The Social Impacts of a Nature Center

The Social Impacts of a Nature Center
Author: Mi Yan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022
Genre:
ISBN:
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Since the mid-twentieth century, nature centers have offered environmental education programs for surrounding communities. They play a significant role in nonformal and informal environmental education, with audiences from children to seniors. They also generate social impacts on communities. This research used qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate nature centers' social impacts from the perspectives of nature center leaders and staff. Findings showed that leaders and staff recognized three categories of social impacts: impacts on "human," impacts on "human-society," and impacts on "human-nature." The social impact on human includes health, human development, and personal achievement. The social impact on human-society includes sense of community and facilitating community building and solidarity among people of different races, ethnicities, and social-economic backgrounds. The social impacts on human-nature includes connectedness to nature, sense of place, and catalyzing environment stewardship. Among these three categories, nature center leaders and staff prioritized human-nature over human and human-society. This study begins to fill the gap in nature centers' social impact analysis.

Urban Environmental Education Review

Urban Environmental Education Review
Author: Alex Russ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1501712780
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Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.

How to Create and Nurture a Nature Center in Your Community

How to Create and Nurture a Nature Center in Your Community
Author: Brent Evans
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Nature centers
ISBN: 9780292720978
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"Every community needs a nature center just like it needs a school, church, and library. Nature centers teach environmental values. This book is a practical and usable guide to establishing and operating a nature center from authors who did it themselves and who studied dozens of other nature centers across the country. It is full of useful information, and a must read for anyone interested in nature centers."--John Flicker, President, National Audubon Society"The authors' love of nature and their labor of love in establishing the Cibolo Nature Center come through loud and clear. . . . They offer a wealth of wisdom based on their own experiences in a clear, readable style. They also present significant information on where help is available."--Michael Riska, Executive Director, Delaware Nature SocietyPreserving wild land as a community nature center can be a powerful antidote to the stresses of modern living. This practical handbook is designed to inspire, inform, and enable readers to create a local nature center, or help an existing nature center grow and prosper. It will be an essential resource for nature center pioneers, as well as volunteers, board members, donors, government officials, or new members who want to educate themselves about the operation and potential of a nature center in their community.Brent Evans and Carolyn Chipman-Evans give step-by-step instructions for creating and maintaining a nature center. They cover topics such as starting from scratch; gathering support; organizing the organization; building community; handling costs, budgets, and funding; managing land without managing to ruin it; and planning. Photographs, line drawings, and boxes with helpful tips amplify the entire book.

Bioeconomic and Biophilic Intersect in Nature Centers

Bioeconomic and Biophilic Intersect in Nature Centers
Author: Carolyn Jeanne Price
Publisher:
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2010
Genre: Ijams Nature Center (Tenn.)
ISBN:
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The purposes of this research were 1) to understand what stakeholders in one nature center are "thinking" about the focus of their center and the niche it occupies; 2) to characterize the role of one nature center in its local community; 3) to examine the nature center in terms of established characteristics of a "best" nature center; 4) to compare stakeholder perceptions with perceptions of directors of exemplar nature centers and environmental education organizations; and 5) to characterize visitor and member stakeholder perceptions and motivations in terms of the extrinsic value of ecosystem services, bioeconomics, versus the intrinsic value of nature, biophilia. This research was conducted utilizing case study methodology with mixed method data collection. Ijams Nature Center visitors and members were surveyed concerning the value of nature; structured interviews were administered to Ijams Nature Center employees, nationally recognized nature center and environmental organization directors. Visitors' perceptions of nature focused on the natural surroundings of the nature center, providing opportunities to watch wild animals, appreciate nature, and feel at peace. Nature center member perceptions of nature reflected the concepts of stewardship and advocacy fostered by the Center's conservation mission, education programs, and preservation activities. Participants shared common thematic concepts for the role of nature centers and the characteristics of a best nature center. A best nature center was characterized as a composite of factors, practices, and perspectives that merge to form a business plan reflective of best practice guidelines. Participants highlighted the unique quality of centers and the passion and vision that guides development and the roles played by nature centers in their local communities, as identified in this study, i.e., education, advocacy, and immediacy. Ijams Nature Center visitors and members valued nature differently in terms of bioeconomics and biophilia, but both groups rated the biophilic value of nature of greater importance, with differing constructs reflective of that value.