The vision
“Yes, plants and animals face daunting threats on our warming, crowded planet, particularly in a society that seems increasingly disconnected from the natural world. But unlike most global challenges, this one can be addressed — in part, at least — right on our very doorsteps.”
— Biologist and author Thor Hanson, in Close to Home
The spotlight
I love watching my dog. I could sit and admire him all day — because I love him, and I find him very cute and very funny. Paying attention to him brings me joy, but it also serves a purpose. It helps me notice if he’s acting strangely, if he needs something from me, if he’s about to snarf something he shouldn’t. It makes me a better caregiver.
Seldom do I extend this kind of focus to creatures (or plants for that matter) that aren’t “mine.” I might notice them when I’m outside walking said dog, but I rarely take the time to observe, to see what interesting things they might be doing, where they like to hang out, how they respond to different types of weather. I often don’t even know what they are.
After reading conservation biologist Thor Hanson’s new book, I may have to rethink that. Hanson has traveled the world to study animal behavior, and he has helped create opportunities for other people to observe nature through wildlife-driven tourism projects in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda and national forests in Alaska. But his latest book, Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, offers a guide to seeing, exploring, and helping to restore nature right in our backyards.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered how, at the national level, protecting and expanding outdoor access enjoys broad bipartisan support, and at the community level, how that broad support can translate into real climate solutions, like public parks that combat flooding. In today’s newsletter, we’re zooming in even closer, on how to more intentionally nurture the innate curiosity and appreciation for nature that makes it such a uniquely nonpartisan issue.
“It’s hard to care about things we don’t know about,” Hanson told me. He sees reconnecting with the natural world around us — not only on our favorite nature show, or in the places we go for vacation — as a precursor to championing its protection. “I think that by focusing close to home, making nature more of a daily practice, it strengthens those fundamental ties. And that is a human impulse, to know the world around us.”
Hanson also notes in the book that “backyard” is a general term, not meant to refer only to actual yard space, which many people do not have, but to our neighborhoods generally. Observing nature is something that anyone can participate in. And not only for our own enrichment, but oftentimes to the benefit of science as well.
“You can be involved in some surprising levels of scientific work right now, without owning land or having a big yard or living in a rural place, simply by utilizing something that most of us own right now. And that is a smartphone,” Hanson said. Platforms like iNaturalist and other crowdsourced observation hubs have become repositories of data, fueling scientific studies that wouldn’t have been possible without them. Hanson mentioned one project tracking when lilacs bloom, which people can easily observe in their yards, local parks, and anywhere else they might see the flowers. “Climate researchers are using this to track the progression of spring across geography, but also across time as springtime gets earlier and earlier,” Hanson said. “You can see it with this simple backyard tool.”
I talked with Hanson about some of the other projects discussed in the book, and why this all matters — for humans, wildlife, and the climate. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q. Tell me a bit about the origins of this book. How did the ideas behind Close to Home come together for you?
A. Well, to be honest, this book started with a thump. One that we all dread hearing — and that was the sound of a bird hitting the window of the little shack that I use for an office in our yard. And I dashed outside to look, and there, unfortunately, was this beautiful hermit thrush lying in the grass, still warm to the touch. And as I laid that poor little thing to rest, I was feeling horrible. But also, to be honest, a little bit embarrassed. Because here I was writing books about nature, and I had no idea that this species was wintering in my yard. And it’s a really famous bird in both of my lines of work. It’s famous to biologists because of the way it sings — it makes two notes at once, and the intervals are very similar to the harmonies in human music. And that resulting sound is so beautiful that in literature, it has played a role — even before people knew what bird was making that song, poets were putting it into their poems. I mean, it has appeared in everything from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Walt Whitman’s famous elegy for Abraham Lincoln.
This famous bird was right there. I had no idea. And that obviously invited other questions — most basically, what else am I missing in my own backyard? So that was the origin for the whole project.
A hermit thrush in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Q. One of the things you mention in the book is that observing and building a relationship with the nature around us isn’t just about ID’ing species. In some cases, maybe, people might help identify new species where they live. But often it’s more interesting to watch what those species are up to. Can you tell me more about that?
A. Oh, you’ve hit on a passion of mine. I’m constantly teasing people, if I take them out on a field walk someplace, that we call it “bird watching,” but what we really tend to do most of the time is “bird identifying.” People will raise their binoculars and focus on the bird just long enough to know what it is, and then the binoculars all drop and we move on to the next one.
A lot of the fun and a lot of the science and a lot of the fascination happens when you keep watching. So not just what’s out there in the yard or in the park, but what’s it doing? When we take the time to ask that deeper question, we learn all sorts of things about even common familiar species doing outlandish things.
One of the stories that I feature in the book that still sticks with me is the story of a German animal behavior specialist, she was doing a postdoc in Australia and she was able to document the development of culture in wild animals, which is a really rare thing. We talk about culture as the learned behaviors that are passed down and take on specific characteristics within and among populations — the same way we define culture in human populations. We know that the cuisine of Italy is different from the cuisine of Norway, where my ancestors are from. And it’s the same thing we look for in nature. And it’s very rare in nature. We have chimpanzees that pass down different habits for tool use. There are certain dolphins and whales that pass down different techniques for foraging. And here in the backyards and driveways of Sydney, Australia, this researcher, with the help of more than 1,300 local people who took on the task of observing this for her, discovered that parrots — these big sulphur-crested cockatoos, a beautiful white parrot with a big flop of yellow plumes atop its head — had learned to open the bins of garbage cans and teach one another that habit.
