{"id":370,"date":"2006-07-03T07:36:59","date_gmt":"2006-07-03T13:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/?p=370"},"modified":"2006-07-03T07:39:08","modified_gmt":"2006-07-03T13:39:08","slug":"460","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/03\/460\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Fresh Air Gone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my best friends has always been one of the most nature-philic people I know.\u00a0 She has to be surrounded, for some part of her day, by mountains or open fields or rivers or creeks.\u00a0 She can’t exist, happily, without them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I came to realize, in my early twenties, that I was not the same way.\u00a0 I spent a lot of my teen years wondering why I never felt that pull toward being outdoors.\u00a0 All those years of everyone inviting me camping and hiking never made me giddy with excitement – it just wasn’t my idea of entertainment or relaxation.\u00a0 Bugs and sweat don’t turn me on.\u00a0 I always love the view from atop a mountain that I just hiked, but the getting there part is never anything that I enjoy. I like (love) the city.\u00a0 I love air conditioned museums and sidewalk cafes.\u00a0 I would rather spend my day sitting on the floor of a used bookstore than at the beach.\u00a0 I like that I have learned this about myself before the age of thirty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ok, but now I have these two beautiful kids and, occassionally, when I help one of them blow their nose I find that their sweet little baby snot is full of black sooty looking stuff.\u00a0 I notice that they cough a wee bit more than I did when I was a kid.\u00a0 They get colds with a greater frequency than my friends’ kids who live out in the country (note: I said country, not suburbs.\u00a0 I think the suburbs are equally as detrimental to one’s health as the city, if not more).\u00a0 Is this what is best for them?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is it possible for us urbanites to marry our love of the city with some kind of commune with nature?\u00a0 Yes and no.\u00a0 Obviously, we are a species that has taken ourselves seriously out of the loop in regard to natures deepest cycles but there are people researching means to this end:<\/a><\/p>\n

We believe that urban planning efforts and public policies would benefit greatly by integrating the lessons learned by ecologists working with health professionals, and the ecological health guidelines that these researchers are setting forth. \u00a0It is clear that urbanization, and the inevitable degradation of the environment that ensues, disrupts ecosystem processes and ultimately threatens human health, and the well-being of all species of animals and plants.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hopefully, I won’t feel the need to push the eject button, but I think that finding a city that regards this balance is going to be an important factor in our decision making factor for where we settle down for good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my best friends has always been one of the most nature-philic people I know.\u00a0 She has to be surrounded, for some part of her day, by mountains or open fields or rivers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healthy-living"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.familyresource.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}