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ABSTRACT. Preservation of biodiversity and continued provision of ecosystem services increasingly relies on environmental conservation on private lands. Despite a multitude of past studies, our knowledge of the motives, opportunities, and challenges of private land conservation, especially on nonworking lands, where financial incentives are less relevant, remains incomplete. A key reason is that a variety of theoretical approaches, resulting in diverging study results, have been used to investigate private land conservation. To help remedy this problem, the current study rigorously examined several established social-psychological determinants of proenvironmental behaviors and developed a comprehensive model, which merged elements from previous studies, to investigate landowner participation in a government-sponsored private land conservation program for nonworking lands. The results are based on analysis of a mailed survey of 800 program-eligible landowners. Contrasting program participants with nonparticipants, we elicited information such as about values, worldviews, socio-demographic characteristics, and property attributes that led landowners to participate in this conservation program. The results of our study illustrate the complex relationships among values, worldviews, norms, attitudes, and behaviors emphasizing the importance of proenvironmental worldviews and of formal education for increasing the likelihood of enrollment in this government-sponsored private land conservation program. Against expectation, neither personal norms, household income, political leaning, nor the size of the eligible property area were found to be important in directly determining the decision to enroll in this conservation program. However, an association of political leaning with stated personal obligation for private land conservation was found. Our results highlight the relationship between formal education and achievement of private land conservation goals through governmental programs for nonworking lands; they also suggest opportunities for supporting conservationminded landowners who are disinclined to engage in governmental programs. To our knowledge, the current study is the first to use a comprehensive model to systematically compare alternative concepts from social psychology such as values, worldviews, norms, and attitudes and their relationships with private land conservation.

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Accuracies of self-reports of household energy consumption were examined among a sample of 2090 electricity and 1699 fuel oil and natural gas consumers. Information obtained from self-reports allowed an increase in response of 37% over what could be obtained from utility company files. Errors in measures as a result of self-reporting occurred, ranging between 10.5% and 12.6% and 24.6% and 29.3%, depending upon fuel type and respondents' use of household receipts. There was no apparent tendency toward systematic over-or underreporting, with the exception of underreporting among larger users. Selfreports correlated more highly with actual consumption than did scores computed to replace missing data. Relationships among variables did not vary significantly between subgroups of respondents for which utility records were and were not obtained. It is concluded that no great error is introduced into findings by researchers' use of self-reports of household energy consumption, either in terms of parameter estimation or in the calculation of relationships among variables. At the sametime, use of self-reports allows the number of missing observations to be reduced.

The prospects for expanded citizen involvement in environmental decision-making through public consultation are explored based on survey results and review of three case studies in the Grand River watershed. Public participation in watershed planning has expanded greatly during the last three decades, largely in response des differentes theories portant sur le role de la participation des citoyens aux d6cisions 6tatiques. Les trois 6tudes de cas introduits dans le texte font oart d'une 6ventail d'enjeux environnementaux qui ont fait l'objet de participation du public, allant des disputes reli6es a l'environnement, aux politiques d'am6nagement a long terme. Les r6sultats de l'enquete font part de l'attitude de la population au sujet de la participation aux d6cisions environnementales. L'analvse des r6sultats 1. Department of Sociology 2. School of Urban and Regional planning