Abstract
AbstractDespite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this article, we endeavor to complicate the understanding of these experiences of nature (EoN). Because EoN are embedded in social and cultural contexts, transformative or new EoN are emerging in combination with societal changes in work, home, and technology. Policies that acknowledge and accept a diversity of culturally situated EoN, including negative EoN, could help people reconnect with the complexity and dynamics of biodiversity. A new conceptualization of EoN that encompasses diverse experiences and reflects the sociocultural context could help to stimulate a broader transformation in the relationship between society and nature, one that better integrates the two spheres. Such a transformation is necessary to more effectively address the biodiversity crisis.
Highlights
Over 30 years of awareness about the biodiversity crisis have not yet effectively addressed the problem (Mace et al 2010)
According to this formulation, societies that follow a Western way of life face a reduction in both opportunities and the desire to encounter nature, leading to a progressive disaffection. This so-called “extinction of experience,” a phenomenon described over 20 years ago by Robert Pyle (1993/2011), is presented as having deleterious consequences for human well-being and health, and for people’s emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral relations to nature and biodiversity (Soga & Gaston 2016). This hypothesis is appealing to the conservationist community, because it suggests that attention to human needs may help to address the biodiversity crisis, avoiding politically difficult tradeoffs between human and ecological values
We describe some important dimensions of diverse experiences of nature (EoN) and explain why that diversity is significant to the ways people think about nature
Summary
Keywords Conservation; biodiversity; attitudes; values; social context; experience of nature
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
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
