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.