Search

Environmental learning occurs through an interconnected web of opportunities. Some arise via organizations with sustainability- or environmental learning-focused missions, while others are facilita...

We examined The University of Vermont’s new sustainability requirement for undergraduates through the lens of just sustainability. We found that sustainability courses are proposed in diver...

The possible dynamism of relational values is of extreme interest to sustainability scholars and practitioners, yet the fledging field of relational values has seen few research on whether interventions of any kind affect the relational values that people hold and express. Other fields that study related topics can provide insight into this question. This paper investigates how the field of environmental education has addressed relational values, without labelling them as such. Results demonstrate that recent environmental education literature explores different types of relational values. Connectedness was the most common relational values construct present, but its definition was not always clear. The environmental education literature provides evidence that relational values can be dynamic – that they may change after interventions such as environmental education programs. We argue that research at the intersection of environmental education and relational values may benefit both fields.

Relational values as preferences, principles and virtues about human-nature relationships have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. The term has been used to include concepts and knowledge from a wide range of social sciences and humanities, e.g., importantly making space for qualitative approaches often neglected within environmental management and science. Meanwhile, crucial questions have emerged. What counts as a relational value, and what does not? How do relational values (RVs) compare with other value categories and terms, including held, assigned, instrumental, moral, shared, social, and non-material values (e.g., associated with cultural ecosystem services)? In this article, we address these issues, partly by providing context about how the RV term originated and how it has evolved to date. Most importantly, because of their somewhat unique combination of groundedness and moral relevance, positive relational values may offer important opportunities for the evolution of values that may be necessary for transformative change towards sustainability. The special issue includes contributions that contemplate particular concepts (e.g., care, stewardship, eudaimonia human flourishing), applications (e.g., environmental assessment, environmental policy design), and the history of relevant scholarship in various intellectual traditions (e.g., ecological economics, human ecology, environmental education). Together with this suite of thought-provoking papers, we hope that the clarification we provide here facilitates a broad and productive interdisciplinary exchange to create and refine a reflective but powerful tool for sustainability and justice. © 2018 We have been funded by a Canadian SSHRC Insight Grant (#435-2017-1071) and a UBC Killam Research Fellowship (KC).

Decades of research emphasize that information alone rarely influences environmental behavior. We addressed the question of, “what, then, does influence environmental behavior?” by asking more spec...

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are a crucial but relatively understudied component of the ecosystem services framework. While the number and diversity of categories of other types of ES have steadily increased, CES categories are still largely defined by a few existing typologies. Based on our empirical data, we suggest that those typologies need updating. We analyzed data from interviews conducted in adjacent Hawaiian ecosystems—one agricultural and one forested. We found that current categories of CES do not capture the diversity and nuance of the nonmaterial benefits that people described receiving from ecosystems. We propose three new CES categories: ingenuity, life teaching, and perspective. We discuss issues of lumping and splitting CES categories, and advocate that creating categories for these emerging themes will help us to more fully capture nonmaterial benefits in ecosystem services research and policy.

The field of cultural ecosystem services (CES) explores the non-material benefits that ecosystems provide to people. Human perceptions and valuations change, for many reasons and in many ways; research on CES, however, rarely accounts for this dynamism. In an almost entirely separate academic world, research on environmental education (EE) explores how EE programming affects peoples' attitudes and values toward the natural world. In this review of 119 EE research publications, we explore whether CES (and the adjacent concept of relational values) can be dynamic. We approach this via two lines of inquiry that explore whether EE may instigate this change. First, we investigate whether the EE community measures (and tries to affect) CES-related outcomes. Second, we ask: Has EE research detected changes in CES-related outcomes? We find the EE programs measure many CES outcomes (e.g., aesthetic appreciation, social connectedness), and that in most cases studies observe increases in these outcomes after EE experiences.

The environmental sector is often characterized by ‘wicked' problems: problems that are ever-changing and difficult to define, have multiple causes and affected parties, and lack a clear solution. To explore scholars' suggestion that wicked problems necessitate leadership that is collaborative and transformational, this study analyses how community-based environmental leaders—those who emerge from community need and are propelled to address pressing environmental issues—discuss their leadership styles. Drawing on data gathered through narrative interviews with 12 leaders from diverse sectors in the San Francisco Bay Area (California, USA), we use a leadership typology to consider the role of collaborative, participatory, and transformational leadership styles. We found that the majority of leaders describe their work as collaborative and transformational, but that almost all respondents also discussed an equally transformational, but less than fully collaborative/participatory, style. Interviewees...

