From Public Agenda: Spring Governance: Environmental Sustainability, Public Wellness, and the New Public Health Challenge of Sitting and Scroll Addiction
by Dr Shellie M. Bowman Sr Editor, Public Agenda Senior Contributor, The Spotsylvania Gazette
Spring arrives with a quiet instruction that publicadministrators too often treat as poetic rather than policy relevant: go outside. The lengthening days, warmer air, and reawakening public spaces are not merely seasonal comforts. They are a governance opportunity. Environmental sustainability and public wellness are deeply intertwined, and they meet most visibly in the built environment that determines whether people can safely walk, breathe, gather, and move.
In public administration, sustainability is sometimes framed as a technical concern, measured through emissions targets, stormwater plans, energy portfolios, and recycling programs. Those measures matter. Yet sustainability is also about daily life. It is about whether communities are designed to support physical activity, mental health, social connection, and the kind of civic belonging that strengthens resilience. When local government invests in parks, sidewalks, trees, greenways, and clean public spaces, it is not just beautifying a jurisdiction. It is shaping behavior, reducing preventable health burdens, and building a healthier public.
This is why spring should be read as more than a season. It is a governance signal. If we want a healthier people, we must make it easier, safer, and more appealing for people to be outdoors and active. If we want a sustainable future, we must treat public space and environmental conditions as foundational public health infrastructure.
Environmental sustainability as public health infrastructure
A growing body of research links exposure to green space and active use of urban green spaces with beneficial health and wellbeing outcomes, including improvements across physical and psychological dimensions (Lopez-Haro et al., 2024). Evidence also suggests that organized or routine exercise in green environments can support mental health outcomes (Hu et al., 2025). These findings matter for public administration because they connect environmental policy to measurable wellbeing and because they elevate “quality public space” from a discretionary amenity to a public value.
Public administrators do not control whether people choose to walk, stretch, garden, or meet neighbors outdoors. But they do control whether communities are built in ways that make these choices realistic. In practice, sustainability policy intersects with zoning, transportation planning, tree canopy management, park maintenance, and recreational programming. These are administrative decisions that determine whether spring becomes a community health catalyst or merely a date on the calendar.
The World Health Organization’s guidelines emphasize that physical activity contributes to significant health benefits and that reducing sedentary behavior is also recommended across age groups (Bull et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2020). In other words, the policy goal is not merely “more exercise.” It is also “less sitting.” That distinction is critical in a society that increasingly works, learns, shops, and socializes through screens.
Sitting and the administrative burden of modern life
Sedentary behavior is not simply a matter of individual choice. It is shaped by work design, commuting patterns, school routines, neighborhood safety, and digital dependence. Research has shown that prolonged sedentary time is associated with adverse health outcomes, even when accounting for physical activity (Biswas et al., 2015). At the same time, scholars caution against simplistic comparisons such as “sitting is the new smoking,” noting that smoking and sitting are not identical risk exposures and should not be treated as interchangeable (Vallance et al., 2018). Both points can be true: the comparison is imperfect, and the health risk of prolonged sedentary behavior is still significant.
From a public administration lens, this is a governance problem in plain view. We have built systems that reward stillness and deliver convenience through immobility. Many communities lack safe walkways. Many jobs normalize eight or more hours seated. Many families face time scarcity, and screens become the easiest form of rest. The result is a publichealth challenge that is structurally produced, not merely personally chosen.
Spring offers a corrective. But only if publicsystems make movement accessible. When a locality invests in walkability, maintains clean public spaces, supports outdoor programming, and reduces environmental hazards, it can reduce barriers to physical activity. In publicadministration terms, this is a form of burden reduction. We lower the friction of healthy behavior.
The new addiction environment: social media and compulsive digital use
A second, related challenge sits alongside the physical problem of sedentary life: the cognitive and behavioral pull of attention economies. Social platforms are engineered to retain attention through variable rewards, social validation loops, and rapid feedback. Scholars increasingly discuss problematic social media use and related behavioral patterns through addiction frameworks, including cue reactivity, craving, and impaired control mechanisms that resemble processes studied in substance use disorders (Nasser et al., 2020; Wegmann et al., 2021). Evidence from neuroimaging research has also reported similarities in cue-reactivity related brain activation patterns between problematic smartphone use and other addictive disorders (Schmitgen et al., 2020).
These studies do not claim that social media use is identical to nicotine dependence or crack cocaine use. They do show something policy relevant: compulsive digital behavior can operate through mechanisms that public health professionals recognize as addiction adjacent, including cue-triggered craving and diminished self-regulation (Nasser et al., 2020; Schmitgen et al., 2020; Wegmann et al., 2021). That matters because societies often respond slowly when a behavior becomes normalized before its harms are fully understood.
In the late twentieth century, America learned hard lessons about normalization. Tobacco use was deeply embedded in media and public life, and authoritative public health analysis ultimately identified nicotine as addictive, shifting the national understanding of smoking from a habit to an addiction with serious health consequences (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1988). During the same era, crack cocaine emerged as a serious publichealth concern, with researchers documenting how use patterns could shift from experimentation to chronic and compulsive use, producing a wide range of immediate and long-term harms (Cornish & O’Brien, 1996). The governance lesson is not that these crises are identical to social media. The lesson is that when exposure becomes culturally normalized and structurally reinforced, the harm profile expands.
