Opinion: Whaddya know? People really aren’t built for this world.

Russia has more forest than any other country on Earth – Copyright AFP Yuri KADOBNOV

It’s obvious, really. Imagine 8 billion totally maladjusted idiots in a world they can barely survive. Who’d a thunk it? Zurich and Loughborough Universities, that’s who.

A study by Colin Shaw and co-author Daniel P. Longman has come up with the environmental mismatch hypothesis.  Euphemistic as this may sound, this idea comes with some solid facts.

For example, a species evolved in a nature-rich environment can have trouble adjusting to an almost totally unnatural environment. People who grew up physiologically in low-stimulus environs have to adjust to high-stimulus.

They cite a lot of prevalent health conditions like inflammation, low fertility, and environmental toxins as additional physical stresses. Quite a bit of physical research into blood pressure, cortisol, and other physical indicators were mapped out.

In natural environments, many of these indicators reduced. According to the researchers, it’s a matter of “evolutionary fitness”, aka what you’re evolved to be.

That’s a pretty strong argument. They also point out that humans evolved to manage high-stress issues like predators and natural phenomena. No, not stresses like electricity bills, the news, or a mindless culture.

However, humans react to stress as if these things were predators. The combination of adrenaline and cortisol creates the normal response, which is out of whack with the actual issues.

Psychiatry may have to adapt to these ideas. Stress evasion is the absolute unchallenged big deal in human mental health at the moment. “Escapism” isn’t so much a mental issue as a multi-billion-dollar industry.

I’ve often wondered what was so wrong about people trying to escape environments they loathe. Seems pretty normal to me.

Stress crashes the hormonal balance, affects the immune system, and surprise, surprise, you get a lot of sick, overstressed people.

Sound familiar? Cities are a major part of the problem. 4.5 billion people live in these highly stressful environments. Add noise, pollution, constant stress in human interactions, packed close together, it’s a mess.

The solution is to redesign human environments.

It’d be a lot cheaper and safer to demolish these hellholes.

Modern architecture can easily create far more space in smaller footprints.

Most of these unhygienic toxic waste dumps need bulldozing anyway.

The positive effects of natural environments aren’t exactly unknown. It’s recreating those environments and preserving them that’s the issue.

OK, natural environment good, hellhole bad. Now lets make the human environment bearable.