Growing Green Kids

The Lifeboat, the Milk Bottle, and the Middle Passage

Editor's Note: "A Place in the World"

Photo above: A walk with Grandma at Sand Ridge Nature Center. Photo by Joe Nowak.

Fall 2004

CONSERVATION PSYCHOLOGY

Growing Green Kids
Psychologists are working to understand why people care about nature. One theory focuses on childhood.

Brookfield Zoo's Carol Saunders (above) believes that connecting kids to nature will help them develop a sense of caring and responsibility for it as adults. Photo by Jim Schulz, Brookfield Zoo.

By Dave Aftandilian

Chances are, if you're reading this, you care about nature. But why do you care? And when did you start?

For Dr. Carol Saunders, director of communications research and conservation psychology at Brookfield Zoo, caring about nature began during childhood. Growing up in the Northeast, she spent hours alone in her back yard, watching just about any animal she could find. Soon she was bringing some of those animals indoors as temporary pets. Her parents not only put up with lizards running around the house and snakes lounging in terrariums, they also took her on many camping trips, both as a family and with the Girl Scout troop her mom led. When Saunders grew up, she continued her lifelong interest in studying animal behavior, first earning a master's degree in psychology from the University of Virginia and then a doctorate in behavioral biology from Cornell University.

Looking for a job where she could make a difference, Saunders landed at Brookfield Zoo. She started off as an educational specialist, helping visitors better understand the primates in the rainforest exhibit and care about protecting them in the wild. But as she stayed at the zoo longer, she realized that to create more effective conservation messages required a better understanding of what inspires people to care about the natural world and then act to protect it. That led her to start combing the psychological literature and attending academic conferences, looking for people who had researched how caring for nature develops and ways to encourage pro-environment behaviors.



	Photo by Jim Schulz, Brookfield Zoo.

Saunders discovered that over the past decade a growing number of researchers in psychology and other social sciences have been conducting studies more directly oriented toward the goal of environmental sustainability. Conservation biologists, too, have long realized the need to bring social scientists on board to work on the human side of conservation (simply put, we can't conserve animals and plants without understanding and working with people). But most people doing this research, Saunders found, were scattered across the country and even around the world, often working in different disciplines with no centralized community for sharing research findings.

To solve that problem, Saunders, along with Gene Myers of Western Washington University and other colleagues, started rallying these widely scattered researchers around the banner of conservation psychology. "We're trying to study in a scientific way the reciprocal relationships between humans and the rest of nature," Saunders says, "with the end goal to encourage people to care about and take care of the natural world."

Brookfield Zoo hosted the first national conservation psychology conference in May 2002, bringing together not just researchers but also practitioners, such as environmental educators and communications specialists. Saunders sees this approach as key: "Practitioners, the people on the ground, know the critical questions we need to be asking," she says.

For instance, how can we foster caring about nature in children? How can we better communicate with political leaders and the public about the importance of conservation? How can we help city dwellers connect with nature? "We need to link them up with researchers interested in doing applied work that improves conservation efforts. This winning combination will help researchers advance the field of conservation psychology and help practitioners have a more strategic impact on their publics."

At the conference, researchers and practitioners discussed four key areas of future research for conservation psychology: connections to animals, connections to place, encouraging environmentally friendly behavior, and relations between values and the environment. For each topic, researchers drew from previous research and suggested new approaches to pursue. For instance, since 1980, a number of studies have investigated which life experiences have motivated people to act to protect the environment, and at what point in their lives people had these experiences. Researchers have found that people in the United States and Europe consistently point to the same kinds of life experiences, mainly in childhood, as profoundly influencing their later environmental interests and activism.

In one such study, Louise Chawla of Kentucky State University and her colleagues interviewed more than 50 adult men and women who were all committed to protecting the environment. She asked them what experiences had inspired them to care about the environment, and at what times in their lives those experiences occurred. More than three-fourths of the environmentalists Chawla interviewed identified "the experience of natural areas and the influence of family members who directed attention to the value of the environment" as the main reasons they cared about nature.

She also identified several other contributing factors, such as positive experiences with environmental organizations and environmental education, and negative experiences of environmental destruction. Some factors were more influential during childhood, while others were more important as people aged. Additional comparative research is needed to determine the degree to which people's attitudes about nature come from experiences versus a pre-existing affinity for nature; relatedly, researchers plan to explore how people with different starting interests interpret nature experiences differently.

The Play Zoo allows kids to see wild animals up close — such as this cecropia moth, above. They can even dress up like the animals and build a human-sized bird nest. Photo by Jim Schulz, Brookfield Zoo.

