Category Archives: health-wellbeing

Could Forest Bathing Be One of Public Health’s Most Overlooked Tools?

Could Forest Bathing Be One of Public Health’s Most Overlooked Tools?

By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator.

Scientists are discovering that spending time in forests may help prevent disease before treatment is ever needed…

Nature is powerful medicine. Multiple studies over the years have found that people in hospitals with windows overlooking nature recover and heal faster than those without. And I remember the years when Louise and I ran a community for abused kids that was out in the woods of rural New England, it always seemed that taking them on nature walks calmed them down more than anything else, including most of the meds.

Last month, a team of researchers from six countries published an argument in Communications Health that nature should be thought of as a therapeutic tool in and of itself, and should be available to everybody. They point out that worldwide anxiety is up 63 percent and depression up 26 percent just over the past 15 years, and argue that much of this is the result of what they call “nature deprivation.”

The solution, they recommend is something called “nature-based mental healthcare” or NBMHC, citing multiple studies showing the power of regular immersion in nature as a psychological tool every bit as important and effective (and sometimes more so) as pharmaceuticals.

Ralf Buckley, the lead author, points out that more than half of all doctor visits these days are now about some aspect of mental rather than physical health, but mental health gets roughly half of one percent of public health funding.

— A 2007 study found that “forest bathing”—a Japanese concept that’s taken hold around the world, basically standing in the forest and pausing to take it all in—measurably reduces levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone.”

— A 2010 study discovered that the anti-cancer immune system “killer cells” (NK cells) in our bloodstream jacked up by exposure to nature:

“…2-night/3-day trips to forest parks enhanced human NK activity, the number of NK cells, and intracellular anti-cancer proteins in lymphocytes, and that this increased NK activity lasted for more than 7 days after the trip in both male and female subjects.”

Follow-up research found that even a one-day trip to the forest similarly increased killer cell activity, helping prevent cancer in people for at least a week thereafter.

I’ve been drawn to nature my entire life, from exploring forests and a nearby stream as a kid to Louise and my weekend trips to Portland’s Forest Park to climb the foothills of the Tualatin mountains.

And it’s not just the physical activity; when “forest bathing” is compared to working out in a gym both produce physical improvements, but the psychologically positive effects of forest bathing far outstrip those of simple exercise.

Louise and I, however, live in a city with the largest urban park in the world with over 80 miles of trails in it. And we have a good enough income to afford a car to drive to it, something many people simply can’t do.

Pointing specifically to this imbalance in access to nature caused by financial status, the authors of that first study I mentioned argue that nations should start thinking of natural spaces as part of the panoply of psychotherapeutic tools available to society, rather than decorations or recreational opportunities for people who can afford to get to them (or pay for a park pass, like in many parts of America; here in Portland, Forest Park is free).

I wrote a while back about awe being the cheapest medicine we’ve got, but cheap isn’t the same thing as accessible. In the medical context, we spend a fortune on both physical and psychological tools to repair people, but nature is almost never (other than the hospital windows studies and changes in new hospital construction) considered as a therapy.

Buckley’s team calculated back in 2019 that national parks contribute upwards of five trillion dollars a year to the global economy through the mental health benefits to visitors alone; that’s roughly five hundred times what the world spends maintaining protected areas that, it turns out, can be so critical to improving mental health (with considerable side-benefits for physical health).

Nature, it turns out, is the cheapest, safest, best-tolerated intervention in the entire mental health toolkit, but has been quietly reclassified as, essentially, a consumer good, now only available to people who have a car, a weekend, and enough disposable income.

Teddy Roosevelt understood the importance of wilderness areas instinctively and intuitively, having used nature for years to treat his own asthma and “weak constitution.” It’s why he set aside over 230 million acres of wilderness as national parks, land that sadly today’s administration is trying to sell off to donor drilling and mining operations as fast as it can.

China, on the other hand, having examined this type of research and drawing on centuries of folk medicine pointing in the same direction, has, according to researchers, a “national health strategy includes nature-therapy infrastructure in 1200 forest reserves, to provide a billion person-hours per year.”

Nature should be available to everybody, and our urban planning and policies should make sure that we have wild spaces and public transportation cheap enough to get pretty much everybody to the wild spaces.

Let your state legislators and city council know, and put together a plan to get yourself into nature at least once a week!

Copyrighted by Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator. Thom has written many respected books. Reprinted with permission from The Wisdom School of August 5th, 2026 by Thom Hartmann. All articles are free and available to everyone in The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human. Wisdom School is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Thom’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Wisdom School.

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What If Some of Our Depression Is Coming from the Grocery Store?

What If Some of Our Depression Is Coming from the Grocery Store?

No country should have to accept a food supply that makes its people sick and sad because that’s what’s most profitable, and the science is now on our side when we say so out loud.

 
By Thom Hartmann, author, educator and commentator.
 
 

Back in the late 1970s, when Louise and I were running a residential treatment program and school for abused and emotionally disturbed kids, we took the children off the standard institutional diet. Out went the dyes, the artificial flavors, the sugary cereals and the boxed dinners, and in came real (vegetarian) food cooked fresh every day from scratch.

While it’s impossible to know how big a factor that was (we were also on a remote forest-covered lake and had some great therapists), kids who were given up on as being incorrigible or uneducatable were soon ready for reintegration into the normal school system and a foster home.

While Ben Feingold told me diet was a huge factor in kids’ behavior, and we did a small study on salicylates in their diet that I published in 1980 in the Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, I was always skeptical. Until now.

Last week, researchers at UC San Francisco published a small trial in JAMA Psychiatry that looked at what happened to people clinically diagnosed with depression stopped eating ultra-processed food (UPF). For four weeks they ate a diet that cut their UPF consumption by more than 85 percent.

And, sure enough, their depression eased with their depression eased, with moderate to large improvements showing up on three separate measures. Their anxiety scores got a little better, as well.

Similarly, in 2017 an Australian team led by Felice Jacka ran the SMILES trial, taking 67 people with moderate to severe depression and giving half of them coaching toward a Mediterranean-style diet (fresh foods, mostly vegetarian/pescatarian) while the other half got supportive counseling from trained professionals. After twelve weeks, 32 percent of the food group were in full remission from their depression, compared with of the the people who just got counseling.

