Welcome to the Future of Outside
“Americans have often relegated nature to the romantic realm of Thoreau and Abbey,” wrote Florence Williams in this magazine’s 2012 December cover story, about the health benefits of spending time outdoors. “Viewing it as medicine is still largely foreign.” That was almost a decade ago, when research on the topic was considered somewhat novel. Since then, studies linking exposure to nature with positive impacts on our well-being have proliferated; the findings seem to be penetrating the American psyche (perhaps one reason the U.S. saw an explosion in outdoor recreation during the pandemic); and as we reported in a 2019 cover story, doctors have even begun prescribing “doses” of nature to patients. For this month’s innovation-themed issue, we explore two new offshoots of the nature Rx phenomenon. In “Congrats, You Just Earned…