A sulphur-crested cockatoo in a suburban backyard in Canberra, Australia. Tracey Nearmy / Getty Images
But the techniques they were using started to diversify in different neighborhoods across the city. And so you had this culture of behaviors developing all across Sydney as the parrots learned to use these various techniques and came up with their own methods in different populations, in different neighborhoods. What’s more, she went on, then, to realize that people were being impacted by this interaction as well, because nobody wants their garbage strewn all over the lawn. So some people started putting out rubber snakes to scare away the parrots. Then their neighbors thought that was a good idea, so they got rubber snakes too. Other people were weighing down the lids with bricks, or coming up with ways to fasten the lids. So you had this sort of innovation arms race taking place culturally between the parrot populations and the human populations.
She published these papers in Animal Behavior and all these big journals — they were really very headline-making papers in terms of the biology that was going on. And it was not happening out in the wilderness. It was happening in people’s yards, with the help of citizen scientists all across the biggest city in Australia.
Q. In the book you talk a bit about the time you yourself spend in your own great outdoors as a form of self-medication — including this great quote: “Nature is cheaper than therapy.” I’d love to hear your thoughts on the health and emotional benefits of spending time in nature.
A. I think it’s something we intuit, that we feel better when we get outside, clear our minds. You get outdoors and you breathe the fresh air and so forth. But what makes it even more fascinating, or more, you know, official from a scientific and medical standpoint, are the data points that keep accumulating.
All scientists, I’m sure, have favorite research papers that they have read. And I’m a biologist, but actually one of my very favorite papers is a medical study — this two-page paper from back in the ’70s where someone out at a small hospital in rural Pennsylvania compared the results of people recovering from the same gallbladder surgery in the same ward of the hospital. And the only difference between the two rooms that they were comparing was whether your bed looked out the window at a grove of trees, or whether it looked out across the courtyard at a brick wall. And they controlled for all the things you do in science to try to get the variability out of there, make sure it’s not that the patients are different in other ways. The only thing they were testing for was the view. And they found that those people with the view of trees recovered from their surgeries faster. They were discharged faster. They called the nurses station less frequently. They used fewer painkillers and they suffered fewer complications from surgery.
It’s just this beautiful, small little study, but it has gone on to become the scientific equivalent of a runaway bestseller. It’s been cited by other scientists over 8,000 times. And it’s helped launch this whole field of study on how nature affects the body, how it makes us feel, how it makes us heal.
Since that time, we’ve really been able to put all sorts of numbers behind what we have long intuited, that nature’s good for us. It’s now possible to get a medical prescription for nature exposure in over 30 states, four Canadian provinces, countries around the world. And that is something that has results in terms of reducing anxiety, lowering blood pressure, all of these measurable things that we gain from it. I mean, it’s just across the board that there are these fundamental impacts to human health and how we feel. And so I, as someone who likes to be outdoors anyway, now go into nature with the knowledge that I really am doing myself some good when I’m out there.
Q. Do you also see this type of local nature connection as a form of climate action?
A. It certainly is related. We’re taught almost these days to think of climate change — which is the fundamental issue of our time, really — as this immense global issue. And in the face of that scale of a crisis, it’s hard often for people to think that individual action makes a difference. That’s sort of beaten into us by just the scale of this thing and the way that we tend to talk about it. We can have this sort of helpless feeling that, you know, whatever I do is so small and it’s just meaningless. But I would say that that is untrue. And not just untrue, I would say it’s the opposite of the truth.
We’re talking about a shift at the level of our society — in our relationship with energy, not just how we produce it but how much of it our lifestyle is demanding. And we want to think, “Oh, well, that requires better policy. It’s a top-down thing.” Yes, we need better policy. But the policies will be the results of change, not the cause of it. The change needs to start with us. It needs for us to believe that all of the individual actions that we take add up to make a difference. Because that is what changes the culture — it is the accumulation of individual decisions, individual people changing how they live. We see bits and pieces of that happening.
Politically, now, we’re in a bit of backsliding on issues of climate. But not too long ago, we passed the first major climate legislation in decades in this country, by a thin margin. It happened politically because people made it a priority. So it has to come from the bottom, and we need to reclaim that momentum. And I think if we have more of a daily connection with nature, that is a huge and critical piece of that puzzle.
Q. Is there anything else you’d like to highlight that you hope people will take away from the book?
A. One message that I always like to include when I’m talking about this is that, of course, as an author, I want people to read my book. But I also really want people to put it down. And I think maybe you feel the same way about the article you’re writing. Yes, read this — but put it down! Don’t take my word for it. Go outside and see for yourself.
— Claire Elise Thompson
More exposure
- Read: the book — Close to Home: The Wonders of Nature Just Outside Your Door, out this week
- Read: more about the hospital-bed study Hanson described, and additional research on the health benefits of nature (The Atlantic)
- Read: about prairie restoration in Washington, including in individual yards (High Country News)
- Read: about a new study tracking the decline of butterfly populations over the past two decades — made possible by a combination of data from researchers and volunteer observers (Smithsonian Magazine)
- Check out: iNaturalist, a platform where you can record wildlife observations, get help identifying species, and chat with other nature enthusiasts
A parting shot
One particular technique for wildlife observation described in Close to Home is “lightsheeting” — a nighttime activity that’s essentially just what it sounds like. You shine a light on a white sheet or other surface, and wait for moths to land and patiently pose for your pictures. Here, a wildlife biologist photographs moths at Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve in California. But you can try this at home, too! There’s even a special time to do it: National Moth Week, coming up at the end of July. You’ll likely see more moth activity in the summer, but you could always get some practice in before the big blitz.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The wildlife all around us is doing fascinating things. Are you noticing? on Mar 12, 2025.
In his new book, biologist Thor Hanson reveals the power of paying attention to the natural world “close to home.” Solutions Grist
