Does beauty matter?

All around the region, it’s beautification time. On Monday, the final Sullivan Renaissance awards were given out. Shortly before that, the Pocono Mountains Vacation Bureau, Inc. gave out their awards. Adults, students, and organizations of all kinds have been cleaning out brush, trees, lawns and flowers, designing and creating new signage, cleaning up existing structures and even building new ones. But is all this time, energy and money lavished on making things look nicer worth it?

It could be argued that there are many causes more urgently in need of our attention. With a broken health-care system, wages stagnant, gas prices out of control and increasingly frequent catastrophic floods, a preoccupation with mere beauty might seem frivolous. This is all the more the case when concerns for beauty seem to clash head-to-head with economic issues, as happens all too often when new development is being considered.

But the evidence suggests that beauty is not, in the long run, a mere luxury. It is fundamental to our health, our mental and spiritual well being, and even our pocketbooks.

It is difficult to define beauty because there is no fixed objective standard—what one person finds beautiful could leave another indifferent or even repel them. But in the context of neighborhood beautification, there is substantial agreement that one important aspect of beauty, and perhaps the chief one, is the integration of vegetation into the human landscape. This could involve bringing plants into a man-made habitat, as when planters are put on a town street, or it could involve taming a tangled wild area enough to make it easy for humans to sit, walk and play there.

There is a growing body of evidence that environments so created have a significant health impact. As noted by Rosemary Mandeville in her column in the August 3 issue of The River Reporter, therapeutic gardening has become a legitimate field of study. Research showing that just the sight of green space helps people heal faster is so compelling that a number of major hospitals have planted gardens specifically for that purpose.

But it is not just physical health that is affected by exposure to green environments. Studies show that people are less stressed, less easily discouraged and have longer attention spans if they spend more time in green space.

Of course, we have plenty of green in this area without having to lift a finger. But that doesn’t mean the beautification work is in vain. The parks that many local communities are developing provide space that is accessible, and invites people to linger—not privately fenced off, and not a tangle that some might not want (or be able) to wrestle with. Moreover, according to researchers Nancy Wells and Gary Evans, writing in the journal Environment and Behavior, “The data suggest that there is little ‘ceiling effect’ with respect to the benefits of exposure to the natural environment. Even in a setting with a relative abundance of green landscape, more appears to be better when it comes to bolstering children’s resilience against stress or adversity.”

The fact that people respond to these effects shows up in how much they are willing to pay for real estate—and of course that means that beauty has a bottom-line financial value as well. Those who doubt this should reflect on the home staging industry, which helps people sell their houses for more money, and faster, precisely by making them more beautiful. Home stagers do for houses what our local beautifiers are doing for our towns and neighborhoods.

There is no question, then, that the beautification efforts of local groups and communities are well justified. But it is also worth noting that, when it comes to beauty, it is easier to tear down than to build up. To refrain from destroying the splendid natural landscape that is our free endowment here in the Upper Delaware Valley is just as important as creating parks out of wilderness or bringing plantings into towns. That means that we need to make our planning and zoning decisions with the same care and zeal that we put into our beautification projects. If we do, we ought to have a rich legacy of beauty to hand on to our children: one that will satisfy their material needs at the same time it restores their souls.

Dr. Punnybone

Tea Rex