Private landowners' childhood nature experiences affect their feelings of connectedness-to-nature and land stewardship as adults

Abstract

Achieving land conservation goals cannot be accomplished with policies aimed at public lands alone but critically depends on private land stewardship. Therefore, understanding what motivates private landowners to engage in land stewardship is vital. Connection with nature is a more recently developed construct that provides additional explanations for pro-environmental behaviors, next to more established social-psychological constructs. We investigated the interactions between childhood experiences in nature as well as adults' connection with nature and environmental concerns, and how these affect private landowners' stewardship behaviors. We collected data with a large survey of 1200 Ontario landowners and analyzed the 598 responses with structural equation modeling. We conducted additional analyses to investigate possible effects of landowner demographic characteristics using bootstrap validation. Our results suggest that childhood experiences in nature affect adults' connection with nature and land stewardship behaviors, but not their environmental concerns. In turn, connection with nature may affect private land stewardship behaviors indirectly through environmental concerns as well as directly. Some of these relationships were modified by landowner employment status, income, participation in conservation programs, and political orientation. We speculate that landowners' engagement with environmental topics, their perception of personal responsibility for environmental issues, and their exposure to environmental degradation, influence social-psychological relationships that precede the enactment of private land stewardship behaviors. Reduced childhood experiences in nature may be a contributing factor that is limiting private land stewardship behaviors and constraining the achievement of land conservation goals.