Last year, Adam Banzhoff was living in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, working an IT job at a bank and feeling morose. “I was in a downswing, a little bit of a depression,” he tells me. Then one day, on a whim, he signed up for Horti, a new subscription service that ships members a plant every month. Soon a crispy wave fern arrived, a frisky looking thing with rippling tendrils. Q When the first new leaf appeared, it gave Banzhoff an electric thrill. He was hooked. A year later, between Horti’s regular shipments and pots he bought on his own, Banzhoff had transformed his house into a riot of green, with more than 120 plants. Crucially, it lifted his mood. “It really taps into a different part of your personality. That sounds kind of hippie-dippie,” he admits. “But it pulls you out of yourself.” Banzhoff had discovered the existential power of biophilia—and stumbled into an emerging industry that uses technology to increase our exposure to the natural world. Q The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm first proposed the idea of biophilia in the early 1970s, but the biologist Edward O. Wilson expanded on it, suggesting it was a genetically based, “innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” Research since has found that exposure to nature reduces symptoms of ADHD in kids, speeds the recovery of hospital patients, enhances creativity, and—bosses, take note—boosts white-collar productivity.
This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
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This story is from the October 2019 edition of WIRED.
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