Dispatches: Can Nature Heal Our Deepest Wounds?

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2018

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wilderness therapy has been used for decades to help troubled teens and addicts, and recently all kinds of people are seeking out guided nature experiences to detox from their hyper-digital modern lives. The classic approach of such programs is to push participants to challenge their limits in order to build character. That can work great, but it’s not a smart recipe for those trying to recover from emotional trauma. Not long ago, contributing editor Florence Williams, author of the The Nature Fix, went backpacking with victims of sex trafficking, writing about it for Outside’s May 2018 issue. Now she’s adapted the story for The Three-Day Effect, a new series for Audible that explores what’s really happening in our brains when we head outdoors. This episode, an excerpt of that project, reveals the surprising ways we can find comfort in wilderness.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by visit Arizona, home of filmmaker and night sky photographer Harun Meck Medinaich.
0:07.6	And I'm a filmmaker in a general sense.
0:10.3	If you've ever seen a time lapse video, where the stars seem to be dancing across the desert,
0:15.0	or a photo where the Milky Way seems like it's jumping out of the picture at you,
0:19.0	there's a good chance it's by Heron.
0:21.0	I mean, it's been a kind of an Instagram phenomenon in a way but I love it because
0:26.2	it's propagating the idea the night skies are important. His images have over half a billion views online,
0:33.0	and his most recent film is Skyglow,
0:35.0	a documentary about light pollution.
0:37.0	Anybody that sees the night sky in its pristine form
0:40.0	is going to have the question, what is that?
0:42.0	They're going to know, like, is that is
0:45.0	real? Is that real? Yes, it's real, but why don't I see it?
0:47.0	Well, you don't see it because of light pollution.
0:49.0	Herron teaches photography at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where stargazing is built into the city code.
0:56.7	Back in the 1930s, astronomers built two observatories in Flagstaff.
1:00.5	But pretty soon, the city was so lit up that it was interfering with the astronomy.
1:04.0	And that led to a unique once in a billion years event
1:11.0	and when it comes to light pollution, which is that the local government of Flagstaff
1:16.1	decided to enact a lighting ordinance.
1:18.5	Today it's perhaps the only city in the world where you can see the Milky Way.
1:23.0	Which is like unreal.
	...

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