Peter H. Kahn

Winner of Outstanding Book Award, 2000, Moral Development and Education, American Educational Research Association. Winner of the 2000 Book Award from the Moral Development & Education Group of the American Educational Research Association Urgent environmental problems call for vigorous research and theory on how humans develop a relationship with nature. In a series of original research projects, Peter Kahn answers this call. For the past eight years, Kahn has studied children, young adults, and parents in diverse geographical locations, ranging from an economically impoverished black community in Houston to a remote village in the Brazilian Amazon. In these studies Kahn seeks answers to the following questions: How do people value nature, and how do they reason morally about environmental degradation? Do children have a deep connection to the natural world that gets severed by modern society? Or do such connections emerge, if at all, later in life, with increased cognitive and moral maturity? How does culture affect environmental commitments and sensibilities? Are there universal features in the human relationship with nature? Kahn's empirical and theoretical findings draw on current work in psychology, biology, environmental behavior, education, policy, and moral development. This scholarly yet accessible book will be of value to practitioners in the social science and environmental fields, as well as to informed generalists interested in environmental issues and children.

Development and Culture

The Human Relationship with Nature

Stephen R. Kellert

Multidisciplinary research on the significance of children's relationship with the natural world.

Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations

Children and Nature

Patricia H. Hasbach

We often enjoy the benefits of connecting with nearby, domesticated nature -- a citypark, a backyard garden. But this book makes the provocative case for the necessity of connectingwith wild nature -- untamed, unmanaged, not encompassed, self-organizing, and unencumbered andunmediated by technological artifice. We can love the wild. We can fear it. We are strengthened andnurtured by it. As a species, we came of age in a natural world far wilder than today's, and much ofthe need for wildness still exists within us, body and mind. T he Rediscovery of theWild considers ways to engage with the wild, protect it, and recover it -- for ourpsychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species. The contributors offer a rangeof perspectives on the wild, discussing such topics as the evolutionary underpinnings of our needfor the wild; the wild within, including the primal passions of sexuality and aggression; birding asa portal to wildness; children's fascination with wild animals; wildness and psychological healing;the shifting baseline of what we consider wild; and the true work ofconservation. The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.

Peter H. Kahn

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