Rachelle K Gould

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Vermont

Modern environmental thought has always involved normative claims about the values needed for sustainability. This has often played out in debates between proponents of anthropocentric and ecocentric ways of valuing nature. More recently, there has been a flourishing of interest in relational and pluricentric ways of valuing nature, coinciding with...

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurrin...

Many discourses, both academic and public, assume that values, understood as principles (e.g. fairness, loyalty), lead to behavior. We analyze how 134 theories of human behavior treat values, which we define broadly to include value(s) related to both principles (e.g. moral values) and value(s) related to importance (e.g. cost or priorities). We fi...

Conservation science often addresses highly complex issues; creative approaches can help develop new ways of doing so. We describe constraint-based brainstorming, a 10-minute creativity-inducing exercise inspired by design thinking. Although we applied the method with the goal of developing creative environmental valuation methods, it is applicable...

Twenty-five years since foundational publications on valuing ecosystem services for human well-being1,2, addressing the global biodiversity crisis³ still implies confronting barriers to incorporating nature’s diverse values into decision-making. These barriers include powerful interests supported by current norms and legal rules such as property ri...

There is growing attention to the idea of a relational turn in sustainability science. Scholarship that names and discusses this trend briefly recognizes Indigenous knowledge traditions as relevant to relational turn conversations, but it has not yet elaborated on this deep source of insight. To begin this elaboration, we describe how Indigenous un...

In the past 5 years, scholarly and policy attention to relational values, a concept that articulates plural values of nature, has grown steadily. To date, there are no published syntheses of empirical research that explicitly addresses relational values. We perform a systematic literature review of n = 72 empirical studies of relational values to s...

Unlabelled: A burgeoning and diverse field of study investigates the many aspects of human-nature relationships-what they mean for ecosystems, for human well-being, and for transformations toward sustainability. We explore an emerging concept in human-nature relationship research: perspective from nature, defined as the idea that nature helps peop...

Regenerative agriculture refers to a suite of principles, practices, or outcomes which seek to improve soil health, biodiversity, climate, ecosystem function, and socioeconomic outcomes. However, recent reviews highlight wide heterogeneity in how it is defined. This impedes our ability to understand what regenerative agriculture is and has left the...

The concept of relational values has emerged in the arena of biodiversity and sustainability science in the past decade. Relational values are values that pertain to relationships between people and nature or among people through nature, and they include preferences and principles associated with those relationships. They offer an alternative to th...

To create the science we need for the ocean we want in this United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and to support the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) value assessment, we systematically reviewed literature from the past 20 years (N = 375) that used conceptualizatio...

Relational values are emerging as an important aspect of ecosystem valuation scholarship and practice. Yet, relatively few empirical examples of their expression exist in the literature. In addition, many characteristics of relational values suggest that they may interact with the quality of empathy, but scholars have not explored that interaction....

The paper, ‘A relational turn for sustainability science? Relational thinking, leverage points and transformations’ presents a compelling summary of the incipient relational turn in sustainability science. That piece and the reply and response that follow put forth important arguments about what relational thinking is and how it can infuse sustaina...

Collaborative research approaches can promote social learning by curating a structure that facilitates inclusive dialogue and reflection. Within an epistemological frame that upholds notions of emergence rather than extraction, such modes can foster collective reflection in ways that contribute to reversing traditional notions of expertise. In this...

Conservation professionals use language related to instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values when communicating about the importance of conservation, frequently in connection with ecosystem services. However, few researchers have examined whether messages that emphasize values associated with ecosystem services result in different policy‐suppo...

The values associated with nature are a central component of human–nature interactions, but their assessment remains a challenge. In this exploratory research, we examine the potential of a creative data collection method to elucidate the multiple values of nature. We invited visitors to a natural area to write letters to non‐human elements of the...

We explore two as-yet-unconnected trends: evidence of nature's effects on mental health/wellbeing, and acknowledgment that behavioral research is overwhelmingly informed by globally non-representative societies. We assess geographies, ethnicities, and conceptualizations in 174 peer-reviewed studies of nature's mental-health/wellbeing connection. Fi...

