A blog post from the Scottish Wildlife Trust by Ed Taylor discusses the importance of greenspace in Scotland’s suburban and urban areas. It’s part of a “50 for the Future” series that suggests 50 things that should occur in Scotland over the next 50 years to benefit both people and wildlife. As suburban areas are massively built all over affluent countries to accommodate growing families and populations, wildlife areas are shrinking. From experience, my family moved to a newly built suburb near LA several years ago and the area around us is being rapidly built just over the little time we’ve been there. Sadly, this is at the expense of decreased biodiversity and urban greenspace.
The Scottish Wildlife Trust blog post goes into how greenspaces originated, what the benefits are, and what future goals should be. For instance, that “research has found that the difference between highly walkable and non-walkable communities is an average of about seven pounds of body weight.” Ed Taylor believes that the ideal urban area should incorporate parks and green areas into compactly built structures to encourage walkability for pedestrians. On microBEnet, we have often discussed research on possible benefits of indoor plants. It seems to go hand-in-hand with a discussion of increasing wildlife immediately outside of buildings. Although there is still more research that can be done on the subject, there are undoubtedly positive effects to increasing the amount of nature that surrounds us, whether psychological or biological.
