A neuro-scientific approach to environment care

Abstract

Grass-root feedback to public agencies¿ policies for coping with global change threats is poor and reactive. Concurrently, human population becomes more urban, isolated from nature and unable to take personal decisions about it. Therefore, helping societal involvement and proactive behavior towards nature is a crucial challenge nowadays. This paper intends to explore the role of emotions in support of a positive interaction in human/environment systems, to assess their evolutionary changes and ways to eventually readdress its trend. For that purpose, the latest neuroscientific findings are applied to disentangle the nature impact on the human emotional system by comparing the present people¿s attitudes to those from pre-agrarian cultures. This knowledge allows drawing guidelines to improve people¿s concern to care for the environment.