Читать книгу Natural Environments and Human Health - Alan W Ewert - Страница 39

In the US, dating back to the 1800s, romantic notions about nature often fueled spending time outside when it was not for work. Frequently these romantic notions were about being refreshed by spending time in nature, akin to the current restoration theories. Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote about our connections with nature and the importance of being in nature in order to know oneself. This time period saw Henrik Ibsen’s writing about friluftsliv (1864) or a way that the tonic of nature gets under one’s skin, solidifying in one’s being. A unifying concept for outdoor enthusiasts and educators in the Scandinavian countries, friluftsliv is a principal tradition for outdoor education with the goal to seek to seep nature into one’s bones. John Muir’s (1838–1914) writings speak to this concept: ‘Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, nature’s peace will flow into you as the sunshine into the trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves’.

The concept of a vacation (a time away for rest and regaining of health) in Europe was most likely a result of the influences of industrialization and urbanization combined with a wish for the romantic. In the early 1800s the concept of going to the mountains for health was becoming in vogue. For example, an English woman, Isabella Bird Bishop (1831–1904), traveled at the advice of her physician. When she was at home in Britain she often was ill with the vapors and other non-descript ailments. When she traveled in Japan, Malaya, Canada, Scotland, and the Rocky Mountains and California in the US while pursuing her natural history interests in nature, she was not ill. By the 1820s mountaineering and adventure pursuits as vacations were ensconced in Europe and by the 1930s the British Mountaineering Leadership Scheme was developed. This beginning of exploration and adventure excursions formed the basis for adventure travel and challenge course programs in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the US (Priest, 1986). The concept of vacationing for health and renewal has been better maintained in Europe, New Zealand, and Australia where six weeks of vacation per year are the norm with no less show in work productivity.

The idea of the natural environment being instrumental in attention restoration in addition to being used by hospitals was also used in intentional design to incorporate nature into parks and planned communities. In the 1860s Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), one of the landscape architects responsible for the planning and design of Central Park in 1857, was certainly aware of this phenomenon, as evidenced in the following quote: ‘The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, though the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system’ (Olmsted, 1865 as cited in Nash, 2001).

When Olmsted designed Mount Royal Park, Montreal he combined what we now might describe as a socio-ecological approach to health and well-being. He believed what has now been confirmed by research—that providing pleasantly wooded open spaces would encourage city dwellers to enjoy fresh air and take walks, providing them with healthful exercise. He believed in both a therapeutic and a mystical effect of the natural landscape upon people. While he may have had the prevailing Anglo-Saxton attitudes toward nature of using it for the good of people, he also found in nature, according to Murray (1967), ‘the emotional intensity and moral qualities which had hitherto been reserved for formal Christianity’ (p. 163). Olmsted considered beautiful scenery to be an effective therapy against mental disease. In his report he stressed the: ‘power of scenery to eliminate conditions which tend to nervous depression or irritability. It is thus in a medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value. . . . And for the mass of the people it is practically available only through such means as are provided through parks’ (Olmsted, 1967).

Olmsted developed sites in line with their intrinsic qualities and many sites have stood the test of time. He understood the importance for stress relief as people became city dwellers rather than working with the land. Olmsted was involved with Yosemite and the oldest US state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara, New York, as well as one of the country’s first planned communities in Riverside, Illinois. There he designed the drive to and from the planned community to Chicago to be lined with trees and green to help alleviate the stress after work. This same concept was used in his design of a boulevard ring as part of the ‘emerald necklace’ in south Chicago. Perhaps a lesser known park, Presque Isle Park in Marquette, Michigan is a compact version of Olmsted’s values of getting people into the environments to relax and recover from stress as well as fortify themselves to return to city life. He strove to have geniality between nature and people; he wanted the parks to welcome people and he wanted people of poor health and from all classes to have access.

The late 1800s and early 1900s also saw the rise of the camping movement, which was a return to the outdoors for health and romantic ideals. In 1861 Frederick and Abigail Gunn, who ran the Gunnery Camp in Washington, Connecticut for 12 years, decided to take the boys on a 2-week hike to the beach as part of their curriculum in order to keep the boys fit. A focus of the boys’ camps was physical fitness and recapturing their rugged individualism reminiscent of the US frontier life (Miranda and Yerkes, 1987), as well as competition, challenge, and conquering the wilderness (Mitten and Woodruff, 2009). Dr Joseph Trimble Rothrock founded the North Mountain School of Physical Culture in 1876 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania devoted to ‘weakly’ boys. Boys stayed at the camp for 4 months combining the pursuit of health with practical knowledge. The Boy’s Club began in 1900 in Salem, Massachusetts with 76 boys and in 30 years grew to 26,088 campers. The Boy Scouts began in Britain in 1907 and in the US in 1910. The first Boy Scout Camp was on Brownsea Island off the coast of England. The Boy Scouts continue to epitomize what Miranda (1987) indentifies as a form of resistance to a changing world in their (and other boys’ camps) conservative view of using the outdoors to preserve a rugged manliness and an allegiance to certain ideals. 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.