Publications

Filter Publications

Select Research Themes

Select Authors

Select Publication Years

8 publications listed under Environmental Generational Amnesia

Environmental Generational Amnesia

2026 / Environmental Generational Amnesia

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) is the psychological phenomenon wherein each generation constructs its understanding of what constitutes a “normal” natural world based on the environment experienced during childhood. The crux of the problem is that, as environmental degradation increases, each successive generation comes to perceive an increasingly impoverished natural world as normal. As a result, profound environmental losses—damaging to both human well-being and the more-than-human world—go unrecognized. It is difficult enough to address large-scale environmental problems when they are clearly recognized; it becomes even more difficult when such problems are barely recognized or not noticed at all. In this way, EGA reveals a temporally layered process, where shifting baselines accumulate across generations and obscure the long-term trajectory of environmental decline.

Reflections on: The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature

2026 / Children, Environmental Generational Amnesia

In “The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature” (Kahn & Weiss, 2017), Thea Weiss and I wrote that the problem of environmental generational amnesia (EGA) was one of the most pressing psychological problems of our lifetime. EGA happens in this way: With each new generation, children are born into an increasingly diminished, fractured, and partly destroyed natural world. Do we know that? No, because as children we take the nature we encounter as the baseline, the norm for what counts as healthy nature. It is difficult enough to address large-scale environmental problems when we clearly recognize them; it becomes ever more difficult when we barely recognize them, or do not notice them at all. In recent work (Kahn, in press), I review the empirical evidence for EGA. The body of research is still modest, but the findings in support are consistent across diverse ecological and cultural contexts. I also extend EGA’s theory, showing that it represents a tragic success of Piagetian constructivism. Children build cognitive structures around available external input, as Piaget established, but when that input is an increasingly impoverished natural world, the result is internally coherent yet ecologically misaligned and maladaptive knowledge. I also differentiate EGA from related constructs, including Diamond’s (2005) Landscape Amnesia and Pauly’s (1995) Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Neither construct reckons with the force of childhood baseline construction. Thus, both hold that the historical record and current knowledge can reasonably correct course. EGA is less optimistic: its roots in early childhood phenomenological experience make the amnesia more deeply entrenched. Here, looking forward, I would like to note two solutions to the problem of EGA, which were in their more nascent form in the 2017 article, and which I’ve been extending in my scholarly work.

Technological Nature and Human Well-Being

2018 / Environmental Generational Amnesia, Urban, Virtual nature

In terms of physical and psychological well-being, does it matter that on a worldwide level we are replacing interactions with actual nature with technological nature—technologies that mediate, simulate, and augment the natural word? Research from three forms of technological nature are reviewed: a technological nature window, robot pets, and a telegarden. Results suggest that while interacting with technological nature is better than nothing, it is not as good as interacting with real nature. A concern with accepting technological nature is that it can shift the baseline downward for what counts as optimal well-being, as people across generations lose experiences with healthy baselines, a process referred to as environmental generational amnesia. One result is that we ask too little of the idea of urban sustainability, confusing biological living with human flourishing.

The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature

2017 / Children, Development, Environmental Generational Amnesia, Health and well-being

The problem of environmental generational amnesia is that nature gets increasingly diminished and degraded, but children of each generation perceive the environment into which they are born as normal. Thus, across generations, the baseline shifts downward for what counts as healthy nature. One solution is to broaden and deepen children’s interactions with nature, and whenever possible, with big nature. To convey how this solution looks in practice, we draw from our observational data of children in a forest nature preschool to identify patterns of interaction with nature and illustrate how these interaction patterns may help children develop environmental capabilities, values, knowledge, intimacies, and relationships.

The Rediscovery of the Wild

2013 / Environmental Generational Amnesia, Health and well-being

A compelling case for connecting with the wild, for our psychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species. We often enjoy the benefits of connecting with nearby, domesticated nature—a city park, a backyard garden. But this book makes the provocative case for the necessity of connecting with wild nature—untamed, unmanaged, not encompassed, self-organizing, and unencumbered and unmediated by technological artifice. We can love the wild. We can fear it. We are strengthened and nurtured by it. As a species, we came of age in a natural world far wilder than today’s, and much of the need for wildness still exists within us, body and mind. The Rediscovery of the Wild considers ways to engage with the wild, protect it, and recover it—for our psychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species. The contributors offer a range of perspectives on the wild, discussing such topics as the evolutionary underpinnings of our need for the wild; the wild within, including the primal passions of sexuality and aggression; birding as a 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 of conservation.

