Why Conserve Nature?
Perspectives on Meanings and Motivations

A philosophical discussion about the meanings of nature which can give rise to our motivations to conserve nature.

Stephen Trudgill (Author)

9781108958578, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 February 2022

412 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.7 kg

'… this book will help the … reader to think through their values and their relationship with nature… I encourage the readers … to buy this book, let Trudgill's seminars reshape their thinking, and (re)discover for themselves why we should conserve nature.' George Holmes, Oryx

How we view nature transforms the world around us. People rehearse stories about nature which make sense to them. If we ask the question 'why conserve nature?', and the answers are based on myths, then are these good myths to have? Scientific knowledge about the environment is fundamental to ideas about how nature works. It is essential to the conservation endeavour. However, any conservation motivation is nested within a society's meanings of nature and the way society values it. Given the therapeutic and psychological significance of nature for us and our culture, this book considers the meanings derived from the poetic and emotional attachment to a sense of place, which is arguably just as important as scientific evidence. The functional significance of species is important, but so too is the therapeutic value of nature, together with the historic and spiritual meanings entwined in a human feeling for landscape and wildlife.

Part I. The Experience of Nature: 1. The experience of nature
2. Climate change
Part II. Nature Imagined: 3. Nature in ecological science: explanations, emotions and motivations
4. Nature in literature and art
Part III. Nature, Self and Place: 5. Personal meanings of nature
6. Places for nature
Part IV. Why Conserve Nature?: 7. Possibilities.

Subject Areas: Environmental management [RNF], Environmentalist thought & ideology [RNA], Ecological science, the Biosphere [PSAF]