SoS 281: Industrialization and the Environmental Mismatch: The Case for Returning to Nature with Dr. Danny Longman and Dr. Colin Shaw

I think it's really interesting that you both mentioned that your own lived experiences sort of motivated your interest in Well, now we're going to move into our questions about the paper that you sent us, which was titled Homo sapiens industrialization and the environmental mismatch hypothesis published in Biological Reviews last fall.

And I just have to say, I've been teaching environmental mismatch in my nutritional anthropology class and You know, we use it a lot in relationship to diet and non-communicable disease risk.

And so I really love that your paper extends beyond just the dietary mismatch and goes into all the other ways that we might be mismatches humans to our contemporary industrial environment, including pollutants.

I actually study exposure to pollutants and the impacts on reproductive maturation.

So I was thrilled that you included that because I don't think it's usually conceptualized in a mismatch approach.

So yes, kudos to that.

But anyway, taking a step back, we want to know what motivated you to put together this wonderful review paper.

It all started around the time of the COVID lockdown, maybe slightly earlier, when I think, Colin, we both each individually, completely independently read a National Geographic article that was entitled Your Brain on Nature, written by Florence Williams and This article described how spending time in nature boosts various aspects of cognitive function.

And this resonated quite a lot with both of us because we both spend lots of time outdoors, hiking, running, camping in the forest and the mountains and generally feeling great as a result of that.

So I think we shared that we both read this paper, we both sent it to each other saying, hey, this is cool, check it out.

And we then started reading around it, started looking into papers predominantly coming out of japan that were describing nature's effect on human biology which mainly focused on dampening the stress response but there was also some work on cognition some work on immune function and it became quite clear fairly quickly that no one was asking the question of why which is what colin mentioned just a few moments ago that is to say why should human biology be enhanced in natural environments and This led us to a lot of long discussions remotely online because of the lockdown, but also once lockdown eased it in person, hiking through the mountains of Iceland.

I remember Colin, we discussed this in quite a lot of detail.

And that slowly led to the ideas that we wanted to discuss in this paper.

It was really interesting looking at the literature and then trying to assess what we could add.

And I think what was very obvious was the evolutionary perspective led us to think not necessarily only about health, And levels of stress, because that's really what drives much of the Japanese literature is people are hyper stressed.

We need to find a way to deal with it.

Is there some sort of treatment that you could do? Oh, look, you can go outside.

That's cheap and easy.

And there's some benefits to it.

Your cortisol goes down, your heart rate goes down, blood pressure goes down.

This is great.

And again, getting back to the why, the evolutionary theory, it helps you to really look at the bigger picture and try to understand the origins of these types of things.

Because not to downplay in any way, but if you just look at mood, it can be seen from health practitioners as... possibly hand-wavy and not scientific enough and rigorously biological to the point where anybody in the healthcare industry or most in the healthcare industry would really use this in a day-to-day practice.

And so our thought was, well, evolutionary theory gives us a nice clear path to really ask the question based around evolutionary fitness, your ability to be viable and reproduce.

And so what we said was, okay, what factors could we look at that would help us to assess whether or not this very obvious habitat change has had any impact on our ability to be fit, to our evolutionary fitness? And what we looked at was these factors.