A new book released in France explores how ornitherapy and sylvotherapy – linked to the birds and the trees – can have a positive effect on human health and wellbeing, with some doctors in the UK and the US even prescribing them to patients.
Here's a little experiment: go outside and listen to the birds singing. Give it a few minutes. How do you feel? Better?
You've just administered yourself ornitherapy: therapy using birds. Ornithérapie is the title of a book just released in France, by Elise Rousseau and Philippe Dubois. The latter is an environmental engineer and ornithologist, whom RFI met with in the Parc Montsouris in Paris, where it was sunny and the birds were singing.
Ornithotherapy, Dubois says, is based on science: "UK studies have shown, for example, that just a few minutes of attentive listening to birds can lower our levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and enable us to eliminate or at least greatly reduce negative thoughts and stress. So much so that in some parts of Great Britain and the United States, doctors are now prescribing their patients instructions to go outside and listen to the birds."
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The park is also the perfect spot to practise sylvotherapy – therapy through trees. This is a concept birthed in Japan, a country where nature and the changing seasons set the pace of human life. You could "bathe" in the forest (spend time there, basically) or even kiss the trunk of a tree – although beware of fungi and insects.
Studies have shown that sylvotherapy has a relaxing and calming effect. In one hospital, it was found that cancer patients in a room with a view of trees had a better rate of recovery. While nothing can replace conventional medicine, more than half of these are made from molecules derived from plants. Green equals good.
Biophilia
But why is this? "I think that we live in a world that has become very urban, since the majority of humans live in cities, and that we cannot cut ourselves off from this 'primitive' side of nature," says Dubois.
"Here I hear a robin, I hear a chaffinch, I hear a great tit... All these birds speak to me, I can't answer them, but just hearing these calls around me soothes me, does me good."
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American biologist Edward Wilson called this desire to get back to our origins and connect with nature linked to our distant past "biophilia". However, this concept is not universally accepted because it reduces human beings to their genes, disregarding cultural influences.
Valérie Chansigaud, a science historian, says she "doesn't dispute the benefits of nature" but is keen to qualify the concept of biophilia.
"In Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, no writer found nature marvellous," she says.
"The sea and the mountains were places of anguish, threatening places. Beautiful nature was cultivated nature – orchards, fields – and not the so-called wilderness. In other words, we are always conditioned by our cultural heritage, which we don't necessarily realise."
This article was adapted from the original in French.
