The Health Benefits of Nature: Is a Walk in the Park Good Medicine?

For a fuller discussion of how we overspend on medicine compared to other government functions, see [Where Do Our Tax Dollars Go?]

What if one of the most powerful health interventions wasn’t found in a pill bottle or in surgery — but just outside your door?

In 2013, the Toronto Board of Health made a striking recommendation: for the sake of public health, Toronto should aim to maintain 40% green cover across the city. This wasn’t about beautification. It was about disease prevention, wellbeing, and the kind of everyday health support that doesn’t require medical intervention.

The city’s Strategic Forest Initiative highlighted something many of us intuitively feel but often overlook — access to nature is deeply therapeutic. Green spaces encourage physical activity, invite social connection, reduce stress, and restore our cognitive energy. They offer shade on hot days, cleaner air to breathe, and a subtle but powerful shift in how we experience our environment.

The Evidence

And this isn’t just theory. The research is remarkably consistent. Access to green space has been linked to lower mortality rates, reduced cardiovascular disease, lower obesity rates, and improved mental health. Perhaps most compelling: people living in greener neighbourhoods tend to live longer — even when compared to communities with similar income levels. This pattern has been observed across countries, suggesting something fundamental about the human relationship with nature.

One particularly memorable study found that planting just ten additional trees on a city block produced a health benefit comparable to a $10,000 increase in annual income for each householder — or the feeling of being ten years younger. It’s a poetic finding, but also a practical one. Small environmental changes can yield meaningful health returns.

So powerful is this body of evidence that medicine itself is beginning to adapt. Through initiatives like PaRx, physicians are now prescribing time in nature as part of treatment plans. The recommended “dose”? About two hours per week, or roughly 20 minutes a day.

Even Parks Canada has become part of this movement. In partnership with healthcare providers, some patients can now receive free park passes — an acknowledgment that access to nature isn’t just a luxury, but a legitimate component of care.

Why Isn’t This More Central to Healthcare?

All of this raises an important question: if we know that nature supports health so effectively, why isn’t it more central to how we think about healthcare?

A walk in the park may not replace medical treatment — but it may reduce the need for it. It may ease anxiety, lower blood pressure, improve mood, and reconnect us to something steady and grounding in an increasingly fast-paced world.

In a healthcare system that often focuses downstream — on treating illness after it appears — green space offers an upstream solution. It’s preventative, accessible, and remarkably cost-effective.

So yes, a walk in the park might just be good medicine.

And perhaps the more important question is not whether it works — but what we can do to take this research finding more seriously.

What Can and Is Being Done

In 1982, Japanese doctors began prescribing “forest bathing.” In New Zealand, green prescriptions are a formal part of health care. And since 2017, green prescriptions have been available in part of the US. In this spirit, Canada now provides free access to parks (PaRx) for a certain number of doctors in certain provinces. As of the publication date of this resource, 4,000 prescriptions had been written by 10,000 doctors. And the Canadian Medical Association has officially endorsed this!1

What You Can Do

Take a walk in a park.