Humankind and the planet face many thorny environmentally related challenges that require a range of responses, including changing behaviors related to transportation, eating habits, purchasing, and myriad other aspects of life. Using data from a 1201-person survey and 14 Community Listening Sessions (CLSs), we explore people’s perceptions of and actions taken to protect the environment. Our data indicate a striking prevalence of waste management-related actions. Survey respondents described actions and concerns related to trash, recycling, and composting as the most common environmental behaviors; similarly, participants in CLSs discussed waste-related topics, for which we did not prompt, as frequently as those topics for which we specifically prompted. Explanations for this prevalence emerging from the data include (1) the nature of waste-related behaviors (concrete, supported by infrastructure, simple, compatible with lifestyle); (2) norms and social dynamics (family interactions, feelings of belonging/participation, government policy); and (3) internal psychological processes (internalized norms and environmental concern). We also found that many waste-related discussions were relatively superficial, focusing on immediate waste-related issues (e.g., litter or recycling) rather than larger issues such as consumption. Our results may provide insight into future efforts to encourage pro-environmental behavior. Given that most pro-environmental behavior involves tasks more complex and lifestyle-changing than those related to simple aspects of waste management, we suggest focusing on the latter two intertwined categories that our data suggest are important: encouraging social dynamics and related development of norms concerning environmental behavior (category 2), and fostering internalized norms and environmental concern (category 3).

Themes of place, situatedness, and locale are increasingly prominent in environmental education literature and practice. Sense-of-place research, which considers how people connect with places and the influence of those connections on engagement with the environment, may have important implications for environmental education. Prior place studies have proposed that people’s place connections have various dimensions. This paper explores four place dimensions, analyzing data from a survey (n = 712) conducted in three ecoregional sites in which we investigated residents’ sense of place. We examine how our data fit a proposed typology of place dimensions – a four-dimension (biophysical, psychological, sociocultural, and political-economic) categorization based on previous conceptions of the dimensions of place. We use structural equation modeling to question whether a 4-factor conceptualization of the dimensions of sense of place is superior to plausible alternatives. In comparing the four-dimension model wit...

Focusing on ecosystem services (ES) is seen as a means for improving decision-making. Research to-date has emphasized valuation of material contributions of ecosystems to human well-being, with less attention to important cultural ES and non-material values. This gap persists because there is no commonly accepted framework for eliciting tangible values, characterizing their changes and including them alongside other services in decision-making. Here we develop such a framework for ES research and practice, addressing three challenges: i) non-material values are ill-suited to characterization using monetary methods, ii) it is difficult to unequivocally link particular changes in social-ecological systems to particular changes in cultural benefits; and iii) cultural benefits are associated with many services, not just cultural ES. There is no magic bullet, but our framework may facilitate fuller and more socially acceptable integrations of ES information into planning and management. Copyright statement: “NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in BioScience. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in BioScience, 6, (8), (2012) http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/bio.2012.62.8.7¨

The ecosystem services concept is used to make explicit the diverse benefits ecosystems provide to people, with the goal of improving assessment and, ultimately, decision-making. Alongside material benefits such as natural resources (e.g., clean water, timber), this concept includes—through the ‘cultural’ category of ecosystem services—diverse non-material benefits that people obtain through interactions with ecosystems (e.g., spiritual inspiration, cultural identity, recreation). Despite the longstanding focus of ecosystem services research on measurement, most cultural ecosystem services have defined measurement and inclusion alongside other more ‘material’ services. This gap in measurement of cultural ecosystem services is a product of several perceived problems, some of which are not real problems and some of which can be mitigated or even solved without undue difficulty. Because of the fractured nature of the literature, these problems continue to plague the discussion of cultural services. In this paper we discuss several such problems, which although they have been addressed singly, have not been brought together in a single discussion. There is a need for a single, accessible treatment of the importance and feasibility of integrating cultural ecosystem services alongside others.