Public administrators should take this analogy seriously without exaggeration. The central point is that harmful dependency can be socially manufactured. It can be amplified by market incentives. It can become an environmental condition, not merely an individual behavior.
The public policy frame: sustainability, wellness, and attention as public values
Public administration has long recognized that government is responsible for protecting publicwelfare where markets externalize harm. Environmental sustainability is a classic example. Pollution is a market externality. Heat islands are an urban planning externality. Unsafe streets are a mobility externality. Similarly, digital dependence can be understood as an attention externality. The costs are not only personal. They show up in population health, mental wellbeing, civic engagement, family stability, and workplace productivity.
This brings us to a fundamental public value question. What kind of society are we administratively building? A society where people have safe places to walk, breathe, and connect? Or one where the easiest default is to sit, scroll, and remain indoors, with environmental conditions and social design pushing people further away from movement and community life?
The policy implications do not require moral panic. They require governance discipline.
Design for outdoor living and movement.Cities and counties can treat sidewalks, trails, parks, and tree canopy as wellness infrastructure. Evidence linking green space activity to health outcomes supports prioritizing these investments (Lopez-Haro et al., 2024; Hu et al., 2025).
Reduce sedentary defaults in publicinstitutions. Schools, workplaces, and public service environments can incorporate movement-friendly norms. The health risk of prolonged sedentary time is sufficiently established to justify administrative interventions that encourage breaks and active options (Biswas et al., 2015; Bull et al., 2020).
Treat digital dependency as a publichealth adjacent issue. Public agencies can support digital wellness education and community programming that increases offline civic connection. Research on problematic social media use suggests relevant mechanisms that policymakers and public health leaders should not ignore (Nasser et al., 2020; Schmitgen et al., 2020; Wegmann et al., 2021).
Reconnect sustainability communications to daily wellbeing.Environmental sustainability messages often fail because they feel abstract. When sustainability is framed as cleaner air for children, safer parks for elders, and walkable neighborhoods for families, it becomes tangible. Public administrators should center lived experience, not only emissions targets.
Spring as a civic intervention
Spring gives public leaders a moment to invite people back into shared space. Less screen time is not merely a personal resolution. It is easier when there are clean parks, safe sidewalks, and community events that create real alternatives. More movement is not merely a fitness goal. It becomes plausible when transportation policy supports walkability and when public spaces feel welcoming.
The public administration task is to align environmental sustainability with the public’s daily wellbeing. That is timeless governance work. It is also urgently modern.
In the 1980s, America confronted how cigarettes and crack cocaine could reshape communities, distort health outcomes, and generate publiccosts when exposure and dependency were normalized and widespread (Cornish & O’Brien, 1996; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1988). Today, we face a different normalization problem: prolonged sitting as a default lifestyle and social media as an always-on attention environment. The data do not require us to claim equivalence. They require us to take the structural pattern seriously.
If governance is the art and science of shaping public life, then the coming of spring is more than a season. It is a reminder of what good administration can make possible: healthier people, stronger communities, and environments designed not for extraction of attention, but for the flourishing of the public.
References
Biswas, A., Oh, P. I., Faulkner, G. E., Bajaj, R. R., Silver, M. A., Mitchell, M. S., & Alter, D. A. (2015). Sedentary time and its association with risk for disease incidence, mortality, and hospitalization in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of Internal Medicine, 162(2), 123–132. https://doi.org/10.7326/M14-1651
Bull, F. C., Al-Ansari, S. S., Biddle, S., Borodulin, K., Buman, M. P., Cardon, G., Carty, C., Chaput, J. P., Chastin, S., Chou, R., Dempsey, P. C., DiPietro, L., Ekelund, U., Firth, J., Friedenreich, C. M., Garcia, L., Gichu, M., Jago, R., Katzmarzyk, P. T., … Willumsen, J. F. (2020). World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 54(24), 1451–1462.
Cornish, J. W., & O’Brien, C. P. (1996). Crack cocaine abuse: An epidemic with many publichealth consequences. Annual Review of PublicHealth, 17, 259–273.
Hu, G., et al. (2025). Effects of urban green exercise on mental health: A meta-analysis. [Journal information as listed in the article].
Lopez-Haro, J., et al. (2024). Association between active use of urban green spaces and health outcomes: A systematic review. [Journal information as listed in the article].
Nasser, N. S., et al. (2020). Cue-reactivity among young adults with problematic social media use. [Journal information as listed in the article].
Schmitgen, M. M., et al. (2020). Neural correlates of cue reactivity in individuals with addictive smartphone use. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 125, 153–161.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (1988). The health consequences of smoking: Nicotine addiction. A report of the Surgeon General. U.S. Government Printing Office.
Vallance, J. K., Gardiner, P. A., Lynch, B. M., & Owen, N. (2018). Evaluating the evidence on sitting, smoking, and health. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 55(2), 258–261.
Wegmann, E., et al. (2021). Social-networks-related stimuli interfere with decision making under ambiguity: Evidence for social-networks-use disorder mechanisms. [Journal information as listed in the article].
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Spotsylvania Courthouse Weather: Thursday February 19
High: 47°
Low: 43°
Wind: 5 MPH ENE
Chance of rain: 80%
Moderate rain, with a high of 47 and low of 43 degrees. Don't forget your umbrella! Overcast for the morning, light drizzle in the afternoon, light rain in the evening, clear overnight.
43° and Patchy rain nearby
