Abstract
Urban green spaces have long been studied in terms of their impact on human and environmental health and well-being. We collected and analyzed preliminary survey data for central New Jersey municipalities relating to participants’ perceptions of public green spaces, quality, and usage and relating these factors to environmental knowledge and literacy. Results have yielded new insights into the role of urban canopy cover in differing levels of environmental literacy. Included in this, persons living in areas with higher canopy cover have higher levels of environmental literacy (p=0.0338) and higher educational attainment (p=0.049). Persons with access to higher quality parks also exhibited higher levels of educational attainment (p=0.0475).This relationship and others collectively would support there being multiple types of environmental literacy, with diverse sources, impacts, and outcomes on individuals and communities. Work done to this point has not addressed this idea, nor sought to study the connections between EL and all influencing socio-cultural and landscape factors.
Highlights
Environmental literacy is a concept dating at earliest to the late 1980s that developed more thoroughly as a framework in the 1990s as part of environmental education[1]
Definitions: Abbreviations used in rest of this paper: EL, GS, NJ (New Jersey), NEEF (National Environmental Education Foundation), INS (Inclusion of Nature in Self Scale), NAAEE (North American Association for Environmental Education)
Environmental literacy is correlated with access to high quality parks, as determined by our metric, but is not correlated with actual park use or perception of quality (Table 2)
Summary
Environmental literacy is a concept dating at earliest to the late 1980s that developed more thoroughly as a framework in the 1990s as part of environmental education[1]. There are a number of competing definitions of what constitutes environmental literacy and how it is measured These definitions proposed by major organizations include combinations of: knowledge about the environment and environmental functions (with some connection to how these impact human life), some ability to think about and analyze information as it relates the environment as well as attitudes towards the environment, and the ability and intention to act on this knowledge and transfer it to a set of behaviors and actions based on the environmental impacts of those behaviors and actions[2,3,4,5]. The second component of environmental literacy relates to thoughts and cognitive habits that individuals have with regard to environment and health. These habits of mind impart individual identity, which informs both action and behavior. While environmental literacy in many forms has long been studied, there has been little
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
