewalk deeply invested in a ladybug.

The world children open up is not only physical, it is emotional, moral, and even spiritual. Next time on Birth of a Parent, Krista Tippett on motherhood, hope, and what it means to keep showing up for the future.

Krista Tippett I’ve thought about it so much in my life. I just think when you become a parent, they crack your heart open in a way that I just don’t know that any other life experience can.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.