Two years later, researchers at Macquarie University tried a three-week version of the same study with depressed university students. The students who cut back on processed food and ate more vegetables, fish and olive oil reported significantly less depression, and the improvement was still clinically evident a full three months later.

Then came the really big large-population studies, a gold standard in health science.

Harvard researchers followed almost 32,000 nurses for decades and found that the women eating the most ultra-processed foods had about a 50 percent higher risk of developing depression than those eating the least. (Of particular interest: artificial sweeteners stood out as the worst offenders.)

A massive review in The BMJ pulled together 45 separate analyses and tied these UPF foods to 32 different kinds of harm, with anxiety and other common mental disorders at the top of the list.

And just this week another British study looked at more than 46,000 people born around the end of postwar sugar rationing. Those who spent their first thousand days of life—from the womb to their second birthday—under sugar and meat rationing were less likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety as adults.

Why would a bag of potato chips or too many sodas slam into your mood with such impact? The UCSF team suspects the gut-brain connection.

Their idea is that the emulsifiers, preservatives and other industrial additives in these products wear down the gut’s protective lining, which sets off low-grade inflammation that travels through the whole body and triggers a freak-out (my term, not theirs) in the brain. Dr. Nyasha Chagwedera, who led the study, put it this way:

“Junky processing may harm your gut in ways that ripple up to your brain.”

Older cultures wouldn’t find any of this surprising. They were not just careful about what they ate, but had a story about every edible plant or animal in their world; it’s how both cultural and “safe-to-eat” information was transmitted from generation to generation. And it worked until we turned our food system over to the giant corporations and their “food scientists” to figure out how to make things more profitably.

As a result, today the CDC says fully 55 percent of the calories Americans eat now come from ultra-processed products, and for our kids it’s closer to a shocking 62 percent. We—and our kids—are up against some of the most well-paid scientists and greedy capitalists on the planet.

So try this: give yourself four weeks, the same stretch the UCSF volunteers got. Read the ingredient list on everything you buy, and if it’s got anything on the list that you wouldn’t find in your own kitchen, put it back. Cook simply, and notice how you feel in week one and again in week four. And if someone you love is struggling with depression or anxiety, pass this along and offer to do it with them.

No country should have to accept a food supply that makes its people sick and sad because that’s what’s most profitable, and the science is now on our side when we say so out loud.

By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator. Thom has written many respected books. Reprinted with permission from The Wisdom School of October 7th, 2026 by Thom Hartmann. All articles are free and available to everyone in The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human. Wisdom School is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support Thom’s work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to The Wisdom School.

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The Lie Capitalism Told about Human Nature

The Forest Exposes the Lie Capitalism Told about Human Nature

By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator

Walk into a piece of old growth Pacific Northwest forest, and something happens to you. The light goes liquid. The air thickens. The moss is six inches deep on every horizontal surface. The Doug firs go up two hundred feet without a branch and disappear into a canopy you can’t quite see. The fallen trees, what loggers used to call nurse logs, are slowly becoming the next forest, with seedlings already rooted in their soft, decaying bodies. And the silence isn’t really silence. It’s a different quality of attention than you can find anywhere else.

I’ve spent a lot of hours in those forests over the years. What strikes me, every time, is that the forest doesn’t feel like a place. It feels like someone. Or, more accurately, like many. A standing community of beings that knows you’re there before you know how you feel about being there.

For most of my life, science was telling me I was wrong about that. The official story, survival of the fittest, was that a forest is a kind of slow-motion gladiator pit, every tree fighting every other tree for sunlight and water and nutrients, and that the canopy I was walking under was the result of a few million years of relentless mutual exploitation. Whatever I was feeling under those firs was a poetic projection, not a fact about the forest.

In April, scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Forest GEO global research network published a paper in Nature that’s quietly demolishing that story.

The team examined nearly three million individual trees, across more than five thousand species, in seventeen forests spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and they found that positive, supportive interactions between neighboring trees are at least as common as the competitive ones we were taught about in school, and that the closer a forest is to the equator, the more cooperative its tree-to-tree relationships tend to be.

“Most research has focused on competition and other negative interactions among trees,” the study’s co-author Matteo Detto said, “but trees can also help their neighbors in many ways. We find that these positive interactions are more common in tropical forests, adding another piece to the puzzle of understanding their remarkable diversity.”

This is on top of decades of research, by Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia and by many others, on the underground mycorrhizal networks (the so-called wood wide web) that connect tree roots through filaments of fungus, allowing them to swap carbon, water, nitrogen, and chemical defense signals across species lines.

Simard’s framework, including her concept of mother trees (older, larger trees that appear to act as hubs in the underground network), has been beautifully popularized in books like her own Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and has also, in fairness, been challenged by other ecologists who argue that some of the popular claims have run ahead of the data.

The careful version of the science, today, is this: forests are unmistakably interconnected through fungi and roots, carbon and signals do move among trees through those networks, big old trees do appear to play structural roles in the system, and the precise mechanisms of how, and how much, are still being worked out. What’s not in question, after the new Nature paper, is the larger frame. Forests are cooperative systems at least as much as they are competitive ones. They’re not gladiator pits. They’re communities.

This matters far beyond ecology, because for the last hundred and fifty years our entire economic worldview has been built on a stolen metaphor from biology. We took Darwin’s struggle for existence, ripped it out of its context, ignored the fact that he wrote at least as much about cooperation and mutualism as he did about competition, and built capitalism, libertarianism, and most of our public-policy frameworks on the assumption that competition is the law of nature.

We lectured each other about it for generations. We told the kids in our schools that the forest was red in tooth and claw. We told them the market was just an extension of the forest. We told them anyone who didn’t make it deserved their fate, because that was just how nature worked.

But nature doesn’t work that way. The Russian biologist Pyotr Kropotkin, observing wolves and birds and human peasant villages across Siberia in the 1880s, noticed this immediately and wrote his classic Mutual Aid to push back on the social-Darwinist misreading of his contemporary, Thomas Huxley.

