Psychological Restoration in Nature as a Positive Motivation for Ecological Behavior

Shifting the focus from fear, guilt, and indignation related to deteriorating environmental quality, the authors hypothesized that people who see greater potential for restorative experiences in natural environments also do more to protect them by behaving ecologically, as with recycling or reduced driving. University students (N = 488) rated a familiar freshwater marsh in terms of being away, fascination, coherence, and compatibility, qualities of restorative person-environment transactions described in attention restoration theory. They also reported on their performance of various ecological behaviors. The authors tested a structural equation model with data from a randomly drawn subset of participants and then confirmed it with the data from a second subset. For the combined subsets, perceptions of the restorative qualities predicted 23% of the variance in general ecological behavior. As the only direct predictor, fascination mediated the influences of coherence, being away, and compatibility. 590 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 33 No. 4, July 2001 590-607 © 2001 Sage Publications Will people drive less or recycle more only when they feel that they must do so to ward off the threat of ecological collapse? We see in environmentbehavior research an emphasis on risks, damages, and moral obligations as the driving forces of ecological behavior (i.e., behaviors that contribute to environmental preservation and conservation) (Axelrod & Lehman, 1993). Although research on negative determinants such as personal threat (e.g., Baldassare & Katz, 1992), harm (e.g., Manzo & Weinstein, 1987), and guilt feelings (e.g., Kaiser & Shimoda, 1999) may help to ameliorate environmental problems, it represents a limited perspective on the motivational basis of ecological behavior. In this article, we apply a complementary perspective that encompasses positive motivations for ecological behavior. There are solid conceptual grounds for attending to positive as well as negative motivations for ecological behavior. Ecological behavior is commonly understood as a consequence of attitudes and concerns related to habitat destruction, global climate change, and other ecological effects of human activity (e.g., Fransson & Gärling, 1999; McKenzie-Mohr, Nemiroff, Beers, & Desmarais, 1995; Schahn & Holzer, 1990; Stern, Dietz, & Kalof, 1993). Environmental concern implies a distinction between more and less desired conditions. Accordingly, ecological behavior can be seen not only as a way to avoid undesired conditions (e.g., obliterated habitats) but also as a way to maintain or achieve desired conditions (e.g., intact habitats). More generally, attitudes as cognitive-affective structures that underlie ecological behavior can be positively as well as negatively valenced (e.g., Bogner & Wiseman, 1999; Staats, in press). Positive attitudes toward ecological behavior may involve positive evaluations of the behaviors themselves (e.g., as means to develop competence) (De Young, 1996) or of the consequences of the behaviors (e.g., intact habitats). With respect to the consequences of the behaviors, a positive attitude will often if not always be implicit in statements of negative attitudes toward ecologically harmful human effects, as with environmental concern. Hartig et al. / RESTORATION & ECOLOGICAL BEHAVIOR 591 AUTHORS’ NOTE: Primary support for the study came through Grant DUE9554965 from the U.S. National Science Foundation (P. A. Bowler), a grant from the Transportation Corridor Agencies (P. A. Bowler), and Fellowship 8210-40207 from the Swiss National Science Foundation (F. G. Kaiser). We are grateful to the University of California Natural Reserve System’s San Joaquin Marsh Reserve for permission to conduct the study on the reserve. We thank Gabriel Magassy and Samantha Boltax for assistance with data preparation and entry. We also thank Henk Staats and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments. Address correspondence to Terry Hartig, Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Box 785, S-801 29 Gävle, Sweden; e-mail: [email protected]. There are also solid evidential grounds for making more explicit reference to positive motivations for ecological behavior. Abundant anecdotal evidence points to conjoint positive and negative motivations for ecological behavior. Certainly, leaders of the American environmental movement have railed against environmental destruction, but their range of expression has hardly been limited to outrage, bitterness, and disappointment. Appreciation of nature and outdoor life runs through the ecological and activist writings of Aldo Leopold (1949), Rachel Carson (1962), David Brower (1990), and many others (see Fox, 1985). Environmental activists have often stoked people’s fears about ecological catastrophe in the effort to sway public opinion, but they have also frequently remarked on psychological values of environments in need of protection. The simultaneous expression of positive and negative motivations is clearly manifest in efforts to prevent the loss of psychological values of natural environments. Solitude, aesthetic experience, and psychological health have long been major themes in the rhetoric of park proponents in the United States and abroad. People such as Frederick Law Olmsted (1865/1952) and John Muir (1912) articulated prospects for enjoyment of scenery and public recreation in tandem with warnings about flagrant commercialism and ecological destruction on American public lands. Rhetoric such as theirs has frequently been effective, judging from the passage of the National Park Service Act of 1916, the Wilderness Act of 1964, the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968, and similar pieces of legislation. Such measures have slowed the erosion of psychological values by physical resource–focused land use practices that are also ecologically unsustainable. In this article, we start from the possibility that positive experiences in natural environments underlie the formation, maintenance, and modification of positive attitudes regarding ecological behavior and its consequences. We focus on restorative experience as one kind of positive experience frequently sought in natural settings. Restorative experiences involve the renewal of depleted psychological resources. A focus on restorative experience is appropriate; since the time of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (1962) report, surveys have consistently identified stress reduction and escape from stressors as important motivations for outdoor recreation (cf. Bultena & Taves, 1961; Driver & Knopf, 1976; see reviews by Hartig, 1993; Knopf, 1987; Schreyer, 1989). We frame restorative experience here in terms of attention restoration theory (S. Kaplan, 1995). Restoration is seen taking place in situations that involve psychological distance from aspects of one’s usual routines and demands on directed attention (being away), effortless attention engaged by 592 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / July 2001