Climate Conservationists Push for People to Live with Nature Rather Than Against It

This article was updated on December 16, 2025.

In early October 2025, the Trump administration ordered that a 211-mile mining road through the Alaskan wilderness be approved. Known as the Ambler Road Project, it would allow the mining of copper, cobalt, gold, and other minerals.

The project has been debated since Trump’s first term in office, when he initially approved it only for the succeeding Biden administration to block it due to the threat it posed to caribou and other wildlife, as well as to Alaska Indigenous tribes that rely on hunting and fishing. Now, Trump has once again approved the project.

Increasingly, environmental experts are becoming aware of…behavioral clashes and their impact on climate and conservation efforts.

In response to this order, conservation groups and three Alaska Native tribes filed lawsuits against the Trump administration on November 12 to block a deal for a gravel road through a wildlife refuge on the Alaska Peninsula and protect the wildlife and natural world it would disrupt.

The back and forth over Ambler Road continues to highlight opposing viewpoints on such projects, based on perceptions of who benefits from them and how.

“What I suspect in Alaska will be a challenge is where constituents and stakeholders have vested interests and different worldviews, so recognizing what those worldviews are will help to build a shared understanding of how best to move forward,” says Neil Carter, associate professor of conservation and restoration at the University of Michigan.

Increasingly, environmental experts are becoming aware of these behavioral clashes and their impact on climate and conservation efforts. It’s partly why, one month before Trump’s order, The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in Southern California launched the Center for Species Survival: Behavior Change in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This project aims to address how human behavior (or a failure to account for it) shapes conservation efforts.

“People have this misperception that conservation is working just with the animals and the plants, and that will conserve the animals and plants,” said James Danoff-Burg, vice president of conservation at The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, in an interview with NPQ. “But most of us who go out and work with the animals and plants realize it doesn’t help animals and plants. What it does is it helps us understand the impact of behaviors and systems on those plants, animals, and ecosystems, and then you realize you want to go and work with people, because we are the reason species are declining, but we can also be the solution.”

Nature Is Emotional

Nowadays, particularly in urban areas, nature is often portrayed as removed at best, and threatening at worst. From media hyping up wildlife attacks, demanding the culling of stray animals, or even cutting down trees to make room for roads, human beings have—for the last few generations—seemed to be at odds with nature.

What’s particularly important about involving human behavior and emotional responses to conservation…is that they allow all these abstract and sometimes distant realities to make a little bit more sense to the everyday person.

But this approach has only isolated conservation efforts, limiting them to sanctuaries or wildlife parks. Not until the climate crisis becomes intolerable for most of the world, reaching a peak that some scientists deem close to a point of no return in some regions, will people realize the issues this approach has created.

“One misconception [around conservation] has to do with the role of emotion,” Carter said. “I think for the longest time, many people in the human dimensions realm, but also the conservation planning realm, would overlook the role of emotion. It wasn’t something that you would study, and we’re learning now that emotion is a driving influence.”

What’s particularly important about involving human behavior and emotional responses in conservation and other elements of climate action is that it allows these abstract and sometimes distant realities to make a little bit more sense to the everyday person. This is where the approach of conservation psychology and the intersection of human behavior within conservation efforts become so important.

“I think it’s a challenge for people in developed countries to articulate their connection with nature because there’s so many barriers with society and tech and how people live, and a lack of lived experience with wild places, wild animals, things like that—yet it is such a basic part of our identity,” said Thomas Doherty, a psychologist specializing in applying an environmental perspective to mental health and wellbeing.

Where science is often painted as logical or rational, Doherty’s approach to the psychology behind climate action is the opposite. It asks people to feel their emotions to better understand their “environmental identity,” which he explains is unique to everyone.

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that people and nature exist separately.”

