I picked this rather unconventional topic for us this week because so often our discussions diverge to the ultimate cause behind all environmental problems: human behavior. Our tendency to carelessly consume all we can without regard to what is around us and what comes after us is the underlying cause behind all our problems. Conservation issues cannot be solved if people don’t care. So could conservation psychology offer a solution for achieving our aims?
The authors quite boldly state that the ultimate purpose of CP is to direct human behavior towards more sustainable patterns and increase our care for the nature. We wondered if this could be seen as a problem – is it politically feasible for a branch of science to aim at manipulating people’s preferences and behavior? On the other hand, many applied fields, especially our own conservation biology, aim at influencing rather than just exploring. It’s probably a very subtle balance between actually influencing human behavior towards the desired direction vs. provoking a backlash. But that’s for the psychologists to discover 🙂
In general, we enjoyed this very readable paper and its contents that were largely novel to us. But perhaps for the same reason, being strangers to psychology, we would have preferred even more concrete examples of what has been found in the research so far, instead of just summarizing what topics have been dealt with. The examples that the author did describe were very interesting, and more of those would have been helpful for us laymen. We felt the paper focused a bit too much on the definitions of things, and trying to justify the need for this new field instead of describing its contents more concretely. Whether or not it really differs enough from environmental psychology to merit the status as its own field seemed to divide our opinions. Nevertheless, we did conclude that such research would be highly beneficial and necessary to advance conservation, regardless of what its name was.
The paper quite nicely identified all the gaps in research so far and prospect for future work. We only wondered whether this field has really taken off as was hoped back in 2003 when the paper was written? At least a quick search for more recent papers resulted in a rather thin outcome, mostly short essays rather than actual research papers.
Being largely about terminology and definitions, I should mention that we slightly disagreed with the definition of conservation biology as excluding preservation and including only active management, and including factors such as social sciences and ecophilosophy – these belong to conservation science, not conservation biology. But this probably did not influence the relevance of the psychology contents. The author mentions that a common terminology for care for nature is a key issue for achieving advances in conservation. As a curiosity, in the Finnish language we use the word “hoito” for management, which also means caring (e.g. sairaanhoito = health care, lastenhoito = child care, metsänhoito = forestry, riistanhoito = game management). Not sure if it is a direct consequence of the choice of word here, but many Finns seem to believe that we really are caring and doing the “right thing” for the forest by regularly thinning it and maximizing its growth, or that we are caring for the game animal populations by hunting.
All in all, we enjoyed reading about this divergent topic. It is very useful exercise every now and then to try to broaden our perspectives and think outside our biological boxes!
http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her102/102saunders.pdf
