Rachel Kaplan - The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

established in part I, lays the groundwork for the rest of the book.

Although part I will be challenging for some readers, a detailed understanding of this more theoretical material is not essential to enjoying the book. And, despite the somewhat technical nature of the content, the writing is clear and free of jargon; even difficult concepts are presented in a relaxed, free-flowing style.

Part II presents a more intimate view of nature experiences and is more easily accessible to the layperson. Here the technical concepts of perception and preference give way to a fascinating presentation of human benefits and satisfactions. These insights into human gains, central to the thesis of the book, provide much food for thought. The warm, meaningful responses presented here lead to a deeper understanding of one's self, allowing one to explore one's own nature experiences.

From part II to the end, I felt comfortable and indeed rewarded on every page, rejoicing in seeing the importance of relationships with green nature so clearly established. The book provides an important perspective for looking at one's self journeying through this world, allowing one to examine more closely what had only been suspected, tying personal nature experiences into the larger web of human experience.

I think the volume creates a baseline for anyone interested in the green experience. It provides the scientific basis for inquiry as well as an invitation to think more deeply about this ancient and perhaps too easily accepted role of vegetation as being "good" for people. Everyone who is interested in this relationship will find here an approach that is insightful and widely applicable. They will also find a perspective that they can use as they seek to understand their own nature experiences or to enhance the experiences of others. I am grateful to Rachel and Stephen Kaplan for the exciting and useful synthesis they have achieved in this important volume.

Charles A. Lewis

The Morton Arboretum

Lisle, Illinois

preface step. The first is that these many nature-related and nature-influencing activities - designing, planning, managing, interpreting - are going on right now, often based on little theory and even less data. Compared to the well-intended but often severely limited intuitive bases for decision making currently being employed, the results of these years of research and theory could make a positive contribution. Second, we feel the outlines of what is known and what needs to be known have become clear enough that it is time to invite others to join the fun, to participate in the process themselves.

We intend this volume to be of interest to people who may not realize that they have a common bond. Such people include gardeners, backpackers, and bird watchers. Many professionals whose work brings them in direct contact with the natural aspects of the environment have expressed their eagerness to know about the psychological counterpart to the biological knowledge they have acquired. Horticulturists and landscape architects constitute two such professional groups whose training is not as rich in the psychological dimensions as many of them feel it ideally should be.

Yet another intended audience consists of our professional peers in areas such as environmental psychology, environment/behavior research, behavioral geography, environmental education, recreation behavior, and other assorted disciplines. These groups have no common professional association or single home base. We have been fortunate to have many excellent students from these areas in our classes where they have come to learn from each other and to find out that there are strong underlying themes unifying their apparently disparate directions.

Writing for such diverse audiences is a challenge. On the one hand, the topic of the book is widely appealing, and our readers will have great intuitive familiarity with the contents. On the other hand, our intention is to present results of a large number of empirical studies and considerable theoretical material. We have tried to accommodate to these issues and to the differing expectations about supporting information that diverse professional groups hold. Both the chapter notes and the summaries in the Appendixes are intended to provide some of the information that is essential to some more professionally oriented readers but may be distracting to others. There are also references that provide fuller documentation. At the same time,

though our intention was to write a readable and interest- preface ing volume, we have not attempted a popularized treatment. Our effort is to integrate a substantial quantity of both empirical and theoretical material into a framework and perspective on the role nature plays.

From the present perspective it is difficult to believe that at the time we began this research program there were virtually no studies on the subject of this book. A great deal has happened since then, and the literature on the importance of nature is growing. In retrospect, we find ourselves surprised by the quantity of research we and our students have done in these two decades. The present volume focuses on this more or less coherent research program. Though we refer to the work of others as it seems pertinent, we have placed a higher priority on coherence and integration than on exhaustiveness.