Lynn Margulis, a century later, blew the whole story open with her work on endosymbiosis, demonstrating that the eukaryotic cell, the basic unit of every plant and animal on Earth, came into existence through cooperation between two ancient bacteria, not through competition.

And forest ecology is now arriving at the same place. The trees, it turns out, are not in business school. They’re in a long, patient, multi-species relationship with their neighbors, their fungi, their soil, their rain, their light, and the dead bodies of every tree that ever lived and fell among them.

I made a related argument decades ago in Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. The whole basis of life on Earth is a single, vast, hundreds-of-millions-of-years-long cooperative project.

Photons from the sun cooperate with chlorophyll. Chlorophyll cooperates with carbon dioxide and water. The resulting sugars cooperate with mitochondria. Plants cooperate with fungi. Fungi cooperate with soil. Soil cooperates with microbes. Trees cooperate with other trees.

And for almost all of human history, every culture except the most recent one understood this implicitly. The forest was a relative. The river was a relative. We were not above the system. We were part of it, and our job was to maintain the relationships that kept it alive.

What does this mean for the rest of us in 2026, with a planet on fire and a civilization built on the wrong story? Three things, I think.

First, defend the old growth forests we have left. They aren’t interchangeable with tree plantations. A two-hundred-year-old Doug fir, with its underground mycorrhizal partners and the centuries of local relationships it has built, can’t be replaced by twenty saplings on a clearcut. Once those connections are severed, it can take centuries for the network to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all. There’s a reason indigenous land sovereignty consistently produces healthier forests than corporate or state management does. Indigenous knowledge has known this in its bones for thousands of years.

Second, change the story you tell yourself about how the world works. Adam Smith was wrong about the invisible hand being our deepest nature. The forest is the deeper truth. Cooperation, mutualism, kinship, and care are the substrate. Competition is real, but it sits inside the larger frame of cooperation, the way a jazz solo sits inside the band.

If you build a society on the metaphor of the forest instead of the metaphor of the market, you get a different country, with different schools, different hospitals, different elder care, different economics, and very different relationships between neighbors.

Third, find a real forest, an old one if you can, and sit in it for an hour with your phone face-down. Not to perform contemplation. Just to listen. The forest will teach you what cooperation actually feels like, in your body, with no theory required. You’ll feel small in the right way, and held in the right way, and you’ll come out of it remembering something the dominant culture spent a century trying to make you forget.

The new Nature paper is just the latest piece of the science finally catching up. The forest was never a battlefield. It’s a community we forgot we belonged to. And the very good news is that the community is still here, still patient, still willing to teach us, in the language of light and root and fungus, who we actually are.

If there’s an old growth forest within driving distance of you, go this month. If there’s a campaign to protect it, donate or volunteer. If your local government is making decisions about a nearby greenbelt or watershed or working forest, show up at the meeting and speak. And tell me in the comments where your forest is, and what it’s teaching you. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our forests, like our wisdom, belong to all of us.

By Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator. Thom has written many respected books. Reprinted with permission from The Wisdom School of June 10th, 2026 by Thom Hartmann. All articles are free and available to everyone in The Wisdom School: What it Means to be Human. To receive new posts you can become a free or paid subscriber of this reader-supported digital publication.

The Climate Collapse Presidency

Editor’s Note: To observe the Earth Week and Earth Day 2026, we republish this timely but grim warning from a well-respected columnist, Thomas Hartmann. It was published in The Thomas Hartman Report on February 1, 2026. Unfortunately, preserving the planet’s livability continues to be a steep, uphill battle. Our only hope is that the humanity will wake up NOW and shoulder the responsibility of saying NO to the suicidal path taken by our government and business entities before things get any worse!

The Climate Collapse Presidency

“Climate change is the single greatest threat to a sustainable future but, at the same time, addressing the climate challenge presents a golden opportunity to promote prosperity, security and a brighter future for all.” 

  —Ban Ki-moon, former UN Secretary-General, Remarks at Climate Leaders’ Summit, April 11, 2024

The greatest existential threat humanity faces isn’t hiding in a military bunker or a terrorist cell. It’s in plain sight: the accelerating collapse of our only home’s life-support systems.

Trump’s first term was environmental arson. He gutted the EPA, installed fossil fuel executives in key positions, shredded over one hundred environmental protections, and abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement.1 Scientists were silenced. Research was suppressed. The words “climate change” vanished from government websites as if deleting terms could delete reality.2

When confronted about climate’s role in the devastating 2020 wildfires, Trump smirked: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”3 Tell that to thirteen-year-old Wyatt Tofte, who died in Oregon’s inferno embracing his dog as he tried desperately to save his grandmother.4 As our Western skies turned blood-orange, Louise and I choked from a summer of wild forest fires, and record hurricanes pummeled our coasts, Trump mocked renewable energy and praised coal.

But his second term has proved apocalyptically worse. By April 2025, Trump had reinstated his “Schedule F” executive order, purging government agencies of climate scientists.5 His new EPA administrator—­formerly chief counsel for a coal conglomerate—is suspending methane regulations, gutting emissions standards, and fast-tracking permits for drilling in previously protected Arctic wilderness.6 The phrase “climate emergency” is now prohibited in federal communications, while years of expensive-to-compile government climate data are being systematically altered, hidden, or outright deleted.

Climate collapse reveals democracy’s most fundamental challenge: can we save our planet for our children and grandchildren when fossil fuel profits demand Republicans force inaction? The answer is becoming horrifyingly clear as tipping points approach: permafrost is thawing, ice sheets are destabilizing, and ocean currents are weakening.7

These aren’t distant threats: they’re happening now, accelerated by policies designed to benefit the donor class while sacrificing everyone else.

This betrayal falls hardest on poor and minority communities. Environmental justice and racial justice are inseparable.8 Studies consistently show that communities of color consistently face the highest levels of air pollution, toxic waste, and climate disasters while having the fewest resources to fight back. And to add further injury, Trump and Musk have now gutted FEMA.9

As droughts intensify, coastlines disappear, and climate refugees multiply, the social fabric unravels. Democracy requires at least a modicum of stability, but climate chaos breeds authoritarian “solutions.” The Pentagon itself identifies climate change as a “threat multiplier” that endangers national security. Scientists warn we have less than a decade to halve emissions before crossing irreversible tipping points.10

Our children will judge us not by our tweets or culture wars, but by whether we protected their right to a livable planet. The machinery of climate destruction doesn’t operate in isolation: it’s connected to the plutocracy that captured our courts, the propagandists who poison our media, and the authoritarians who threaten our democratic foundations.

