Transformation of Experience: Toward a New Relationship with Nature

Despite decades of awareness about the biodiversity crisis, it remains a wicked problem. Besides preservation and restoration strategies, one approach has focused on increasing public concern about biodiversity issues by emphasizing opportunities for people to experience natural environments. In this article, we endeavor to complicate the understanding of these experiences of nature (EoN). Because EoN are embedded in social and cultural contexts, transformative or new EoN are emerging in combination with societal changes in work, home, and technology. Policies that acknowledge and accept a diversity of culturally situated EoN, including negative EoN, could help people reconnect with the complexity and dynamics of biodiversity. A new conceptualization of EoN that encompasses diverse experiences and reflects the sociocultural context could help to stimulate a broader transformation in the relationship between society and nature, one that better integrates the two spheres. Such a transformation is necessary to more effectively address the biodiversity crisis.