Dr. Werner Nohl · landscape architect · honorary professor (Technical University of Munich)

Connectedness to nature in the mirror of time



Werner Nohl


The provision, design, and protection of nature belong to the basic objectives of landscape architecture, landscape planning, and nature conservation. But how much nature makes landscape, how much nature do people need in their everyday environment? In what forms is nature preferred and offered? How ist nature perceived? What values are tied to nature? How are understanding of and responsibility for nature expressed? Under what conditions do people engage for more nature? How is it possible to initiate nature nursing behavior? Who protects actively nature, who ignores it? How can nature be preserved for coming generation?  In order to be able to consider such and other nature related questions in planning tasks, the following paper tries to find out what people understand by nature, at all, and to what degree they feel connected to nature.


Since comparable investigations with the same questionaire were carried out in 1972 as well as in 1986, the development of the mental attitude “connectedness to nature” can traced back within a period of 40 years. The results show that today the feeling of connectedness to nature is evidently not that strong as it was 25 years ago, and that connectedness to nature got the big push of development in the last quarter of the 20th century.  





As the paper is written in German, please, refer to the German language site (use link below).

Impressum · Kontakt · last modified01/02/2024

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