Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggy | Hacker News Reader

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, but moved out to rural NJ in my thirties. I bought a house on a lake with no motorboats, plenty of black bears and raccoons and lots of trees. I now live in the rice fields of East Java, Indonesia, so I guess you can say I love the outdoors.

I do question the science or numbers in the study as much as I believe the basic premise to be true, however, correlation does not automatically imply cause. People suffering more after trees are removed can also mean that urbanization or development brought factories, or unhealthier air, rodents or any number of other negative factors with it.

I do intuitively relax more, and take great solace in my surroundings, and I do believe it is better for people. I would like to see more research on this; there have been a lot of debacles in the past two years in the social sciences and psychology with statistics and peer review. Some of the studies were taken for granted and are now under the microscope for being inconclusive or just wrong.

Yea for trees! And plants, animals and all that entails!

If you want to know more you may be interested in these:

Japanese researcher describes (with control group) the interesting affects of walking in a forest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPNll1Ccn0

Indian researcher describes side affects of indoor plants on health esp. air quality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmn7tjSNyAA

I'm incorporating some of these concepts into my tiny house design e.g. a terrarium and an hinoki ofuro, together with natural daylighting.

Very interesting. Here's the original study from NASA, Interior Landscape plants for indoor air pollution abatement : http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1993007...

That's a great paper. Several assumptions I had are confirmed after looking through it such as the importance of countering off-gassing. I don't think people are generally aware of this, they just sort of assume it's a solved problem or a diminutive one. Even natural materials like wood will release formaldehyde.

For a small space having good air quality is very important, I plan to install a selection of plants and rig them up as dual purpose air purifiers as shown in the study, with emphasis on the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom.

+1 oxygenation +2 reduced ambient toxicity levels +3 attractive decoration

It's not expensive and it'll pay for itself many times over with better health! Programmers take note! It is easier for your brain to work if it has a nice supply of oxygen. Rocket science I know. NASA science at any rate.

In general society (opinion incoming) has not paid much attention to closed loop systems in the way we ought to (see no evidence the Slingshot scales up). Especially as a way to introduce antifragility. A house in a truly futuristic suburb would recycle heat from water and reliably convert all black/grey water back into distilled water for household use while using the biomass to power the operation. Throw in autonomous air vehicles and ubiquitous net reach from Google blimps and I'd really feel like I'm living in the future. What is more, with houses spread out (side affect of self driving things on land prices), not laying cables/water/sewer lines and not maintaining roads anymore it would appear that it could be a much more economical future. Without cracking closed loop systems it is out of reach. Google Net Blimps, renewable energy, even autonomous vehicles seem like much more tractable problems in comparison despite water filtration seeming simpler.

As someone who suffers from hay fever being around trees can be weeks of pain for me every year

There is a massive, recent hayfever problem in Japan because cedar trees planted to be used for timber after WWII weren't as construction methods changed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hay_fever_in_Japan

The thing that always gets me is that when I spent summers in canada I experienced not an iota of hayfever, but I get pretty significant symptoms in the UK. I think it's about the only strong draw to emmigration at some point in the future!

I'm the same way. I'm from the US and have never had any allergies ever, though I've spent a lot of time outdoors. I spent a summer in the UK one year, and the whole time I had horrific allergies. I was basically hopped up on Benadryl the whole time.

Opposite for me. I grew up in rural England surrounded by flowers and forests. Never had a hint of allergies. Lived in Germany on the edge of the Black Forest for ten years... no problems.

Moved to New England and I had no idea what is wrong with me. It took me three years to figure out it was tree pollen and not a spring cold... haha

In California now so we will see how it goes.

My uncle brings his son on a roadtrip to America every summer to escape his allergies to birch pollen.

My hay fever declined after a serious allergic reaction that sent me to a hospital. Then I also had a few cats, to whom I was allergic to. Hope yours declines, too. I guess I lucked out!

I use a prescription nasal spray and eye drops, and this completely controls my otherwise severe symptoms.

I used allergy pills for years, but the results were not as good, and they all caused some amount of drowsiness.

I also have allergies but I'd take them in a second over cutting down the trees. (Though I might look for a state to live with more allergy friendly trees)

I too suffer from hay fever from trees. They're my number one allergen followed by cats. The last athsma attack I had was on a football (soccer) field surrounded by trees.

I'd never use it as an excuse to complain about trees.

Agree, wildlife & wilderness is great, but my guess is that there's a confounding factor such as wealth, population density, etc. that has more of an impact on health than trees.

Personally, tree are exciting to me, not calming.

What about the evidence of earlier discharge at the same hospital? It wasn't clear how carefully that was evaluated, but surely that would nullify wealth, population density etc since the only difference was the room that people were put in.

How do they decide what room to put people in?

First, just to be clear, issue at hand is the title, which states trees CAUSE calmness which CAUSES health.

All the research shows is there's a link between trees and health; aka there's a correlation, not causation.

Best example I'm aware of of "confounding factor" is that there's an obvious correlation between an increase in people drowning in pools and ice cream consumption rates. Eating ice cream does not cause drowning, nor do drownings cause people to eat ice cream. Hot weather causes people to swim more, which increases the odds someone will drown.

All I'm saying is this research does not show causation or look for confounding factors, which might show the correlation itself is a false positive.

This is why studying marginal effects -- like when the Emerald Ash Borer invaded county-by-county and caused a discrete time-series event that you can analyze before-and-after, as mentioned in the article -- is so critical.

Ah cool - misunderstood you.

The study accounted for both income and area income. So while there may be a confounding factor, I assume wealth is out of the picture. It doesn't seem to have accounted for population density however.

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