This is the ultimate test of our republic: Can we break the stranglehold of fossil fuel money on our politics? Can we choose a habitable planet over quarterly profits?

Time is running out, and the climate doesn’t negotiate. Physics doesn’t care about political convenience. Either we reclaim our democracy from corporate capture and dark money in politics, or we surrender both a livable planet and our system of government to collapse.

© 2026 Thomas Hartmann, Oregon. Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of a highly respected book: The Last American President. And this article makes the Chapter 11 of the book, and it was published in  The Hartmann Report, a reader-supported publication where all weekday articles are free and available to everyone. Reprinted with permission of the author. Opinion expressed is not necessarily that of Skipping Stones, Inc.

Making A Difference: Taking Action

Making A Difference: Taking Action is a Choice 

And that Choice is Available to Us Every day

By Zoe Leitner, age 18, New Jersey.

I have a history of taking action. I believe that action is the most honest form of belief. Conviction means little unless it alters how we behave—what we build, what we interrupt, and what we refuse to ignore. Awareness is only a beginning; agency begins when we decide to respond.

My understanding of action began somewhere ordinary: the kitchen. For my mom and me, baking together, mostly chocolate, was routine, almost background noise. But in 2020, I realized that familiarity could be a tool for change. I started selling over 600 hot chocolate bombs in my community, raising more than $4,000 and reaching over 80 families. I didn’t do it to seek recognition, but in response to what I saw around me: needs that could be met, even in small ways.

The project worked not because of novelty, but because it was accessible. Participation didn’t require prior experience, complicated forms, or large commitments. Anyone could contribute in a meaningful way. It was easy to understand, easy to engage with, and immediately relevant to the people it aimed to serve. What mattered most was how the money was used afterward. Instead of deciding what organizations might need, I asked them. Jackets instead of cash. Food instead of flyers. Listening reshaped my understanding of service: meaningful help begins with attention, not assumption.

That lesson stayed with me. In 2023, I founded Chocolate4Charity, a nonprofit that channels my love of baking into meaningful impact. Through partnerships with Pink Jewels Boutique, David Chad Beauty Parlor, Nicole Nicosia Hair, and Smith & Company Gifts, we’ve sold over 800 boxes, raising nearly $10,000 for causes I care deeply about: $3,000 to the Mark Schonwetter Holocaust Education Foundation, $3,500 to the Montclair Animal Shelter, $1,000 to MIB Agents Pediatric Cancer Research, and 200 chocolate boxes donated to Comfort Zone Bereavement Camps.. Over 80 students have joined me in volunteering, packaging, and delivering chocolates, discovering firsthand how small actions ripple outward. Each box doesn’t just deliver chocolate; it gives people a chance to contribute, participate, and see the real impact of their efforts.

Chocolate is the vehicle, not the focus. Some causes reflect my family’s history. Supporting Holocaust education honors my great-grandparents, Holocaust survivors, and my grandparents, immigrants, whose experiences shaped my understanding of responsibility. Other causes reflect friendship, grief, and compassion, such as supporting a peer battling cancer, helping children navigate loss, and advocating for animal rights.

The most important measure of success is not the money raised but the number of people who participate. Many people want to help but hesitate because they do not know where to begin. Chocolate4Charity offers an accessible entry point through packaging chocolates, sharing a cause, or delivering donations. I have watched classmates who rarely speak up—over 80 in total—discover a sense of purpose simply by stepping into action. Real impact begins not with grand gestures but with invitations that inspire others to act.

In 2025, I was honored as a Top Upstander at an event organized by a library in Montclair, New Jersey, in collaboration with children’s book author Dr. Janice Cohn. The recognition was meaningful, but I do not see it as a title or an accolade. To me, being an Upstander is deliberate. It is the refusal to remain passive once you notice something that needs attention. It is the choice to respond, even when the right path is unclear or imperfect.

This understanding resonates with a message Dr. Janice Cohn often shares: “Light a tiny candle.” Action is not about being seen; it’s about aligning belief with our behavior. It is found in everyday decisions—listening, offering help, stepping forward when silence would be easier. That philosophy continues to guide my work with Chocolate4Charity and in other parts of my life.

Being an Upstander, like any meaningful action, is not a single moment. It’s a practice, a habit, and a commitment to notice what others might overlook. In that sense, recognition matters less than the choices that lead to it. Action remains its own reward.

Action began in a kitchen for me, with melted chocolate and a question I could not ignore: What will I do with what I see? That question has guided every choice I’ve made since that first chocolate, and to the moments when I have chosen to speak, listen, and act.

Meaningful change requires aligning belief with behavior, noticing what needs attention, and inviting others to work with you. Real impact is rarely sudden or dramatic. It is built from small, intentional acts that ripple outward, shaping communities, relationships, and lives in ways that are often invisible, yet enduring.

I truly believe taking action is a choice, and that choice is available to us every day. That’s where responsibility begins, and that’s where belief becomes real!

—Zoe Leitner, Age 18, New Jersey.

In Defense of Dirt: Rewilding Our Children

In Defense of Dirt: Rewilding Our Children
Before their Bodies Forget

 From Finnish forest floors to Michigan creek beds, the science is clear:
real dirt is medicine, memory, and the immune system’s original teacher

By Thom Hartmann, author, speaker, activist, and educator

I grew up on the edge of Lansing, Michigan, with a stream just down the road and woods that felt like a secret frontier. We all did: the neighborhood kids, barefoot in the damp grass after rain, boots mucked up with creek-silt, hands scrubbed raw from climbing fallen logs and digging in the undergrowth. Getting in the dirt was part of childhood. We didn’t ask permission from microbes.