Urban foraging provides city dwellers with numerous ecosystem services, but this human-nature interaction is largely missing from the urban ecosystem services scholarship. This exploratory study aims to address this gap in the literature and examines the benefits and values associated with foraging in New York City, United States. We focus on Russi...

In recent years, environmental values have become increasingly important for understanding human–environment relationships and transitions towards sustainability. Pluralistic valuation seeks to account for values associated with the diversity of human–nature relationships. Relational values (RV) have been proposed as a concept that can aid in plura...

As water funds and other watershed investment programs expand around the world, there is growing interest in designing equitable programs that provide both upstream and downstream benefits. While research demonstrates that diverse values underlie upstream participation, existing communication and outreach materials from non-governmental organizatio...

Chlorides (frequently sodium chloride) are used to improve safety and access to roads and other surfaces in winter. However, chlorides also pose risks to aquatic life and raises human health concerns as they move to surface waterbodies and infiltrate groundwater. In response, many government bodies have adopted winter maintenance best management pr...

Environmental learning occurs through an interconnected web of opportunities. Some arise via organizations with sustainability- or environmental learning-focused missions, while others are facilitated by organizations focused on impacts and outcomes in a range of areas, such as health, social justice, or the arts. To better understand the richness...

The global environmental situation presents humans with challenges of unprecedented complexity, and research into the multiple values of nature aims to inform decision‐making in the context of this complexity. Research suggests that creativity can be a crucial tool in confronting complexity, crises and novel situations. I argue that research into t...

In the original publication of the article, under the section.

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly modified Earth’s social-ecological systems in many ways; here we study its impacts on human-nature interactions. We conducted an online survey focused on peoples’ relationships with the non-human world during the pandemic and received valid responses from 3,204 adult residents of the state of Vermont (U.S.A.). We a...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are associated with diverse and profound values, such as spiritual fulfillment, cultural heritage, and identity-related phenomena. Early ecosystem services research often omitted these deep meanings, but they are increasingly explored in recent studies through a range of disciplinary and epistemological perspective...

Cultural ecosystem services research is in a somewhat tumultuous state. The cultural ecosystem services (CES) idea is seen simultaneously as a welcoming, expansive addition to conservation policy-making and as a strange, square-peg-in-a-round-hole concept that should be replaced by a more appropriate metaphor or conceptual structure. This confluenc...

Hawai’i Island’s shorelines provide intangible and tangible benefits for the island’s residents and visitors. This paper examines long-time residents’ access to, values associated with, and uses of Hawai’i Island’s blue spaces. It finds that Native Hawaiian residents and those who ascribe to Native Hawaiian cultural values encounter barriers to exp...

Humanity is on a deeply unsustainable trajectory. We are exceeding planetary boundaries and unlikely to meet many international sustainable development goals and global environmental targets. Until recently, there was no broadly accepted framework of interventions that could ignite the transformations needed to achieve these desired targets and goa...

Ecosystem services (ES) have been a part of the ecological economics (EE) toolkit for decades. Over that time, however, ES has grown into a field of its own, and some Ecological Economists have criticized it for diverging from several core tenets of EE. Here we highlight five frontier areas of ES research and practice that can reverse that trend. E...

You can find a pre-print of this chapter here: https://gouldgroup.weebly.com/publications.html

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are a crucial but relatively understudied component of the ecosystem services framework. While the number and diversity of categories of other types of ES have steadily increased, CES categories are still largely defined by a few existing typologies. Based on our empirical data, we suggest that those typologies nee...

The ideas of relational values and social values are gaining prominence in sustainability science. Here, we ask: how well do these value conceptions resonate with one Indigenous worldview? The relational values concept broadened conceptions of values beyond instrumental and intrinsic values to encompass preferences and principles about human relati...

The growing field of research into cultural ecosystem services (CES) explores nonmaterial benefits that people receive from ecosystems. These studies have, however, largely overlooked refugee communities. To reduce this gap, we systematically review academic literature on refugee interactions with ecosystems to understand what cultural ecosystem se...

Place connections are core to being human: Every person lives in, and thus has direct experience of, at least one place and likely of numerous places throughout a lifetime. Sense of place—or the meanings, knowledge, and bonds that arise from the biophysical, social, and political–economic aspects of places—in turn influences people's interactions w...

