What are the reasons that people value the environment? And do these reasons influence how they treat nature?

Typically, research distinguishes between two fundamental reasons people value the natural environment. They can value nature because it benefits people (e.g., “I think healthy rivers are important because it means clean drinking water for us!”. Or, they can value nature because it has inherent value or for its own sake (e.g., “I think healthy rivers are important because it means a healthy habitat for fish and animals”). Both reasons for valuing nature have been shown to have different effects on pro-environmental behavior. There is a great deal of nuance, but the gist of it is that caring about nature for nature’s sake is clearly associated with greater pro-environmental behavior; valuing nature because it benefits people, on the other hand, at best doesn’t have as clear of an association and at worst is associated with lower pro-environmental behavior.

As it turns out, however, these aren’t the only two reasons people value the environment and some researchers have recently (Pascual et al., 2017) categorized a third reason that people value nature: because of its direct role as a part of our community and culture).

We recognized that this basis for environmental values had not yet been addressed in environmental psychology so we wanted to create a measure that adequately captured it in order to understand how it predicts pro-environmental behavior.

In our paper, we created a new scale that adequately captures all three environmental value-bases. Moreover, we found that, when compared to nature for people and nature for nature, valuing nature as a member of the community was a better predictor of pro-environmental intentions and actual pro-environmental behavior.

An additional noteworthy finding was that valuing nature for the ways it benefits people had a negative relationship with pro-environmental outcomes when controlling for the other reasons for valuing nature.

These results suggest that (a) when studying the effect of environmental values, it is important to include all three value-bases and (c) that we may want to consider the ways in which we can promote valuing nature as a member of the community rather than valuing it for our own benefit.

You can read the open-access research article to learn more:

Lengieza, M. L., Aviste, R., & Swim, J. K. (2023). Nature as community: An overlooked predictor of pro-environmental intentions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 102127; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2023.102127