By Sheila Marikar

On a recent Tuesday, Steve Nygren was leading a tour of Serenbe, a planned community of 240 homes he began carving out of the woods outside Atlanta in 2000. Most of the group, myself included, clutched half-full coffees against the 30-degree weather. “Does anyone want to get rid of their cups?” asked Nygren, 71. “I want to show you how we deal with trash.” He stooped down in front of a wide, wooden front porch and lifted up what appeared to be a manhole cover. His paper cup thunked softly into a subterranean metal can. “We pick it up with an electric golf cart. Most places have Herby Curbys”—those green and blue bins synonymous with suburbia. “It’s visual pollution. Six a.m., the trash truck comes, ‘beep, beep, beep,’ waking everybody up. Noise pollution,” he said. “We’ve become so used to it, we don’t think about it, but our psyche, our energy forces feel it. We wonder why antidepressant use has increased fourfold over the last two decades. It’s because our built environment is not a good place to be.”