This week marks the end of the Fall program of “forest bathing” at Grinnell, in which students can sign up to spend part of a Tuesday afternoon walking through woodlands and immersing themselves in nature. Although billed as a modern wellness practice—and a form of environmental health or environmental medicine—the essential goal of these trips would have been quite familiar to Henry Shoemaker Conard, who taught Biology at Grinnell College one hundred years ago. Conard, who also served as president of the Iowa Conservation Association, advocated for a system of state parks in Iowa that would provide wilderness preserves for study, recreation, and immersion. He regularly took students on extended camping and hiking trips through Pine Creek State Park (in Eldora) as pictured here. Conard also helped organize similar, albeit shorter, trips for local school children to state parks and preserves. And in the 1930s, Conard was hired as a “Ranger-Naturalist” to lead extensive hiking parties through Yellowstone National Park in the summers, blending science, recreation, and wellness that were seen as inter-connected elements of the conservation movement in the Progressive era.
