Volunteering on Nature Conservation Projects: Volunteer Experience, Attitudes and Values

Abstract

In many countries volunteers are playing an increasing role in nature conservation. Many factors have lead to this trend including reduced government budgets assigned for conservation and an increased awareness and interest expressed by each country's general population to contribute to environmental health and nature conservation. This paper utilizes descriptions of volunteers' experiences participating in Volunteer for Nature, a volunteer programme operated by Canadian conservation NGOs, which facilitates the participation of Ontario-Residents' in 3 to 17-day working vacations involving habitat restoration and recreation infrastructure projects located in natural environments. This paper describes volunteer attitudes and values regarding nature, as highlighted through the description of their volunteering experiences and their characterization and perceptions of nature. Using a constructivist approach to data collection and analysis, the researchers found that volunteers conceptualized nature in four different ways: ‘nature in crisis,’ ‘nature as it should be,’ ‘nature as outside or something different,’ and ‘nature as nurturing.’ Volunteers' egoistic concerns centred on the self (e.g., my health, my favourite activity, my grandchildren), altruistic concerns centred on other people (society in general, people in my community) and biocentric or ecocentric concerns, centred on living things (e.g., plants, ecosystems, birds, the environment in general). While biocentric concerns were cited as important, they were not ascribed greater value than the egoistic or altruists concerns. The volunteer tourism experience generally failed to change the volunteers' perceptions of nature from an ‘external’ phenomenon to an ‘internal’ one, (i.e., changing treatment of nature as ‘other’ to a more ecocentric approach, which incorporates nature into ‘self’). Implications for generating a pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours amongst citizens are discussed.

Keywords:

• volunteerism
• volunteer tourism
• attitudes
• values
• nature conservation projects
• environment
• conservation NGOs