The Human Relation With Nature and Technological Nature

2009 / Environmental Generational Amnesia, Virtual nature

Figure 1. Examples of technological nature. HDTV plasma “windows” displaying real-time images of the local nature scene outside the building are shown (a) installed in a participant’s office in a long-term field study (Friedman, Freier, Kahn, Lin, & Sodeman, 2008); and (b) covering up a real window in the plasma-window condition of an experimental study in the lab (Kahn et al., 2008). The camera that recorded looking behavior can be seen poking out from the drapes to the left of the plasma window. The plasma screen was not present in the glass-window condition of the experimental study; and the drapes were pulled across the entire wall for the blank-wall condition. The bottom pictures show technological nature in the form of a robot dog (AIBO; from Kahn, Friedman, Perez-Granados, & Freier, 2006). In (c), the participant has just been introduced to AIBO and approaches the robot a little apprehensively. Within a couple of seconds, AIBO begins to move toward the participant; in (d), the participant is startled and appears slightly apprehensive (not unlike how a person might respond when encountering a biological dog that he or she has never met before). Two world trends are powerfully reshaping human existence: the degradation, if not destruction, of large parts of the natural world, and unprecedented technological development. At the nexus of these two trends lies technological nature—technologies that in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world. Current examples of technological nature include videos and live webcams of nature, robot animals, and immersive virtual environments. Does it matter for the physical and psychological well-being of the human species that actual nature is being replaced with technological nature? As the basis for our provisional answer (it is ‘‘yes’’), we draw on evolutionary and cross-cultural developmental accounts of the human relation with nature and some recent psychological research on the effects of technological nature. Finally, we discuss the issue—and area for future research— of ‘‘environmental generational amnesia.’’ The concern is that, by adapting gradually to the loss of actual nature and to the increase of technological nature, humans will lower the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of the human experience and of human flourishing. Technology has begun to change our species’ long-standing experiences with nature. Now we have technological nature—technologies that in various ways mediate, augment, or simulate the natural world. Entire television networks, such as the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, provide us with mediated digital experiences of nature: the lion’s hunt, the Monarch’s migration, or a climb high into the Himalayan peaks. Video games like Zoo Tycoon engage children with animal life. Zoos themselves are bringing technologies such as webcams into their exhibits so that we can, for example, watch animals from the leisure of our home or a café. Inexpensive robot pets have been big sellers in the Wal-Marts and Targets of the world. Sony’s higher-end robot dog AIBO sold well. Real people now spend substantial time in virtual environments (e.g., Second Life). In terms of the physical and psychological well-being of our species, does it matter that we are replacing actual nature with technological nature? To support our provisional answer that it does matter, we draw on evolutionary and cross-cultural developmental accounts of the human relation with the natural world and then consider some recent psychological research on the effects of technological nature.

Children’s Affiliations with Nature: Structure, Development, and the Problem of Environmental Generational Amnesia

2002 / Children, Development, Environmental Generational Amnesia

How do children reason about environmental problems? Are there universal features in children’s environmental conceptions and values? How important is it that children and young adults experience natural wonders? Finally, what happens to children’s environmental commitments and sensibilities when they grow up in environmentally degraded conditions? This chapter reports on the results of five studies that the author and various colleagues conducted. In these studies, children were interviewed in diverse locations about their environmental moral conceptions and values. The author also seeks to explicate two ideas that frame his theoretical approach to investigating children’s affiliations with nature–structure and development. Finally, the author builds on the structural-developmental framework and his research findings to articulate what may be one of the most pressing and unrecognized problems of the current age—the problem of environmental generational amnesia.

Child-Nature Interaction in a Forest Preschool

2020 / Children, Environmental Generational Amnesia, Nature school

Children participating in activities at Fiddleheads Forest School. In 2012 there were only around 25 nature preschools and kindergartens in the United States; now there are well over 250. It is a national movement that is gaining momentum. It is an exciting time because in principle these schools have within them the kernels to transform the world through increasing children’s direct interaction with nature and a more wild nature than that exists in most urban children’s lives. In this paper we begin to characterize forms of child-nature interaction that occur in one specific nature preschool, Fiddleheads Forest Preschool in Seattle, Washington, USA. Based on our observational data, derived through a randomized time-sampling methodology, we modeled child-nature interaction using what we call interaction patterns: characterizations of essential ways of interacting with nature described abstractly enough such that the pattern can be instantiated in different ways, across diverse forms of nature. Specifically, we use a nature language to describe (with photographs) eight interaction patterns: leaning on and hanging from supple tree limbs, climbing high in small tree, looking at wild animals, imitating animals, imagining nature to be something other than it is, making boundaries on earth, pushing the edges of boundaries, and waiting attentively in nature. Through an interaction pattern approach, we seek to provide insight into what is actually happening on the ground at a forest preschool and how that provides a key solution to the problem of environmental generational amnesia.