Introduction
Increasing diversity among students in
natural resources (NR) is an expressed goal for many institutions of
higher education in the U.S. (ESA 1993, 2006, NSF 2008, OSU CoF 2017).
Efforts focus largely on demographic forms of diversity, such as race
and gender. These efforts are motivated partially by the recognition
that demographically diverse people are likely to have different values,
ideas, beliefs, and perspectives (Page 2008), and such non-visible forms
of diversity are important as well. In this regard, the goal is to
increase both demographic diversity and what we might call “worldview
diversity.”
But what, precisely, do we mean when we use the word “worldview?” Our
conceptualization reflects a philosophical approach that breaks
worldviews into three major dimensions: metaphysics (i.e., beliefs about
the fundamental nature and structure of the world), epistemology (i.e.,
beliefs about knowledge and how it is produced), and ethics (i.e.,
beliefs about what is good and how humans ought to behave). Although it
is useful to separate these for analytical purposes (Figure 1), the
three dimensions are closely related. For instance, metaphysical beliefs
about how the world is, influence ethical beliefs about how humans ought
to act; and ethical beliefs about how humans ought to act are informed
by epistemological beliefs about how we arrive at moral knowledge or
understanding. Especially salient to NR are environmental worldviews,
i.e., the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical beliefs that
influence how people view, value, and interact with the natural
environment (Mathews 1991, Callicott 1994).
With “worldview” defined, we next consider what constitutes worldviewdiversity in NR. The dominant worldview of NR in Eurocentric
Western societies has traditionally been 1) anthropocentric (i.e., only
humans have direct moral standing); 2) dualistic (i.e., humans are
separate from nature; 3) hierarchical (i.e., humans are above nature);
4) utilitarian (i.e., nature should be used for its instrumental
benefits); and 5) mechanistic (i.e., nature can be known objectively
through reductive, empirical scientific inquiry) (Mathews 1991, Plumwood
1993, Callicott 1994, Xu and Bengston
1997, Crist 2019). Worldview
diversity, then, involves representation of people whose worldviews
deviate from the dominant NR worldview along one or more
dimensions. For example, an
alternative worldview might include non-utilitarian and
non-anthropocentric beliefs that nature should be honored as kin, and
recognized as a sacred community whose value surpasses what it provides
for humans (Kimmerer 2013). Worldview diversity would be increased if
people with both utilitarian anthropocentric and “kincentric,”
non-anthropocentric perspectives were represented in NR (Salmon 2000;
Bhattacharya and Slocombe 2017).
Demographic information has been closely tracked to monitor diversity
trends in NR over time (Sharik et al. 2015, Arismendi and Penaluna 2016,
Bal and Sharik 2019). For example, research shows that gender and racial
diversity have increased in some areas of environmental sciences and NR
fields, although in some of the most traditional fields such as
fisheries (Arismendi and Penaluna 2016), aquatic sciences (Abernethy et
al. 2020), and forestry (Bal and Sharik 2019) the demographic
composition has been slower to change. Overall, though, environmental
worldviews are not a commonly measured metric of diversity. As such,
while there is a large amount of data on demographic diversity in
undergraduate NR programs, the status of and trends in worldview
diversity remain less clear.
One reason why worldview diversity has not been regularly assessed may
relate to the complexity of the “worldview” concept, which
necessitates measurement tools informed by interdisciplinary insights.
Therefore, our objectives in the present study were to develop an
exploratory measure of worldview diversity in NR; and to assess, in a
small-scale study, whether a reputed undergraduate forestry program
differs from non-forestry NR programs in terms of worldview diversity.
In line with reported lags in demographic diversity in undergraduate
forestry programs (Bal and Sharik 2019), we hypothesized that worldview
diversity would be similarly resistant to change among forestry
students, compared to students in other NR majors.