So when I read the recent report in The Guardian about Finnish nursery experiments transforming children’s health by simply letting them play in real soil, sand, leaves and forest-floor, I felt the past crash into the present and I knew again that the story of our species and our health lies in that innocent, messy contact.

In Finland, at a daycare center in Lahti (north of Helsinki), the researchers from the Natural Resources Institute of Finland adopted a radical experiment: rip out the asphalt, dig into the soil, roll out a live carpet of forest-floor moss and blueberry bushes, build compost heaps for children to feed, invite the kids to play, dig, muddle, get their hands in it.

The result, in a two-year study of three- to five-year-olds, was striking: children in the “rewilded” yards had fewer disease-causing skin bacteria (like Streptococcus) and showed stronger immune regulation (increased T-regulatory cells) within weeks. Gut microbiomes were healthier, inflammatory-associated Clostridium levels dropped.

This is the antithesis of today’s “modern” societal perspective on childhood and nature.

On the one hand, we have the modern obsession with pristine, sanitized lives: rubber-surfaced playgrounds, plastic mats, antibacterial everything. On the other, there’s the simple fact that our inner biology, our immune systems, our gut and skin microbiomes, were forged in the wild: the wild of forest floors, streams, soils, plants, bugs.

As I argued in my earlier essay “It’s All One Thing – The Story of the Worms” here in Wisdom School, our estrangement from that substrate is the seed of auto-immune disorders, of chronic inflammation, and a body that’s forgotten it’s actually part of nature.

In Michigan I was lucky: the woods and stream were mine for the exploring. I remember fingers crawling over moist logs, the smell of leaves turning, the damp cold run-off water slipping under my boots. I didn’t know at the time that those experiences were more than play: they were calibration.

They were training my immune system, teaching my skin and gut to know what nature looked like and smelled like and felt like. To know that dirt is not an enemy. And those childhood experiences are probably why I’ve never been troubled by autoimmune disorders or asthma.

So let’s call this what it is: a radical restoration. Not of some exotic wilderness, but of our lost contact with the natural microbial terrains that co-evolved with our species. The Finnish results are more than a Kindergarten trend; they’re a signal of what our children—and we all—are missing.

Here are some of the stakes:

  • When kids play in dirt rich with soil microbes, their immune system steps into a healthier balance: fewer disease-causing bacteria on the skin surface, greater regulation of internal immune responses.

  • The “outer layer” of biodiversity—soil, plants, forest floor—directly influences the “inner layer” of biodiversity in our bodies, our skin, gut, and airways. This is co-evolved, not incidental.

  • The modern shift away from exposure—to “sterile” play surfaces, indoor confinement, sanitized surfaces—may appear benign, but it’s been quietly shaping the epidemic rise of allergies, auto-immune disorders, and inflammatory diseases that both disturb the quality of life and can shorten lifespan itself.

  • This is not just personal wellness: it’s ecological and societal. The health of children, the immune burdens we carry, the resilience of future generations: all of this ties back to whether we let the next generation touch the living earth.

  • In the Finnish classroom yard they said: “We’re moving the action from inside to outside. We want to show the children nature so they learn about it.”

That sentence is packed. Show the children nature. Let them learn through contact, through play, through mess. Not as a museum piece, not as a “nature corridor” behind a fence, but as the ground they run on, dig in, climb across, whose bugs and fungus mix with theirs.

So, I want to issue a personal call to you—if you have children, nieces, nephews—or if you’re planning for grandchildren—or if you’re simply human, who used to feel the dirt under your fingernails and the creek cold on your shins—do this: Let the next generation get messy.

Plant a compost heap. Bring real soil into the sandbox. Create a border of moss and stones. Let the rain puddle, let the bugs crawl, let the children burrow. Let the forest floor not be exotic but ordinary.

I remember that stream down the road from the house I grew up in, the woods on the edge of Lansing, the sticky Michigan clay, the little fish, frogs, and crawdads under rocks, the mud mixing into water. I remember coming home with smudged socks, grass stains and a face kissed by sap.

I didn’t know at the time that I was feeding my immune system. I simply knew I was alive and it was a thrill.

We’ve forgotten that aliveness. Our culture has prized immaculateness, separation from the “dirty” wild, the exclusion of microbes like we exclude strangers. Yet the wildness is in us. The soil is in us. We’re made of the same living matrix as the tree roots and the beetles and the moss. Broken contact with that matrix isn’t harmless: it’s a literal loss.

In the wise old words I referenced in “It’s All One Thing”: “When we remove ourselves from that web of life, we do so at our own peril.”

The Finnish story is not just cute or scientific: it’s urgent. Rebuild our contact with the living earth. Let children scoop sand and soil, let them bury their hands, let them build mud-cakes like Aurora in Finland’s day-care. Laugh as they smear soil on their faces. It’s not chaos: it’s calibration.

Yes, modernization has brought us many gifts. Clean water. Sanitation. Vaccines. But modernization taken too far, with too much separation from our biological roots, leaves us with immune systems that misfire, bodies that mistake harmless soil microbes for threats, children who never taste actual dirt. The Finnish experiment is clear: get back to the soil, get back to the forest floor, get back to the messy, ordinary earth.

And the earth—our living earth—benefits too. More forest-floor carpets. More compost heaps. More kids playing outside, fewer rubber mats, fewer sterile boxes. We begin to treat biodiversity as not just glamorous (rainforests, coral reefs) but local (yard patches, old tree stumps, rain puddles). We begin to remember that our health is tied to the health of that biodiversity.

So my invitation to you: On your next weekend, find a patch of ground the kids (or you!) can mess with. Dig into it. Feel the soil. Let a leaf rot into the compost. Let worms do their work. Let the world pull you back. Because we’re not apart from nature: we are nature. And when we pretend otherwise, we hurt ourselves and the world around us.

It’s time to stop treating microbes as abstract threats or invisible villains. They are—and have always been—our companions, our allies, our ancestral family. The Finnish children’s laughter in the sandy forest-floor yard is our ancient laughter too.

Let’s dig in.

—Thom Hartmann, educator and commentator, is the author of many respected books. Reprinted with permission. To receive new Wisdom School posts you can become a free or paid subscriber of this reader-supported digital publication, The Wisdom School: What It Means To Be Human. All Wisdom School articles are free and available to everyone. Copyright by Thom Hartmann, 2025.

