Exploring dynamism of cultural ecosystems services through a review of environmental education research

Abstract

The field of cultural ecosystem services (CES) explores the non-material benefits that ecosystems provide to people. Human perceptions and valuations change, for many reasons and in many ways; research on CES, however, rarely accounts for this dynamism. In an almost entirely separate academic world, research on environmental education (EE) explores how EE programming affects peoples' attitudes and values toward the natural world. In this review of 119 EE research publications, we explore whether CES (and the adjacent concept of relational values) can be dynamic. We approach this via two lines of inquiry that explore whether EE may instigate this change. First, we investigate whether the EE community measures (and tries to affect) CES-related outcomes. Second, we ask: Has EE research detected changes in CES-related outcomes? We find the EE programs measure many CES outcomes (e.g., aesthetic appreciation, social connectedness), and that in most cases studies observe increases in these outcomes after EE experiences.

COVID-19 and human-nature relationships: Vermonters’ activities in nature and associated nonmaterial values during the pandemic

“…Shifts in human-nature interactions may potentially change how nature benefits us and how we value nature [5,6]. Disasters may bring about such shifts, as evidenced by the increased importance of the psychological, physical, and social benefits provided by parks after Hurricane Katrina [7].…”

Quantifying cultural ecosystem services: Disentangling the effects of management from landscape features

“…This may be because cultural ecosystem services are widely considered to be inherently difficult to quantify (Daniel et al, 2012;Dickinson & Hobbs, 2017;Willcock, Camp, & Peh, 2017): while many ecosystem services relate to easily measured biophysical processes or changes (Bagstad, Semmens, Ancona, & Sherrouse, 2017;Satz et al, 2013), cultural services include intangible concepts such as aesthetic value (Daniel et al, 2012;Milcu, Hanspach, Abson, & Fischer, 2013). Furthermore, people value cultural services in different ways, and these values can change over time (Gould, Coleman, & Gluck, 2018;Plieninger et al, 2015). Therefore, despite recognition of their importance (Chan, Guerry, et al, 2012;Daniel et al, 2012), cultural ecosystem services are frequently ignored or play a minimal role in valuation exercises (Small, Munday, & Durance, 2017).…”

The Woods around the Ivory Tower: A Systematic Review Examining the Value and Relevance of School Forests in the United States

“…Indeed, our qualitative analysis (described below) involved subjective interpretation of concepts described in the works in our sample. Such approaches have been used to conduct similar qualitative literature reviews [42]. Most importantly, an interpretivist epistemology and qualitative methods are well suited for investigating complex, interwoven constructs [38,40,41] and thus our approach was well-matched with our study objectives.…”