Introduction to topiCS Volume 15, Issue 3.

Abstract

My dad was a forester in the service of a German federal state. A major part of his job was to assess the current condition of forests, plan and monitor their management, and ensure their long-term sustainability. During school holidays, I often accompanied him on his field trips where I learned a lot about the forest ecosystem; he taught me what “sustainability” means in theory and how to implement it in practice. When my father graduated from university, the concept of sustainability had been firmly rooted in Germany's forest management for more than two centuries, as an economic principle intended to secure both the usage and preservation of a vital resource (von Carlowitz, 1713). Put simply: for every tree felled, a new one had to be planted. While I grew up, the term began to gain international recognition and turned into a key principle of environmental concern and politics, based on writings such as the Club-of-Rome report on The limits to growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, & Behrens, 1972) and the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987). Against this background, my own Master's and PhD theses explored culturally shaped cognitive concepts and behavior that could foster sustainable resource use, but my work was impaired by the shortage of research focusing on the cognitive dimension of sustainability back then—a shortage that to some extent persists to this day. A major exception was the research program led by cognitive psychologist Doug Medin and anthropologist Scott Atran. Their team combined exceptional rigor with an unprecedented cross-cultural approach to investigate how different cognitive beliefs, framework theories, and epistemic orientations influence people's reasoning about nature and shape their resource-use strategies. Several of their publications are still among my all-time favorites (e.g., Atran & Medin, 2008; Bang, Medin, & Atran, 2007; Medin & Atran, 2004). A fine selection of more recent work along those lines is compiled in the current topic that I have had the honor and pleasure to see through, from its emergence as a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in 2021 to its publication in this issue of our journal. Edited by Barbara C. Malt (Lehigh University, US) and Asifa Majid (University of Oxford, UK), this topic is remarkable in many ways. It covers a broad scope of domains, from the design of the built environment, resource use, and land and water conservation to more fundamental aspects of biodiversity and climate change. It straddles a wide range of disciplines in drawing on anthropological, developmental, educational, linguistic, philosophical, psychological, and social-cognitive perspectives. And it was extraordinarily swift, with some of the shortest turnarounds between conception and completion, commensurate with the urgency of its subject. Each of the 11 contributions to this topic is a rich source of information and insights on one or more of an interrelated set of questions linked to how nature is conceptualized by individuals, in different languages, and across cultures, such as what we know or believe about nature, how this knowledge is acquired, used, and communicated, and how it is shaped by our attitudes and emotions and in turn informs reasoning and decision-making. The editors’ introduction (Malt & Majid, this issue) does a marvelous job in integrating the different parts of the topic, elaborating on distinct, yet shared themes, and weaving them into a well-ordered and nicely patterned scholarly overview of why all of this is not only scientifically intriguing, but also important in a truly elementary way. topiCS encourages letters and commentaries on all topics, as well as proposals for new topics. Letters are not longer than two published pages (ca. 400–1000 words). Commentaries (between 1000 and 2000 words) are often solicited by Topic Editors prior to the publication of their topic, but they may also be considered after publication. Letters and commentaries typically come without abstract and with few references, if any. The Executive Editor and the Senior Editorial Board (SEB) are constantly searching for new and exciting topics for topiCS. Feel free to open communications with a short note to the Executive Editor ([email protected]) or a member of the SEB (for a list, see the publisher's homepage for topiCS: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1756-8765/homepage/EditorialBoard.html).