act on their knowledge and values.
• Cure is to eradicate a disease condition or symptom(s) that the patient has. Curing happens at the level of the body.
• Environment is the natural, physical, and societal surroundings that affect individuals’ functioning on both the micro and macro levels. On a macro level this might include natural-area buffering from potential storms, floods, or other environmental challenges. The well-being of our micro environment includes the level of functioning in our school, home, worksite, and neighborhoods. Our social support system includes family and friends and is also part of our micro environment; it affects our personal safety by influencing whether or not we are at risk of and fear such issues as theft, crime, and violence. Air and water quality, noise pollution, overcrowding, and other factors that influence our stress level are also affected by our micro environment (Blonna, 2011).
• Ethic of care presumes that there is moral significance in the fundamental relationships and dependencies in life and affirms the importance of caring motivation, emotion, and the body in moral deliberations. The ethic builds on the concept of empathy and is inspired by memories of being cared for and of the idealizations of self (Mitten, 1994).
• Healing is process that leads to a sense of well-being which includes optimism and calmness. Healing happens to the whole person and is about confidence and trust in life. If a disease has no cure, the person may still experience healing. For example, the focus of hospice and palliative care is healing (Mitten, 2004).
• Indigenous refers to people who are native to a particular environment and have maintained living in a natural area or environment insomuch as is realistic in the 21st century. These people are usually ethnic minority groups affected negatively by colonization and often marginalized. In this book examples from indigenous people do not mean that all indigenous people are the same nor do we intend to mythologize indigenous people. Throughout the book we have tried to include specific examples when referring to indigenous people.
• Green exercise: Physical exercise performed in relatively natural settings.
• Natural environments: Surroundings or the geophysical space that encompasses all living and non-living features and systems that are dominantly influenced by environmental processes with minimal human disturbances and not managed by humans for human purposes. In this book we use natural environments, nature, natural settings, the natural world, natural landscapes, greenspaces, and outdoor places interchangeably.
• Place-based education is an educational philosophy and method focused on enhancing people’s relationship with their personal community and surrounding land. This experiential pedagogy links curricula, the local classroom, or informal educational settings to the students’ local community by connecting multidisciplinary topics to cultural, political, economic, and ecological concepts.
• Praxis is the practical application of a theory or a branch of knowledge.
• Stress: A resultant situation where an individual perceives the situation as exceeding her or his abilities or ‘a holistic transaction between an individual and a potential stressor resulting in a stress response’ (Blonna, 2011, p. 12). Chronic stress is linked to factors such as obesity, high systolic blood pressure, and elevated heart rate.
• Stress response is a change in the body’s internal environment (i.e. leaving homeostasis) in response to a stressor. When people are stressed, hormone levels change (e.g. cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrena-line increase) resulting in, among other things, blood pressure rising and heart rate increasing.
• Systems theory is a coherent scientific framework that understands that everything in the universe (and perhaps beyond) affects everything else and that everything known to humans is in effect one living system of which humans are a part.
• Quality of life is a person’s ability to enjoy normal life activities and an overall sense of well-being. Quality of life often has a strong connection to individual health perceptions and life functioning.
• Wellness is the realization of the fullest potential of an individual—physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually, and economically—and the fulfillment of expectations associated with one’s roles in the family, community, spiritual life, workplace, and other settings (Smith et al., 2006, p. 5).
While there are many more terms that could be included, the above list represents those that are most essential to a shared understanding of the relationship between human health and natural environments.
Structure of this Book
Historically, there has been much discussion and accompanying literature focused on the role that nature plays in human welfare. Only recently, however, with both the debate over climate change and the 2005 publishing of Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, has the discussion over the importance of natural environments for human well-being been rekindled. This issue is both timely and of critical importance to our society as we continue to define the role that natural environments will play for the health and well-being of future generations. Increasingly, there is recognition that these environments play a critical role in providing benefits such as stress reduction, healthy childhood development, mental health, enjoyment, aesthetics, and catharsis, rather than only in commodity production. This book examines the long history of natural environments being used in these non-commodity production ways and traces the development of the connection of humans to environments within the context of how they impact our personal and collective health. This information is presented in 11 chapters.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of the book by focusing on the intended audience, the underlying assumptions, and definition of commonly used terms. In Chapter 2, ‘Human Perceptions of Nature’, the discussion revolves around the ways that people’s attachment to the natural world is driven by perceptions as well as evolution and biology. Salient WorldViews of natural environments and health, and how these WorldViews impact individual and collective behaviors are identified. Finally, we reverse the direction of this discussion by examining the impact of a lack of natural settings upon health and, in particular, focus on modernity from the perspectives of society lacking a relationship of personally significant connection with the natural world, as well as the growing awareness of an ecological crisis and its impact on human health. Transitioning then to nature and health throughout history, Chapter 3, ‘The Historical Connection between Natural Environments and Health’, provides an overview of the history of the connection between human health and natural environments and how this connection has evolved and changed over time. Following this, we identify particular characteristics and attributes associated with human health that have been linked to natural settings.
In Chapter 4, we discuss a number of salient concepts and theories closely identified with human health and natural environments. This chapter is divided into five sections: (i) genetic theories; (ii) other evolutionary-grounded theories; (iii) psychological theories; (iv) restoration and restorative environments; and (v) intentionally designed experiences (IDEs). Genetic theories include naturalistic intelligence, the biophilia hypothesis, and indigenous consciousness. In the psychological theories section, identity and the natural environment, psychologically deep and extraordinary experiences, flow, the peak experience, and transcendent experiences are examined. The restoration and restorative environments section looks at psycho-evolutionary theory (PET) and attention restoration theory (ART).
The discussion