The Humane Hoax

The Humane Hoax: Animal Industry’s Labels and Lies

By Hope Bohanec, author and activist, Oregon

As consumers become aware of the animal agriculture industry’s cruelty and environmental impact, clever industry marketers adapt with “humane” labels, small-scale tall tales, and other feel-good falsehoods. The term “humane hoax” is defined as new language and labels in animal product marketing that convey a false narrative of humane treatment and sustainable management of farmed animal operations. The marketing language and euphemistic labels tell a story of a supposed distinction from conventional animal products. But the reality on the ground, in the manure pits, during the mechanical milking, and inside the terrifying slaughterhouse, is fundamentally unchanged, despite promises to consumers of something new. Humanewashing and greenwashing are becoming more prevalent and pervasive than ever.

Also encompassed in the concept of the humane hoax is the new trend of people attempting to “do-it-yourself” with backyard farmed animal raising and slaughtering, generally with good intentions, but all too often, with cruel consequences. It has never been more important to educate people on the truth behind the industry lies, and people are hungry for the truth.

Overview:

In the time since I wrote the first book on the subject of the humane hoax, called The Ultimate Betrayal: Is There Happy Meat?, consumer awareness of the suffering of farmed animals has grown exponentially and so has the “alternative” animal product industry. “Cage-free,” “Certified Humane,” and other comforting labels are no longer elusive—dusty items only seen in the back corners of health food stores. They are now as common and numerous as cattle on a feedlot, spotted in common places like Walmart and your local coffee shop. In 2010, eggs labeled cage-free were a mere four percent of the market; that had risen to sixteen percent by 2017. The industry predicts that to meet consumer demand, cage-free production will be seventy-five percent of the market by 2026.

It is a hopeful sign that consumers are demanding better treatment for animals, but the actual difference in the life and death experience for a cow or a chicken with humane labeling is sadly minimal. I have done extensive research on this issue, interviewed numerous stakeholders, and personally visited multiple animal operations, and concluded that these unregulated labels mean very little, if anything at all, for the animal’s experience. I have examined this particular area of farmed animal advocacy, having written the first, and one of the only books on the topic, and having been professionally involved in the field for over two decades. I found, for example, that comparing hens confined in battery cages to those in cage-free barns bodes only slight improvements and those differences can vary widely from farm to farm.

Animal activists have time and again exposed the horrors of egg-laying hens crammed tightly in battery cages, with only the space comparable to a crowded elevator to live in. In response, the shrewd marketers representing the egg industry have distorted the story, altered the labels, and changed consumers’ conceptions. Instead of rejecting the inherent cruelty of commercial egg production, shoppers have been deceived by the fictitious choice of a seemingly “humane” alternative of “cage-free”—but the reality for the birds, however, is bleak.

The difference in the experience of a bird in a conventionally managed operation versus a cage-free one is negligible. Despite the optimistic label, most chickens in cage-free egg facilities still live in miserable overcrowded conditions in massive windowless buildings. Their eyes and throats burn from the ammonia gas released from their accumulated waste. They never feel the sun on their wings or experience a simple satisfying dust bath. Irrespective of any label, all the chickens still go to a brutal slaughter at a very young age. We must not let the deception of “new” marketing eclipse the fundamental cruelty of animal agriculture. The perception invoked by the “cage-free” label—that the birds are now living a good life—is a decidedly false one, a mirage created by the interaction of euphemisms and consumer hopes in the absence of accurate information.

As animal agribusiness attempts to wash the blood off its hands with a new fabrication of fresh farming methods, consumers, activists, and other caring people must educate themselves about the new narratives that the industry continues to weave. This anthology features a range of knowledgeable authors who are at the forefront of this marketing shift, chronicling every aspect with in-depth analyses and intellectual rigor. Among other topics, the book explores how so-called alternative animal agriculture intersects with feminism, affects the environment, is represented in the media, and impacts human and non-human communities alike.

On Contributors to the Anthology:

This anthology has an impressive list of contributing writers who are a diverse assortment of activists, academics, authors, and campaigners. They range from radical protesters to educating advocates to professional scholars in the academy. Of the seventeen expert contributors, eight are published authors, five leaders of advocacy organizations, eight have Ph.D. degrees, and three have masters. What they all share is a forward-thinking vision and common concerns with animal agriculture’s marketing shift from big to small, from industrial to local.

The Humane Hoax contains essays by noted animal rights and environmentalism figures like Carol Adams, Robert Grillo, Sailesh Rao, Karen Davis, and Christopher “Soul” Eubanks. Some of the contributors have done extensive peer-reviewed research on the subject while others have been working with farmed animal advocacy for decades thinking deeply about this issue. Still others are rescuing farmed animals directly from local and small-scale farms, witnessing first-hand the undeniable suffering that is commonplace in animal farming.

The Humane Hoax: Essays Exposing the Myth of Happy Meat, Humane Dairy, and Ethical Eggs; edited by Hope Bohanec. The book is available as a paperback and also as an e-book from Lantern Publishing & Media; lanternpm.org.

Scrambled Lessons

Scrambled Lessons

By Yimeng (Nicole) Wang Yu, age 17, P. R. China

I have an estranged relationship with eggs. We aren’t completely cut off from each other—we still cross paths on occasion—but our encounters are awkward, fleeting, and never quite right. At most, I’m allowed to see them once every couple of weeks, and when I do, they always insist on showing up in some strange outfit. Sometimes they’re draped in a heavy coat of soy sauce, other times they’re wrapped in a knitted avocado-green sweater of their own making, smugly nestled against toast. But bare? Never. On the rare occasions they appear unadorned, it feels less like a gift and more like a threat. My stomach churns, my throat tightens, and my face knots itself into lines I don’t consciously form. I try to be polite, because it isn’t every day I get to share a meal with eggs, but honestly—they make me deeply uncomfortable.

