The Genesis of Care: Knowledge-Emotion Connections, Extension of the Self, and Care for Nature at an Urban Nature Centre

Environmental social scientists have demonstrated that one path to caring for nature is spending time appreciating it. This paper asks why spending time in nature leads to this care and proposes connections between knowledge and emotion and the extension of the self as a mechanism for this link. It develops a general theory of care based on these connections between knowledge and emotion and extension of the self. The data come from a five-year ethnography at a nature centre in Toronto, Ontario, involving 50 interviews and over 500 hours in the field. I find that people care because connections between knowledge and emotion create opportunities for the extension of the self. Specifically, nature knowledge parses out pieces of nature – such as protected areas and species – and emotions make these pieces emotionally vibrant. This emotional resonance based on specialized knowledge, in turn, creates opportunities for people to extend their sense of self to emotionally resonant parts of nature. Once people understand parts of nature as an extension of the self, threats to nature can galvanize care, to preserve what has become part of the self.