If future studies confirm initial findings, it may turn out that one of the best ways to convince the adults of 20 years from now to preserve natural areas and species is to give them positive nature experiences with adult mentors now, when they are kids. This idea particularly excited staff at the Brookfield Zoo, which has had a longstanding interest in conservation psychology, in part due to the advocacy of its former director, Dr. George Rabb. Like other zoos and aquariums, Brookfield seeks to encourage the development of a conservation ethic among its visitors. To do this, Rabb suggested that Brookfield focus on the concept of caring.

To put its caring-based approach into practice, Brookfield created a new exhibit space: the Hamill Family Play Zoo and Gardens, which opened in June 2001. The Play Zoo is a pioneering attempt to put key research findings from conservation psychology and environmental education into practice in the real world. The mission of the Play Zoo is "to help children and their families develop caring attitudes toward the natural world." Its approach is simple: "give children positive nature experiences now to better ensure they will grow to be good caretakers of the environment later."

At the Play Zoo, kids can pet and groom animals, build nests and other habitats, dress up as bugs, plant gardens, paint murals and banners for exhibits, and even act as zoo director or vet. The exhibit is in part a response to an increasingly urbanized and technologically oriented world, where children have fewer and fewer opportunities to have such experiences. The Play Zoo gives children a safe space to play with their parents in a natural context. Specially trained adult Play Partners from Brookfield enhance the experience, serving as models for how parents can encourage their children to enjoy playing in nature.

Many other aspects of conservation psychology research also informed the development of the Play Zoo. Research has suggested, for example, that to develop caring for nature, children need to have the chance to practice caring behaviors. So the Play Zoo gives them ample opportunities to do so, whether by grooming a dog or misting a garden plant. Researchers have also found that children learn caring from watching others practice it. In the Play Zoo, kids get a behind-the-scenes look at zoo staff feeding and caring for animals.

Research is suggesting that experiences such as habitat restoration and gardening give us the positive mental feedback to care for a place. Here, kids plant in the Hamill Family Play Zoo's garden. Photo by Jim Schulz, Brookfield Zoo.

Like any exhibit, especially new ones, the Play Zoo has to be evaluated to see how well it is succeeding in its mission. This is challenging; as Saunders says, "How can we tell, objectively, if kids are having a caring moment?" One way that researchers try to do this is to observe children interacting with the exhibits, and then score them on a variety of scales. How much are they internalizing what it feels like to be a turtle? How are they practicing the opportunities to care for animals and plants in the exhibit? Do they touch animals gently or roughly? Even if researchers can verify that certain activities engage or influence a child at one moment, they will need to conduct studies over a period of years to measure long-term effects on attitudes and actions. Depending on the results, Play Zoo exhibits will be refined over time.

Much of the conservation psychology research that informed the development of the Hamill Family Play Zoo at Brookfield can be applied elsewhere in Chicago Wilderness. For instance, a number of researchers have found that actually doing something in a specific place, such as a forest preserve, is a great way to establish a connection with it, and to encourage more environmentally friendly behaviors overall. "Restoration activities are ideal," says Saunders, "because they allow people to experience a form of reciprocity with a place: humans do something to help nature, and nature responds with restored beauty."

A recent study by Jerry J. Vaske and Katherine C. Kobrin of Colorado State University also suggests that repeated visits to a place to carry out an environmentally friendly behavior, such as restoration, can not only lead people to form a strong emotional attachment to that particular place, but can also influence them to treat the overall environment better. Vaske and Kobrin surveyed nearly 200 young people (14 to 17 years old) just after they had finished a five- to seven-week natural-resource-based work program (e.g., maintaining trails in a local park). Based on the youths' answers to the survey questions, the researchers found that doing "specific environmentally responsible behaviors in a natural resource setting (i.e., participating in the youth work program) encourages environmentally responsible behaviors in everyday life (e.g., talking with friends about environmental issues, water conservation)."

Conservation psychology can also help Chicago Wilderness with one of the most difficult tasks of all: evaluating whether the programs we create to nurture caring and encourage pro-environment behaviors are achieving what we hope they will achieve.

One step, Saunders suggests, would be to conceive a set of social indicators, along the lines of the biological indicators that are being developed to measure the ecological health of Chicago Wilderness. "Sense-of-place scales" developed by psychologists could be used to monitor the connections people feel with their communities; people could also be surveyed before and after participation in a particular program to see how successful it was at increasing their regional pride and awareness of local biodiversity.

Saunders says we will also need qualitative measures, not just quantitative ones; listening to people's personal narratives and stories could serve as one such measure.

"Conservation psychology can help us know what to measure and how to develop programs that are more likely to succeed at their ultimate goal," Saunders notes, "...helping people develop more sustainable relationships with the rest of nature."