And yet, as repulsed as I am now, I’ve probably consumed entire dynasties of chickens in the form of eggs over the past sixteen years. I grew up in a household where protein was fuel, and eggs were regarded as the most reliable gas station. My parents, convinced that my athleticism required a steady supply of scrambled yellow, believed they were doing me a favor. So, for sixteen years, they placed eggs before me every morning. Scrambled, boiled, fried, buried in fried rice, floating in soup—eggs became the guest at all of my meals. 

For years, I wished this unwelcome visitor would finally excuse itself from my breakfasts. I told my parents that eggs made my stomach feel as if it were gnawing on itself from within. My complaints, however, were dismissed as excuses and childish exaggerations. “You’ll get used to it,” my mom would say. “It’s good for you,” my dad would add. And so I swallowed my objections along with the eggs, because, after all, parents must know best. Didn’t they always?

Until last year.

After a lifetime of groans, gags, and grimaces, my mom finally relented and scheduled a food intolerance test. We waited one long week. When the results arrived, it felt as though the SAT scores of my digestive system had been released. My mom and I huddled around the phone, tense with anticipation. Then the screen flashed with numbers, and chaos erupted. There was screaming, crying (mostly mine), leaping, refreshing the page again and again as if the result might shift if stared long enough. The report confirmed what my body had been insisting all along: I was intolerant to eggs. Not just mildly intolerant, either—I had obliterated the intolerance scale. The threshold for high sensitivity was 200. I scored 900. Four and a half times the limit. Eggs and I weren’t simply mismatched; we were sworn enemies, cosmically opposed.

In that moment, years of swallowed frustration finally poured out of me. My intuition had been right, and science had finally corroborated it. Turns out I wasn’t a dramatic complainer. At last, my mom believed me. I was vindicated.

But looking back, I realize those mornings of forced eggs were not acts of cruelty but of love—misguided, perhaps, but love nonetheless. My parents weren’t trying to torture me; they were trying to keep me healthy in the way they knew best. Only now, with hindsight, can I see how much care went into those breakfasts. At the time, I couldn’t imagine it. I just assumed that because my parents insisted, they must be right, and because I was a child, I must be wrong.

It reminds me of the way I thought about growing up in general. As a child, I carried this foreign but persistent belief that everything would improve as I got older. I thought the world itself would change with me—that kindness and fairness were waiting just beyond the next birthday. My greatest problem then was the cafeteria bully, and even that seemed temporary, destined to dissolve once we were all old enough to know better. In my imagination, adulthood was a yet-to-be-discovered place where everyone made good decisions, where people were kinder, wiser, gentler—because they were grown.

Of course, the reality was never that simple. Growing older didn’t fix the world; it merely sharpened my vision to see it more clearly. Eggs did not suddenly stop making me sick when I turned sixteen—it took years of paying attention to myself, of insisting on what I felt, before anyone else would listen. Adulthood did not sanctify those around me—it simply gave me the ability to recognize their complexity, their contradictions, and, sometimes, their well-intentioned mistakes.

In that sense, perhaps I was not entirely wrong as a child. The world did get better—not because it grew kinder, but because I learned how to navigate it. I learned to trust my body when it screamed at me. I learned that being believed is not automatic, even by those who love you most, but that persistence matters. And I learned that the very things that cause you pain can, years later, soften into strangely tender memories.

So yes, eggs and I remain estranged. I avoid them, and I live a happier life because of it. But I can’t quite bring myself to hate eggs. They’re a part of my story, a relic of mornings at the kitchen table with my parents, who—despite their misplaced faith in scrambled yolks—were only ever trying to love me in the way they knew how. And maybe that’s what growing up really is: not escaping discomfort, but learning to hold it alongside love, until the bitterness—or the grossness—tastes almost sweet.

—Yimeng (Nicole) Wang Yu is a 17-year-old junior at Shanghai American School, P.R. China. She grew up in Spain and now lives in China, and she speaks, reads, and writes in English, Chinese, Spanish, and French. When she isn’t writing, she can be found on the basketball court, blasting music through her AirPods, or noticing the small, everyday details that might inspire her next piece—sometimes all at once.

No Phone, No Problem

No Phone, No Problem

By Nasiruddin Hamid, Qadian, Punjab, India.

We all love playing video games, watching funny shorts, and making movies on our smartphones. However, some of us use the cellphones much more than others.

I live in Northern India with my family. After school, my father gives me his cellphone for ten minutes to play games and enjoy SnapChat and YouTube, etc. When those ten minutes turn into 20 or 30 minutes, and then into an hour, I don’t even realize it—but my father does.

Last year, I started avoiding playing outdoors and spending time with my friends. I was using the phone more and more without telling my parents. But my parents never stopped keeping an eye on me.

One day, my father told me when he was a kid, he used to play many outdoor games like Pakadam Pakdai, Baraf Pani, Pitthu Gram, and Addi (see the end note below for a short explanation of these games children play in India). He said, “We didn’t have phones, but we’d read comics and novels in Urdu and English for our pasttime.”

Thinking of those outdoor games and thoughts of reading comics and novels really got me interested. So I made a deal with my dad that he and I would play outside and read books together. He bought me a new bicycle, and now I go riding; he runs beside me while I ride my bicycle, which is quite fun! He also bought me new comics and a few novels, and he reads them with me.

I really like reading the tales of Akbar and Birbal, as well as the stories of Mullah Nasruddin. They are full of humor and wisdom. I must say, I find reading books or riding a bicycle outdoors much more interesting than playing video games or watching YouTube shorts.

Yes, I know cellphones have their own benefits, but as my father says, “They are more useful after a certain age.” We should limit our phone usage. I have read that too much smartphone use can damage our brain cells, affect eyesight, and even our emotional health.

I believe my parents when they tell me that there can be many unforeseen negative impacts of these devices. I always trust them with any issues that come up.

As school age kids, we should use cellphones only for short duration, and under parental supervision and guidance.

By Nasiruddin Hamid, Qadian, Punjab, India.

Notes:

Akbar and Birbal Stories: Akbar was a Mughal emperor who ruled a large region in South Asia that includes modern-day Northern and Central India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan during the 16th century. Birbal was a close advisor and wise minister in the court of Akbar for some 30 years. The Akbar and Birbal stories are not only entertaining but also witty and are widely-read favorites of Indian kids.

