Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
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The boys achieved health gains from the time outdoors; however, the political framing was one of back to the days of the pioneering spirit.
Girls’ camps were not extensions of boys’ camps for at least two reasons. The women who started girls’ camps were caught in the conundrum of feeling the need to be socially appropriate for the time period, and the rugged individualism was not considered feminine. Secondly, though conservative, these women leaders were embracing change and the new roles women would play alongside men in the urbanized US. Using a pedagogy born of feminine and feminist ideals (Miranda, 1987), women camping leaders created educational conditions with a focus on relationships and community. They worked towards cooperative government where the girls took an active role in organizing and leadership, which continues to be a vital theme in Girl Scouts today. They also framed camp as providing a time for networking, relaxation, skills acquisition, and civic engagement. Women camp leaders wanted their programs to emphasize ‘the aesthetic and spiritual kinship of girls to nature and to one another’; the pedagogy was for women to have tools to thrive in the changes caused by urbanization, therefore women leaders made the girls’ camps ‘into excellent social incubators for what would become a new type of woman and the politically active citizen’ (Miranda and Yerkes, 1996). By 1874 the first YWCA camp in the Philadelphia chapter of the YWCA, called the ‘vacation project’, was designed to provide a relaxing environment for young women who worked at tedious factory jobs with little free time. Luther Halsey Gulick in 1890 opened a private camp so his daughter could attend camp and then formed the Camp Fire Girls in 1914, soon reaching 500 participants. However, women’s camps started by men tended to be socially normative, creating spaces for girls to learn to cook and be homemakers. In 1902 Laura Mattoon started Camp Kehonka for girls in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. In 1912 Girl Scouts entered the camping movement. There were enough camps that by 1910 the Camp Directors Association of America (CDAA) was formed to help standardize camp curriculum, and Mattoon was the secretary-treasurer. By 1916 the National Association of Directors of Girl’s Camps formed and by 1924 it merged with CDAA, which in 1935 became the American Camping Association, now the American Camp Association (ACA). In 1948 the ACA adopted its first set of camp standards, which eventually became the basis for accreditation of camps across the US. Both genders received the physical and mental health benefits from being outdoors at camps that current research highlights; however, these examples illustrate the influence educational pedagogy has on the health benefits in the social and developmental realms gained in groups in the outdoors. ACA has completed and recorded research about the health benefits of camps.
The founder of the Appalachian Trail, Benton MacKaye, had similar ideas about the importance of nature for health and recuperation. In 1921 he published an article envisioning the trail as a resource for citizens to access recreation, health, recuperation from illness, and as a means of creating jobs (MacKaye, 1921). The trail was developed to provide access to mountains and nature for those who could not afford to take a vacation to the west. MacKaye recognized that larger plots of undeveloped land such as those being developed into western national parks no longer existed in the east and saw the possibility of a linear span of wild lands connecting Maine to Georgia as a practical alternative. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (2013), to date over 13,500 people are recorded as hiking the entire 2000 miles of the Appalachian Trail since records began to be kept in the 1930s, which showed five completed thru-hikers.
Lloyd Burgess Sharp (1895–1963), a pioneer and leader in modern outdoor education, incorporated Dewey’s experiential education philosophies into youth camping. Sharp believed that educational lessons and principles could be incorporated into camp settings, thus beginning the school camping movement, which eventually became what we know today as outdoor education. He believed that outdoor and experiential education techniques were essential to the learning process, for if certain things were not experienced, they could not be fully understood: ‘That which can best be taught inside the schoolrooms should there be taught, and that which can best be learned through experience dealing directly with native materials and life situations outside the school should there be learned’ (Sharp, 1943).
In addition to organized youth camps, the US was seeing the increased popularity of camping as a pastime for individuals and families. This was fueled by the industrialization and prosperity of the 1920s and by the recent establishment of the National Parks. Yellowstone was named the first national park in 1872, followed by Yosemite in 1890, and the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916. Americans began to travel to see these natural wonders, and the culture of camping took off. The rugged individualism of the times was embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, who was president from 1901 to 1909. Roosevelt was an avid hunter and outdoorsman who founded the Boone and Crockett Club with George Bird Grinell, and who was responsible for signing the legislation behind much of the conservation movement of the era. Camping’s popularity in the US was evidenced by John Steinbeck’s (1937/1994) Of Mice and Men as well as the National Park System making Recreation Demonstration Areas a part of the federal government’s work relief program. Out of this program, 34 of the areas were organized camp facilities to be used by organizations that did not have their own camping areas. Most of these areas became state parks after the depression.
Health through horticultural therapy
An important development during the early 1900s was the academic world believing that nature is therapeutic. One of the first examples in modern time is the blossoming of the academic field of horticultural therapy. In 1955 the University of Michigan developed a combination horticultural and occupational therapy master’s degree and others followed. The groundwork was laid earlier. In the 1920s horticulture therapy began to be practiced in occupational therapy and then showed up in occupational therapy textbooks. The Association for Occupational Therapists in England formally acknowledged the use of horticulture therapy as a treatment for certain psychiatric and physical disorders in 1936. In 1942 Milwaukee Downer College offered a course in horticulture therapy within its occupational therapy degree program; the first such course known to be offered in a US institution of higher learning. During World War II garden club volunteers partnered with occupational therapists to use plants and gardening activities for rehabilitation. McDonald (1995) reported that use of this therapeutic practice for World War II veterans provided important testing and showed the validity of its use in physical and mental rehabilitation, including reduced hospital stays. This involvement by garden club members continues today. Louis Lipp, a propagator for the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, developed a horticultural therapy program as an outreach program at a nearby veterans’ hospital in 1953. In 1951, Alice Burlingame, a trained psychiatric social worker at the Pontiac, Michigan State Hospital, started a horticulture program in the hospital’s geriatric ward (Lewis, 1976). Burlingame became convinced of the validity of this method with geriatric populations, and she persuaded Dr Donald Watson to jointly convene a weeklong workshop in horticulture therapy at Michigan State University, which then led to the eventual degree. The two teamed to write the first textbook, Therapy Through Horticulture, in 1960. The first degree recipient, Genevieve Jones, who worked as an occupational therapist at the Hines Veterans Administration Hospital in Chicago, went on to write the Handbook of Horticulture Therapy published by the Federation of Garden Clubs in Michigan, the organization that provided Jones a scholarship to pursue her degree. New York University Medical Center’s Rusk Institute for Rehabilitative Medicine’s horticultural therapy program was so effective that the horticultural therapist was made part of the treatment team with doctors and psychologists, using horticulture both diagnostically and rehabilitatively—a first for people with disabilities. It was called the ‘glass garden program’ because it operated in a greenhouse.
In 1971–1972, a curriculum was developed at Kansas State University providing students with training in horticulture and psychology leading to a bachelor’s degree in Horticultural Therapy followed by a 7-month clinical internship at the Menninger Foundation (Lewis, 1976). Clemson University was the second institution of higher education to offer a horticultural therapy degree.
In England two organizations, the Society for Horticultural Therapy and Rural Training and the Federation to Promote Horticulture for Disabled People, were formed with more of a focus on practice rather than the US focus of professionalizing the practice. The mission of the Society for Horticultural Therapy and Rural Training