Natural Environments and Human Health. Alan W Ewert
therapy is described as: ‘a professionally conducted clientcentered treatment modality that utilizes horticulture activities to meet specific therapeutic or rehabilitative goals of its participants. The focus is to maximize social, cognitive, physical and/or psychological functioning and/or to enhance general health and wellness’ (Haller and Kramer, 2006).
The success of horticultural therapy may be its non-threatening, familiar modes of therapy and rehabilitation. It has been shown to be successful with people who have physical, mental, psychological, or developmental disabilities, as well as those who are victims of abuse, prisoners, young children, and older adults. Horticultural therapy has been shown to help people recover from illness as well as help spiritually heal those who will not recover and who seek quality of life in their final days. Horticultural therapy seems to appeal to gardeners at all levels of involvement.
Horticultural therapy has grown to occupy a useful position within the healthcare system. The People–Plant Council formed in 1990 to document existing research and to encourage new research uses an interdisciplinary symposium, ‘The Role of Horticulture in Human Well-Being and Social Development’, as one venue to distribute horticultural therapy trends and information.
The Beginning of the Modern Environmental Movement: Ecology
Ecology has become a household word because Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911) was a visionary environmental leader who coined the word in about 1892. Swallow Richards understood the connection between the natural environment and human health. As a sickly child growing up on a farm, she experienced firsthand that being in the clean outdoor air made her healthier and stronger. She connected people to their environment and educated many people at venues such as the 1893 World Fair exhibit, Rumford Kitchen, where she concentrated on preparing nutritious meals from natural foods, published Air, Water, and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint (1900), and helped to start Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory. It was at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory that Rachel Carson later studied and had experiences that profoundly changed her, leading to her environmental work. Swallow Richards graduated and worked at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, making headway in sanitation and in teaching children environmental education. She symbolizes a culture’s coming to terms with the healthful interface between humans and our environment even as we industrialize.
The modern environmental movement, recreation, and understanding the Earth as an organism
By the mid-20th century, while many people in the US were moving off farms and into suburbs and cities, a host of people began to engage in an environmental movement. Perhaps people intuitively missed nature. From the mid-20th century on many practitioners of outdoor and environmental education, worldwide, have understood the value of being outdoors from both a scientific and intuitive level and have educated people about the natural environment and environmental ethics. Aldo Leopold’s (1949) land ethic in A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously, created an awareness of interconnectedness with nature and the expansion of ‘community’ from only humans to the more than human world. The 1964 Wilderness Act presumed the need for people to have time in space untrammeled by man [sic]. Many nature and health connections were publicized during this time, including Rachel Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring, which talked about our connection with the Earth and how we need to avoid poisoning ourselves with the toxic chemicals used in industrial societies. Her book is often credited with awakening public attention to the negative impacts that humans were wreaking on the natural environment. This time period also saw Robert Greenway’s coining of the term ecopsychology in 1963, now a discipline that explores how our psychological health relates to the ecological health of planet Earth. A college professor at Sonoma State University, Greenway annually took students on wilderness trips and then surveyed the students to see if and how this experience impacted their mental health. In the data he found that 90% of the students described an increased sense of aliveness, well-being, and energy during and after their trips and 90% said that the experience allowed them to break an addiction (defined broadly) including nicotine and chocolate (Greenway, 1996). He noted a significant gender difference in that 60% of the men and 20% of the women stated that a major goal of the trip was to conquer fear, challenge themselves, and expand limits and that 57% of the women and 27% of the men stated a major goal was to come ‘home to nature’, a gender difference noted by other authors as well (Mitten 1985, 1992).
The 1970s saw a continuation of the environmental movement of the 1960s. April 22, 1970 was celebrated as the first Earth Day, and also considered to be the birth of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Lewis, 1985). This time period saw the advent of legislation to protect the environment, including the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Earth Day is still celebrated in 2013. In 1968 we received the first photo of the Earth from space, now labeled the Earthrise photo, which has become a symbol of the holistic nature of the Earth’s processes. Many astronauts claim to have been spiritually and emotionally changed forever after seeing the Earth from space (Poole, 2008).
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