Comparing Values Toward Nature Across Cultures

Values are the beliefs and goals that serve as guiding principles in our lives; they often influence our worldview and, therefore, the actions we take. The relationship between values, beliefs, and actions can be viewed as a pyramid: our values, basic beliefs, and value orientations form the base of who we are, and those translate into our attitudes toward the world around us. Eventually, those attitudes manifest in the behaviors we enact and the actions we take.

If environmental educators wish to help students engage in sustainable actions, it is important for them to understand students' values about the environment. This study set out to explore the different types of values that students hold related to nature and the environment by examining students from different cultures. In particular, the researchers were interested in the range of value orientations that students may hold toward nature, and also how those value orientations may differ among cultures.

The study focused on 12- and 13-year-old students living in urban environments in Guangzhou, China, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The researchers matched students on certain variables, including socioeconomic status, geographic landscape type, population density of residential area, and access to natural spaces. Of the study participants, 51 were from Guangzhou and 59 were from Minneapolis. The researchers asked the students to complete three activities: (1) draw a picture representing what they thought the relationship between human and nature should be; (2) verbally explain their drawing; and (3) complete a short questionnaire describing what the human relationship to nature should be using four simple relational terms: subordinate, in harmony, dominant, or other.

The students' regular classroom teachers administered the activities during normal classroom instruction time, and the activities were not accompanied by any additional lessons or interventions. Each task was administered in the students' native language, and all responses were later translated into English for analysis. The researchers initially reviewed all responses to gain a general sense of the data; they then converted each of the drawings into a researcher-constructed written description. A different group of researchers then coded these written responses; the responses were segmented into phrases based on emergent categories and themes. Finally, the researchers counted the frequency of the themes.

The five themes of students' orientation to nature that emerged based on the drawings were: humanistic (“we should love nature deeply”); interdependence (“we rely on nature and nature relies on us”); stewardship (“it is our responsibility to take care of nature”); use (“nature is useful to us”); and dominion (“we should conquer nature”). The most frequently occurring theme was humanistic (6.7% in Minneapolis and 4.4% in Guangzhou). Guangzhou students were much more interdependence-oriented than the Minneapolis students (40%, as opposed to 10.2% in Minneapolis). By contrast, the Minneapolis students felt more strongly about stewardship than the Guangzhou students did (71.2%, compared to 37.8% in Guangzhou). Both use (8.5% in Minneapolis and 15.6% in Guangzhou) and dominion (3.4% in Minneapolis and 2.2% in Guangzhou) were comparatively lower.

To ensure validity of these results, researchers compared the drawing results to those of the four-response questionnaire. The researchers found that almost identical themes emerged from the questionnaire responses as had emerged from the drawings; the division among the five themes was similar to the division in themes in the drawings as well as their corresponding explanations. These findings suggest that students have specific value orientations toward nature, the value orientations are often diverse, and the orientations are different and distinct from one another. The value orientations also differ across cultures.