Shinrin-yoku, or Forest Bathing

Checking my email today, I came across a couple of paragraphs from the Great Smokey Mountains Institute at Tremont introducing me to the concept of Shinrin-yoku, or Forest Bathing. Unlike a traditional hike or guided nature walk, Forest Bathing involves simply taking in the forest atmosphere, slowing down, or not moving at all, and receiving the therapeutic effects of the natural setting. Forest Bathing involves no programmatic goals, no extraction of information, no effort to identify species, say, or to reach a destination. An aimless perambulation through the forest reminded me of the dérive, a revolutionary strategy associated with Guy Debord and the mid-Twentieth-century Situanionist International avant-garde group. That strategy involved people, as individuals or small groups, moving across urban landscapes in an unplanned and unpredictable way, simply letting themselves be "drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." The goals of the dérive include studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography), emotional disorientation, and, ultimately, a radical break with the predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life under capitalism and the human degradation engendered by the "Society of the Spectacle," mass media, and commodity fetishism.