The Formation of Environmental Beliefs

If you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all.

—Ronald Reagan

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.... We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.

—Wallace Stegner

All environmental communication stems from a complex, evolving system of beliefs about the natural world. Regardless of how well it is understood or recognized, an environmental belief system inhabits each individual and informs her or him about where humans "fit" in relation to the rest of the nonhuman world. How you value redwoods, insects, and ecosystems—as well as the environmental messages you send and receive—all have roots in this belief system.

Like most people, you probably have not given much thought to your environmental belief system or what influenced it. You may think of "the environment" as something out there that people tend to fight over and wring hands about, but not as something that's a part of you. But we breathe an atmosphere, drink a watershed, participate in a climate, and live in a habitat that supplies us with food.

Famed naturalist and writer Wallace Stegner wrote that environmental beliefs "have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long, and grow as slowly. Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time." All environmental messages are crafted from a perspective, informed by a worldview, reference personal relationships and experiences, and are used to justify words and actions.

A fully formed environmental belief system is an environmental ideology, or a way of thinking about the natural world that a person uses to justify actions toward it. Ideology articulates a relationship to the land and its creatures, and to some extent, guides the way we act toward it. The next chapter discusses a full spectrum of specific environmental ideologies. These ideologies become the lens through which we interpret words and behavior—received from literature, education, film, news media, advertising, and pop culture—about the natural world. But first, it's important to explore what forms and shapes these beliefs, which is the focus of this chapter.

Development of Environmental Belief Systems

Your belief system is both an individual and a cultural product. The environmental history of this country, your childhood and adult experiences with the natural world, the beliefs of your parents and significant others—these all helped to develop your environmental beliefs. The process begins in childhood, particularly through direct experiences with nature and through deep connections to physical places. By adulthood, much of your ideological foundation has been laid but significant adult experiences may continue to shape it.

In the summer after sixth grade, I shared a tent at church camp with two girls from a Chicago housing project and a girl from an Indian reservation in South Dakota. The Chicago girls hated the bugs, the primitive conditions, and complained that it was so quiet they couldn't sleep. Backpacking was torture to them. Even at our young age, each of us already had established a relationship and comfort level with the natural world that would continue to mold our developing ideologies, regardless of the same direct experience with nature that we shared at camp.

Understanding environmental belief systems and how they form is essential to understanding and analyzing environmental messages. This chapter explores some of the factors that influence ideology formation:

* Childhood experiences

* A sense of place

* Historical and cultural contexts

Childhood and Nature

Almost everyone can remember a special outdoor place from childhood. Mine was the woods and fields of my rural midwestern neighborhood. On three sides of our house was a strip of woods with basswood trees for climbing, shagbark hickory trees with nuts to shell, and an assortment of tree limbs for building forts. The woods had squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, deer, blue jays, and owls, and for our summertime delight, fireflies. Across the road in the "park," an undeveloped parcel held in common by all the families on our road, we played Capture the Flag and held important meetings among the trees. Beyond the next road to the west was "the crick," a steep, wooded gully that held a small stream where we explored every inch, catching crawdads in summer and attempting to ice skate its crooked course in winter.

Even if I never saw this place again, I could draw a map of it in magnificent detail as if it were yesterday. Without intellectualizing or categorizing the experience, I could label the neighbors' houses, the paths through the woods, even a few favorite trees and landmarks. When I remember this place, a flood of senses—smells, sounds, colors, features, sizes, and shapes—returns. A person's childhood memory map can just as easily be an urban vacant lot or an abandoned building as a grandparents' farm or a family cottage on the lake.

Author, poet, and naturalist Gary Snyder reminds us, "The childhood landscape is learned on foot, and a map is inscribed in the mind—trails and pathways and groves—the mean dog, the cranky old man's house, the pasture with the bull in it—going out wider and farther. All of us carry within us a picture of the terrain that was learned roughly between the ages of 6 and 9."

It is well documented that the experiences we gain from special outdoor haunts as children are carried through—with knowledge added and reinterpretations made—to adulthood. Even decades ago, psychologists knew that children's experiences with nature had crucial and irreplaceable effects on their physical, cognitive, and emotional development. As one noted, "The non-human environment, far from being of little or no account to human personality development, constitutes one of the most basically important ingredients of human psychological existence." Earlier forms of a child's knowledge are not lost as the child develops but are embedded, reworked, and transformed into more comprehensive ways of understanding the natural world and acting upon it.

Experiences with nature are like baggage a...