The Nuance
Why Spending Time Around Other Living Things Positively Affects Your Health
Time spent around other living things may be essential to the health of your microbiome, and by extension the health of your brain and body
Until about the midpoint of the 20th century, the prevailing view of life on Earth was something akin to a massive interspecies cage match. The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley famously likened the natural world to a “gladiator’s show […] whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.”
Now we know better.
In his 2020 bestseller Entangled Life, the writer and biologist Merlin Sheldrake details many of the profound and symbiotic relationships that exist among Earth’s life-forms. Fungi are Sheldrake’s field of expertise, and he describes how vast subterranean fungal networks both support and rely on the community of trees and plants that sprout above ground, which are likewise codependent with the insects and animals that live in their midst.
Biologically diverse forests — and oceans, and wetlands, and deserts — are healthier than biologically bereft ones, he explains. Life supports life. And this rule of nature seems to extend to…
