Field Exercises: How Veterans Are Healing Themselves Through Farming and Outdoor Activities

Peace and conflict expert Westlund explores the complex repercussions of warfare on the minds of combat veterans and the ways in which gardening, contact with nature, and work in the air and sunshine bring about measurably positive effects on their psyches. She makes the case for “green care,” which she uses as an umbrella term for health care that combines traditional medicine “with agriculture, therapeutic horticulture and gardening, landscape conservation, wilderness activities, [and] animal-assisted therapies.” The book’s individual chapters highlight the healing of a veteran through the type of green-care under discussion. Westlund asserts that contact with nature is not emphasized enough in the rehabilitation of the war-wounded and makes a case for it, both anecdotally and through a variety of studies. “Both the empirical research and the stories I have gathered here point overwhelmingly to the fact that when a person finds and/or remembers her/himself in ecological relationship with their surroundings, their human psyche is changed, and sometimes transformed,” she concludes convincingly. [em](July) [/em]