Exeter Should Provide More Opportunities to Be in Nature
By SAM ALTMAN ‘26 and JINMIN LEE ‘26
Imagine writing for more than ten hours for your history paper in the library on a Sunday. Your back aches, your posture crumples, and you feel the wave of fatigue running through your limbs. Does this seem natural? Or is this a sad, destructive consequence of an industrial era where we toil every day on mindless, productive work?
We urge that Health and PE classes spend time talking walks in nature because students will be able to enjoy a healthy and meditative time without guilt.
We must first ask what these sections of time in the day are for. Clearly, they’re meant to balance out the often overloaded work schedule of Exonians with natural exercise and discussion of mental health. The issue, then, is that being in the same old building with the same old equipment and Harkness tables can only do so much. As Exonians, we’re constantly locked in our rooms doing homework for hours on end and even when we’re not, we’re trying to sleep or eat. Time in nature is almost always the thing sacrificed by most Exonians. This is fundamentally why we can’t answer this issue by asking, ‘Why don’t they just go out into nature in their own time?’ When we entrust important activities like these to the students’ discretion, many cast it out the window in favor of gaining a competitive advantage. But, if we require journeys through our vast trails or along the Squamscott as an actual component of our Health and PE classes, everyone will be on a level playing field. This means that everyone will be able to enjoy the experience without the guilt of wondering what homework they could be doing instead.
It’s no secret that experiencing the non-urban world is vitally important to our mental health. It’s written into our DNA to love the natural animals and plants around us, and when we’re deprived of that, we get depressed. Staring at your accomplishments on a bright computer screen in a monochrome box of a room is actively detrimental. This is especially true because your body needs things like Vitamin D and the endorphins that run in our veins when we’re out in nature. Most of us know this in principle but write it off as a sacrifice that can be made—except it’s not. Never taking a walk is deeply foreign to the well-being of our bodies, and Exonians are constantly being harmed without it.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his famous book Walden. As the quotation illustrates, going into the woods gives us the courage to reflect upon our lives and recover from the mental strain and pressure exerted on us. Surrounded by so many life forms—trees, insects, birds—we feel alive and rejuvenated. We consider the most important existential questions, such as the purpose of life and even confront the thoughts and responsibilities we have been dreading. Going into the woods breaks the monotony of life, forcing us to remind ourselves that our lives are worth more than perpetually grinding work. It is not surprising that the naturalists embraced the importance of nature. As Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, “In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”
For biological and philosophical reasons, Exeter should encourage students to take nature walks. The only way to properly ensure that students undertake a 20-minute walk in their busy schedule is to give them assigned class time to do it guilt-free. Even such a short time could greatly benefit everyone’s physical and mental health.
