The Role of the Outdoor Recreation Discipline in Public Health: Nature as Preventative Medicine
Main Article Content
Abstract
The natural environment is being increasingly recognized as an essential component of human health. This literature review explores this relationship as it occurs in the scholarly literature, with particular emphasis on the ways that outdoor recreation as an academic discipline facilitates human-natural environment interactions. Salient theories from a variety of disciplines are tied to parks, protected lands and wilderness, and global trends are discussed. Ultimately, it is suggested that outdoor recreation and its parent discipline of recreation and leisure studies can be viewed as integral pieces of the emerging wellness model, and that interaction with natural environments may foster stewardship and health.
Downloads
Article Details
All articles published in Illuminare are open-access articles, published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits reproduction, distribution, derives and commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited and authors and publisher is properly identified.
All authors who send their manuscripts to Illuminare and whose articles are published in Illuminare retain full copyright of their articles. Notwithstanding this, the author(s) grant Illuminare, its editors, publishers, owners and other persons associated with Illuminare and other users/readers, a license to use the article as described in the License Agreement section below. In future Illuminare may produce printed copies of articles in any form. Without prejudice to the terms of the license given below, we reserve the right to reproduce author's articles in this way.
BREIF SUMMARY OF THE LICENSE AGREEMENT
By submitting your research article(s) to Illuminare, you agree that:
- Anyone is free: to copy, distribute, and display the work; to make derivative works; to make commercial use of the work;
- Under the following conditions: Attribution the original author and publisher are clearly and fully given credit (but not in any way that suggests that author and publisher endorse the user or user's use of the work); for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are; any of these conditions can be waived if the copyright holder gives explicit permission.