Mullah Nasruddin (aka Nasreddin Hodja) appears in countless stories—mostly witty or wise—where he is shown as a (holy) fool that teaches great wisdom to the world. He is considered a Sufi (Islamic) character and he may have actually lived in the 13th century in present day Turkey and may have traveled to many lands as his stories are widely known.

A Short Explanation of the Games:

Pakdam Pakdai: Run and catch game One kid tries to catch others who try to run away.
Baraf Pani: When caught, you freeze like “Baraf” (Hindi word for ice) until someone frees you by saying “Pani” (Hindi word for water)
Pitthu Gram: Players break a stack of seven stones with a ball and then try to rebuild it before getting tagged by the fielders.
Addi: is played with two teams of 5/5 players. One team starts in a circle and tries to reach the end of the field line while the other team chases and blocks the players from reaching it.

 

Taking Care of North Dakota

Taking Care of North Dakota

By Yusuf Dean, 13, North Dakota.

Moving to Harvey, North Dakota felt…different.

I was so used to the bustling streets of Orlando and the nearly constant sound of cars, that in North Dakota everything seemed peaceful and quiet by contrast. Rolling hills for miles around, and only the sound of your car on the highway. Now, Having lived here for almost seven years, I can say that the peaceful and pristine image of North Dakota was nothing but a facade.

The majority of the middle and high school boys here always talk about their big, gas-guzzling trucks, diesel combines, and other farm equipment. They also talk about semis (tractor-trailers) and whether Peterbilt or Volvo is better. My preference for smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles amuses them.

During recess, a big, loud pickup might rumble by, belching black exhaust, and one of my friends will say, “How’s that smoke treatin’ ya?” It annoys me because, well, they’re just trying to provoke me. Plus, most of the people in my community are totally fine with high fuel emissions and polluting the environment, and they dismiss the fact that these things are contributing to climate change as untrue and silly. I’m pretty good at putting on a neutral mask, but really, when they make comments like this, I’m fuming inside.

One time, my friend Bentley and I were going on a bike ride, so I told him to meet me at my dad’s house. When I met him in our driveway, the garage door was open. Bentley saw my dad’s Mazda CX-90 and said, “That’s a nice looking car!”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Is it an EV?”

“Um…”

“Hybrid?”

“Yeah, it’s a hybrid.”

Bentley rolled his eyes. “Bruh.”

“What?”

“I like it and don’t like it at the same time.”

I instantly knew why. Any car that used any amount of electricity to move was definitely not his type.

“Come on, Bentley,” I said.

“What? It’s a freaking hybrid. No one likes those.”

I clenched my fists. I absolutely hate when someone makes a blanket statement or speaks in absolutes when they’re expressing an opinion that might not be as popular outside of Harvey. “Maybe not anyone here, but I’ve seen countless hybrids and even fully electric cars in places other than NORTH DAKOTA!!!”

In the U.S., the deaths of around 200,000 people each year are linked to poor air quality. If people don’t put in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, our health and our climate will suffer. Many people in North Dakota think that their gas-guzzling vehicles are better and that EVs are just piles of junk metal with batteries in them that pollute the environment. What they don’t see is that humanity as a whole has to work together to change our transportation system and energy production system; they think that the idea of one’s personal choices helping fight climate change is futile. They are, in part, correct, but not for the reasons they think they are.

The greatest damage being done is not by individuals, but by huge fossil fuel companies, one of them being an oil company based right here in North Dakota. Marathon, the world’s 22nd-largest oil producer (based on 2022 data), is the seventh-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the oil and gas industry. This means that they are emitting way more greenhouse gases than they should be. Owing to Marathon’s carelessness, Fort Berthold Reservation, right here in North Dakota, has seen several crude oil spills due to broken pipelines that pollute the air and water, and flaming does not completely eliminate the harmful gas emissions produced by the oil.[1] North Dakotans are perfectly capable of showing empathy to their community, so they should not be okay with this.

In fifth grade, Bentley was my best friend. We’d hang out together, go to the pool together, but most importantly, he played a huge role in helping me through my parents’ divorce. He is one of the few kids in my class whose biological parents were separated. He empathized with me and gave me a few tips on what to do in certain situations, like when my parents were fighting, but most of the time, he was just there for me.

Following the pandemic, it was my first year of in-person school since second grade, and I didn’t have any friends. My parents were almost always arguing, and of course, I couldn’t talk to my brother—he was just four! One morning, my dad had shouted at me for forgetting to wash my face, which really hurt my feelings. I knew I’d have to bottle it all up before I got to school because I didn’t want to attract too much attention.

When I got to school, I took a deep breath and went inside to see a large curtain in the corner of the commons area where the seventh-grade boys liked to hang out before class started. I went behind the curtain and there was Bentley; I sat down, put my head in my knees, and started to cry.

“Yusuf, are you okay, bro?” Bentley asked.

“I’m fine.” I said, tears rolling down my face.

“Did your dad say something?”

“Bentley, it’s fine!” I said.

“I’m texting your mom,” he said as he opened his messages app.

I perked up, wiped my face with my sleeve and swiped at his phone, knocking it out of his hand. I put my head in between my knees again and my breath quickened.

He embraced my curled body in a hug, my heartbeat slowed, and the tears on my face began to dry.

We are humans, and we should always help our fellow humans in their time of need. If people here in North Dakota—good people like Bentley—took pride in a cleaner environment and the strength to take on a huge company like Marathon Oil, not only would people on the Fort Berthold Reservation be safer, but we could be proud that North Dakota is a state that takes care of its own.

By Yusuf Dean, age 13, North Dakota. He adds: “I live in the U.S. with my brother and my two Sri Lankan immigrant parents. I don’t speak Sinhalese, but I speak a bit of Spanish as my second language. I value curiosity, especially in children, because it is, in my opinion, the driving force behind learning and ultimately being successful in life. When I moved to North Dakota from Florida seven years ago, I found that while it was very different from the city life I was used to, there were some similarities. My essay is a reflection on one of the sources of tension I’ve encountered in my North Dakota community.”

[1]  Marathon Oil and EPA reach $241 million settlement over Clean Air Act violations in North Dakota | PBS News