“I think as part of my work in psychology and even helping people to cope with climate, we step back and help each person think about their own environmental identity. That’s going to be different for each person and their culture, and where they grew up, and their family,” Doherty said. “It’s always a danger to generalize all humans cause we’re so different, but I do think all humans have the potential for an environmental identity and that’s going to look different for everyone.”

Where Doherty brings the environment into psychology, Kevin Green, vice president of the Center for Behavior and the Environment at Rare, does the same, but the other way around.

“It can be really challenging for people to connect to climate when it’s abstract, so at Rare we focus on storytelling,” Green noted. “Science is incredibly important, but if we want people to act, it has to feel human.”

Change People to Change the Environment

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that people and nature exist separately, and protecting nature means something different to how we think about people’s lives, and that it keeps people out,” Green added. “In reality, protecting nature is connected deeply to protecting people’s lives, like clean water or air….When conservation is framed as something that limits people instead of involving them, it creates barriers. Conservation succeeds better when people see that conservation benefits their lives.”

It’s why Rare, The Living Desert, and many other advocates across the world are making sure that their work is in collaboration with—and often led by—the communities they serve rather than something imposed upon them. Instead of sending in team members to lead new projects, The Living Desert works with established community leaders to provide training and asks them what they need to improve their relationships with nature and conservation.

“I’ve taught workshops to PhDs and to people who’ve passed 8th grade because the latter are the ones who are the community conservationists and they are the ones who will do the work and put people at ease,” Danoff-Burg shared.

Sometimes their team will simply meet with communities, put forward a variety of solutions that may have worked in other areas, and ask people to choose how they’d like to go forward.

For Rare, this also means understanding that there is no universal solution. Instead, because they work in so many parts of the world, they aim to create support for what is specifically needed at that time. For some communities this can look like better water management resources while for others it can mean learning how to restructure their relationships with wildlife.

Krithi Karanth, the CEO of the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) in Bangalore, India, who has been working in this field for 27 years, shared that her organization has been successful in community engagement and awareness workshops. She pointed out that these are held “with key stakeholders like village panchayats [councils], and health department staff, who act as key nodes in any cluster of villages. We walk through issues like why human-wildlife conflict happens, how do you lower risk, what human behaviors you need to implement depending on the animal and [the] time of day.”

Parag Kadam, a researcher at Clemson University with over a decade of experience in forest certification, conservation policy, and community-based resource governance, has seen some of the challenges that come with involving these stakeholders on different levels. Change from a top-down approach isn’t always easy.

One example Kadam points to is the lack of trust many Black landowners have in US government schemes to turn land into spaces for conservation because of the historical power dynamics and confiscation of land from minority communities. But he also noted that “there are many federal employees that I have interacted with who are passionate and actively engaging with underserved landowners.”

“Ecological and wildlife folks as well have different perspectives on how to protect the land, and in my experience, if you can’t sit [at] the same table as an industry stakeholder, it’s very difficult to move things ahead,” Kadam added.

For Kadam, the right language can play a key role in shaping and changing behaviors and perceptions: “Ecologists need tools to communicate with industry stakeholders, and I think communication needs to happen in a very subtle way, but in the sense that both parties should be able to get at least something of what they’re expecting and be able to trust in the [people at the] table.”

He also points out that while research is important, what’s critical is how it’s communicated to everyday people. For Danoff-Burg at The Living Desert, that means an approach that centers the communities he works with.

“The work we’re doing here is trying to get locally appropriate and locally desired behavior change. We’re not coming from the top and saying this is what you need to do,” he said, adding that they aim to change the way conservationists and biologists approach this as well.

“A lot of what we try to do is build skills amongst biologists, to be able to learn from, work with, and support Indigenous communities. Our goal is really to take the ‘wonky’ science…which is written for other scientists, and put it into language everyone can understand,” he said.

For too long, we’ve been at odds with nature, and that has led us to this tipping point in the climate crisis that we see today. The way forward now is to figure out a new harmony—or rather an old one—and go back to what it means to really live with nature, not against it.