The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture [Hardcover]

Peter H. Kahn Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 1999 | ISBN-10: 026211240X | ISBN-13: 978-0262112406 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kahn is a thoughtful and sensitive guide across a far-reaching intellectual landscape, illuminating the relevance of ecological reasoning for many of the key intellectual controversies in developmental psychology."
—Charles C. Helwig, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto

About the Author

Peter H. Kahn, Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture (1999, 2001) and the coeditor of Children and Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations; (2002), both published by the MIT Press.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 295 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press; 1 edition (July 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 026211240X
• ISBN-13: 978-0262112406
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,193,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less than I was hoping for, November 24, 2004

By 

D. A. Matthew (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture (Paperback)

Kahn explores the issue of children's developing understanding of the environment and themselves as a part of it. That raises huge issues:

Are human children predisposed to "love" more "natural" settings than those more artificially developed?

Or, is a healthy sense of self-in-nature something that is acquired, learned? And do some cultures do a better job at educating children toward an environmental conscience?

And how do humans come to regard and value other creatures and their presence in the world? What is our ethical relationship to the land and life around us?

Good questions, but unfortunately, the premises so often restrict the findings here that Kahn, who must proceed scientifically from premises to research to conclusions, does not provide what the reader looks for: a more open-ended discussion of all the basic questions I listed above. The book seems a strange hybrid, something not quite a scientific book, but not quite a book open to the general public, either (who will find his chapter on methodology either a waste of time or something to pick apart at the premises).

Kahn keeps to his scientific surveys of children, and his findings are worth noticing. But these findings could have been summed up in a single journal article, and really do not show anything that common sense would not have predicted (children value nature). I found myself arguing with him about the findings, too; he seems to make conclusions that one could argue could easily go in other directions. At times he seems to have decided about the categories in which to fit the children's views. But this seems to be playing a game of squashing round pegs into squares. Wouldn't it be better to let the categories be determined by the answers rather than be established beforehand?

A good thing in this book that I hope to see more of: Kahn mentions "generational amnesia"--the tendency of people to think only in terms of their own experience. In short, everyone tends to value the environment they experienced as "good enough", and "forget" the fact that it has been deteriorating slowly across generations. The result is that we get people who grow up and don't dream of America the way it was, say, in 1800 or even earlier.

A final puzzlement: Kahn mentions George Lakoff's work in this book; yet I wondered why Kahn didn't pursue or explore that cognitive scientist's (and others') philosophical conclusions about "the human relationship with nature." In the end, I found Kahn's weddedness to "structural-developmental" theory a much cloudier way of thinking about these issues than Lakoff's theory of "embodied realism" and the assumption that all human meaning arises out of our embodied interaction with the environment. (A good look at Lakoff et. al. would also point out why one cannot assume that people's conceptual categories are stable or even consistent.)