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20 October 2013 20:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enismirdalYesterday I went to a conference about wildlife and biodiversity monitoring in my region.
One of the talks made me a bit angry and depressed - not because of the speaker, who was very good, coherent and interesting, but because of the findings.
She was looking at the reasons people visit urban green space, i.e. places like parks, public gardens, woodlands, etc. within towns and cities. The majority of interviewees appeared to be walking the dog, which is fine. But the concept of visiting for the nature was so far down almost all the people's list of reasons to be there.
What was a bit scarier was what happened when she measured people's sense of wellbeing in different sites, and compared that to the biodiversity present. For birds, yes, as bird diversity increased then wellbeing also increased. But butterfly diversity actually correlated negatively - people had more wellbeing in places with fewer butterfly species. She then looked at "perceived diversity", i.e. how much diversity of plants and animals people *think* is present in a place...and things started to become clearer. They had no idea. People's perception of biodiversity actually had NO CORRELATION AT ALL with the actual biodiversity measured by ecologists. There could be hundreds of species around them and they wouldn't even know.
However, their perceived biodiversity correlated really well with their sense of wellbeing...so people like the idea of biodiversity, they just have no appreciation of it in reality.
Then they decided to figure out why this was - do people just not know what's around them any more? They showed people 12 pictures of really common UK species. Stuff like red admiral butterflies. And asked people to name them. I didn't see the pictures so I don't know what other species were used and how good the photos were, but... The results were scary: only one single person got 12 out of 12. Most people got fewer than 3 of the species right. These weren't rare moths. These were common birds and butterflies that you could see in almost any UK garden.
How did we get so detached from nature? How did it reach the point where so many people are so far removed from their surroundings they don't even realise what's there? No wonder it's so hard to protect our biodiversity when people only have an abstract concept of what it is and why we might care. I need to do something about this.
One of the talks made me a bit angry and depressed - not because of the speaker, who was very good, coherent and interesting, but because of the findings.
She was looking at the reasons people visit urban green space, i.e. places like parks, public gardens, woodlands, etc. within towns and cities. The majority of interviewees appeared to be walking the dog, which is fine. But the concept of visiting for the nature was so far down almost all the people's list of reasons to be there.
What was a bit scarier was what happened when she measured people's sense of wellbeing in different sites, and compared that to the biodiversity present. For birds, yes, as bird diversity increased then wellbeing also increased. But butterfly diversity actually correlated negatively - people had more wellbeing in places with fewer butterfly species. She then looked at "perceived diversity", i.e. how much diversity of plants and animals people *think* is present in a place...and things started to become clearer. They had no idea. People's perception of biodiversity actually had NO CORRELATION AT ALL with the actual biodiversity measured by ecologists. There could be hundreds of species around them and they wouldn't even know.
However, their perceived biodiversity correlated really well with their sense of wellbeing...so people like the idea of biodiversity, they just have no appreciation of it in reality.
Then they decided to figure out why this was - do people just not know what's around them any more? They showed people 12 pictures of really common UK species. Stuff like red admiral butterflies. And asked people to name them. I didn't see the pictures so I don't know what other species were used and how good the photos were, but... The results were scary: only one single person got 12 out of 12. Most people got fewer than 3 of the species right. These weren't rare moths. These were common birds and butterflies that you could see in almost any UK garden.
How did we get so detached from nature? How did it reach the point where so many people are so far removed from their surroundings they don't even realise what's there? No wonder it's so hard to protect our biodiversity when people only have an abstract concept of what it is and why we might care. I need to do something about this.
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Date: 21 Oct 2013 10:40 (UTC)I do know tree-names like "oak" and "ash" but not in a way that I can associate with *actual trees* because I read them in stories, where the trees weren't described further.