I realize I need to carve out some time to spend in urban parks and greenspace. Not to hit some personal record on my running pace, but just to be and reflect and think.
I went for a run this morning, on a paved trail that runs along a little creek surrounded by a few loblolly pine trees and some red maples, a little bit of urban nature surrounded by houses, streets, and suburbia. It was humid in the early summer morning, with mist steaming up off the concrete trail, and the forest looked lush, with greenbriers and Virginia creeper overhanging the path. Suddenly, I came upon what I thought was a rock in the trail, almost stepping on it. Instead, it was a box turtle, doggedly plodding across the trail. I stopped and watched it, bending down to get a better look. A fellow jogger saw me and stopped to look at the strange sight of a sweaty jogger crouching over a turtle, and we had a pleasant conversation there, in the humid morning air, wondering where the turtle was going and whether he would be happy when he got there.
I then went back home and, after a change of clothes and a quick coffee, logged into my laptop and began my workday. The house felt cool with the air conditioning, and somehow the electronic world of programs felt very tidy after the riot of the forest path, as each interaction with a program led seamlessly and a little predictably to the next interaction. Like lots of people in this modern era, I find it hard to focus, and my gaze kept being drawn to my smartphone. The draw of the algorithm is strong; the desire to check this or that app, fade into an effortless world of click and response, and forget myself for a few minutes. Both my laptop and my smartphone offer, in slightly different formats, a curated, self-contained, smooth information environment. Information flows across the screen, and often I respond and interact with the device without anything more than superficial mental engagement. There is little time for deep introspection or thought, and there are very few surprises, as I glide from one step to another.
Like a lot of knowledge workers, I have been slowly incorporating large-language models and so-called AI into my workflows. It has been extremely useful for speeding up my coding or for rote editing of text. But as I sat and interacted with an AI chatbot today, I realized that this too was another self-contained, smooth information environment. Large-language models have been described as “statistical token tumblers,” displaying strings of text (the token) that statistically, in other similar contexts, were an appropriate response to similar prompts. The chatbot interface with these models is also designed (at least for casual users like me) to be pleasant, each interaction smoothly drawing you into another.
I am not a Luddite. I am a moderately early adopter of new technologies, who now uses computers and smartphones and AI every day in my work. They collectively have greatly improved my productivity. I even still believe in the power of these modern technologies to sometimes be a healthy source of liberation and disruption.
But for me at least, the smooth, shallow electronic world feels really different than almost stepping on a box turtle, with sweat dripping off my forehead and panting for breath. The natural world, even a little urban park, brings with it the possibility of a surprise. We are interacting in a park with other living elements beyond our control, things that were not put there to suit us, and so often face surprise confrontations, however humble they may be. Parks and other public open space also bring with them the chance for a surprise human connection, like the jogger I ended up chatting with. There is a physicality, a directness, about two hot, sweaty human beings who had never met before staring at a turtle plodding along across the path.
I work professionally as an advocate for urban nature, so I can recite many other benefits of urban parks and greenspace, many of them known to readers of The Nature of Cities. We sometimes talk about these in the dry language of ecosystem service provision. Urban vegetation helps manage stormwater, helps clean and cool the air, and otherwise makes our cities more climate resilient. Parks encourage recreation, and all the physical health benefits that come from it. Interacting with nature, even seeing a tree out a window, has benefits for mental health, including reducing stress and improving people’s self-reported sense of happiness and wellbeing.
To these benefits, perhaps ecosystem service scientists like me should add surprise and whimsy, like my encounter with the box turtle. Time in urban nature is also time to think, without the constant bombardment of simulation from our electronic devices. This kind of deep thinking and reflection is hard in a world of computers and smartphones that are designed to facilitate rapid but perhaps superficial information exchange. I suspect it will get really hard as AI and large language models get more ubiquitous. In a world where plausible, recycled answers to almost any question are instantly available, it gets harder to find time to ask: What do I know? What do I feel? Who am I? I want to believe that urban nature can be a space for moments of these sorts of reflections, which lead to new thoughts, outside the statistical distribution of past text contained in large language models, but true creativity.
I want to believe that the rise of AI, this disembodied algorithm, could make more valuable everyday natural spaces that we can all interact with for a very physical, embodied experience. As more of our lives are spent in fast-paced, electronic interactions, I hope we value urban nature more for its slowness. If we increasingly live in curated, self-contained information bubbles, on platforms designed mostly by for-profit companies to suit their own commercial interests, perhaps natural spaces can be a place of surprise, of an impression of things not under our control. This benefit of urban nature then is about making space for some other parts of human nature, not easily satisfied in our electronic world.
And for me, I realize I need to carve out some time to spend in urban parks and greenspace. Not to hit some personal record on my running pace, but just to be and reflect and think. I am reminded of the idea of “vegan before dinnertime” of Mark Bittman, which was his way of trying to squeeze some of the health benefits of vegetarianism into an omnivore’s life. I similarly need some time, perhaps just an hour or two, with no devices or AI: unplugged before breakfast. Some time to be in urban nature, find some whimsy and surprise and quiet before a workday of fast-paced electronic interactions. I hope that a rise in artificial intelligence can also remind us of what we love about the real, messy, natural world.
Rob McDonald
Basel
