Human Nature and Environmentally Responsible Behavior

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Stephen Kaplan

Research a colleague and I carried out in the context of a wilderness program provides further support for the coexistence of the strong concern for preserving the natural environment and the desire to have such settings available for one's own joy and peace of mind (R. Kaplan & S. Kaplan, 1989). Program participants were asked to keep diaries for the first week after their return from the 10-day program. The powerful and far-reaching effects of the program were evident in these reflections as participants wrote of their feelings of "wholeness" and "oneness"; they considered the wilderness experience to have been transforming, to have revealed aspects of their personalities that they had not known before and that they now valued highly. Their clear concern with protection of the natural environment was deeply personal and closely tied to their hopes for the availability of such transforming experiences in the future. At the same time, however, their concern for preserving the resource closely matched Gagnon Thompson and Barton's (1994) discussion of "ecocentric" values as stemming from "a spiritual dimension and intrinsic value in [the] experiences in nature and feelings about natural settings" (p. 150).

An Alternative Approach

It may be helpful to take stock of the nature of the beast and the nature of the problems it faces.

Reconceptualizing Human Nature: The Reasonable Person Model

At an intuitive level it is not surprising that people resist making changes that they perceive as reducing their quality of life. It is also not surprising that people are concerned about the future of the environment. Perhaps a broader view of human nature, one that encompasses more than material gain, could provide a way out of this impasse.

A central failing of the altruistic position is that it attempts to put aside the issue of gain, of self-interest, in human behavior. The "economic man" position, by contrast, argues that gain is all that matters. Neither position is satisfactory; there is need for a position that is neither so extreme with respect to the issue of gain nor so narrow in its focus.

Even though people are often not rational in terms of the formal (economic man) meaning of the concept, they are clearly capable of being reasonable in the sense of behaving as one would hope people would behave. At the same time it is abundantly evident that people have an enormous capacity to be unreasonable as well. And the very same individual can be reasonable at some times and unreasonable at others. This suggests that it is the circumstances in which people find themselves that may well play a central role in their behavior.

What is it about the circumstances in which people find themselves that could make so radical a difference? Some useful insights can be found in two largely unrelated fields, namely cognitive science and human evolution. The interdisciplinary field of cognitive science has made many important contributions. One of these, perhaps too readily overlooked, is the repeated demonstration that people are exceptionally adept at processing information. In many information-processing areas, such as language understanding and object recognition, human competence still vastly exceeds the capacity of high-speed computers, despite the large investments of time and money over many years.