Mind the green gap: access to nature shouldn't be a luxury | Arwa Mahdawi

Living in New York means getting used to seeing the city's population of mutant squirrels. No wonder I need to escapeOne of my favourite things to do in New York is to go on long nature walks around the city. Sometimes I see a baby rat frolicking among the trash cans; sometimes I see a pigeon; sometimes I see a rat eating a pigeon. It's rodent tooth v feral claw in the urban jungle.Manhattan isn't just richly populated with belligerent rats and pigeons. If you are lucky, you can also spot a mutant squirrel on your rambles. Thanks to massive inbreeding, New York is home to soot-black squirrels, which have a genetic condition called melanism. Inbreeding has also caused a group of brownish-orange squirrels to proliferate. "For squirrels, cinnamon is now the new black," the New York Times proclaimed in 2001. OK, that's enough squirrel facts. My point here is that while Manhattan is full of natural delights, they are of a limited variety. I love living in the city, but being surrounded by so much concrete and so many squirrels can occasionally drive me up the wall. I need to regularly escape into the countryside and see some trees for the sake of my mental health. And I am obviously far from the only person to feel like this. Humans were not built to live in densely populated cities, breathing in car fumes as we shuffle from one indoor place to another. The emergence of trends such as "forest bathing" shows that many of us are desperate for more trees in our lives. Continue reading...