This article explores the “broader impacts” of research related to biodiversity conservation. We analyze a sample of abstracts of proposals funded by the United States National Science Foundation's (NSF) Biology (BIO) and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) directorates. The analysis, based on the NSF conceptualization of broader impact...

The ideas of relational values and social values are gaining prominence in sustainability science. Here, we ask: how well do these value conceptions resonate with one Indigenous worldview? The relational values concept broadens conceptions of values beyond instrumental and intrinsic values to encompass preferences and principles about human relatio...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions , such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of 'lenses' and 'ten...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce a novel transdisciplinary conceptual framework that revolves around concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tens...

Cultural ecosystem services (CES) are some of the most difficult ecosystem services (ES) to characterize and connect to specific ecosystem processes. Given their connections to human emotion, deep meaning, fulfilment and motivation, they are also crucial for human well‐being. Scholars have published hundreds of peer‐reviewed articles addressing CES...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, such as religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce the concepts of 'lenses' and 'tensions' to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the n...

The benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services, are increasingly recognized and accounted for in assessments of infrastructure development, agricultural management, conservation prioritization, and sustainable sourcing. These assessments are often limited by data, however, a gap with tremendous potential to be filled through Eart...

This paper concludes a special feature of Sustainability Science that explores a broad range of social value theoretical traditions, including religious studies, social psychology, indigenous knowledge, economics, sociology, and philosophy. We introduce the concepts of ‘lenses’ and ‘tensions’ to help navigate value diversity. First, we consider the...

Relational values—as preferences, principles and virtues about human-nature relationships—have attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. The term has been used to include concepts and knowledge from a wide range of social sciences and humanities, e.g., importantly making space for qualitative approaches often neglected within environment...

Decades of research emphasize that information alone rarely influences environmental behavior. We addressed the question of, “what, then, does influence environmental behavior?” by asking more specifically: what factors mediate the relationship between learning about environmentally related issues and engaging in environmentally related behaviors?...

Researchers have investigated the factors that influence environmental behavior for decades. Two often-investigated phenomena, connectedness to nature and self-efficacy, often correlate with environmental behavior, yet researchers rarely analyze those correlations along with underlying cultural factors. We suggest that this is a substantial oversig...

Provides the survey instrument distributed to students. (PDF)

The possible dynamism of relational values is of extreme interest to sustainability scholars and practitioners, yet the fledging field of relational values has seen few research on whether interventions of any kind affect the relational values that people hold and express. Other fields that study related topics can provide insight into this questio...

The field of cultural ecosystem services (CES) explores the non-material benefits that ecosystems provide to people. Human perceptions and valuations change, for many reasons and in many ways; research on CES, however, rarely accounts for this dynamism. In an almost entirely separate academic world, research on environmental education (EE) explores...

This paper identifies, and offers several ways to address, a serious, persistent issue in conservation: low levels of diversity in thought and action. We first describe the lack of diversity and highlight the continued separation of the environmental conservation and environmental justice movements. We then offer—based on previous research and our...

Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are a crucial but relatively understudied component of the ecosystem services framework. While the number and diversity of categories of other types of ES have steadily increased, CES categories are still largely defined by a few existing typologies. Based on our empirical data, we suggest that those typologies nee...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Figure S1: Database schema. Diversity data in yellow, GIS data in green and Catalogue of Life data in blue. The diversity tables datasource, study, site, measuredtaxon and diversitymeasurement follow the structure described in ‘Methods’ in the main text and in Hudson et al. (2014): a datasource is associated with one or more study records, each of...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

The PREDICTS project—Projecting Responses of Ecological Diversity In Changing Terrestrial Systems (www.predicts.org.uk)—has collated from published studies a large, reasonably representative database of comparable samples of biodiversity from multiple sites that differ in the nature or intensity of human impacts relating to land use. We have used t...

Humankind and the planet face many thorny environmentally related challenges that require a range of responses, including changing behaviors related to transportation, eating habits, purchasing, and myriad other aspects of life. Using data from a 1201-person survey and 14 Community Listening Sessions (CLSs), we explore people’s perceptions of and a...

A cornerstone of environmental policy is the debate over protecting nature for humans’ sake (instrumental values) or for nature’s (intrinsic values) (1). We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being, or “what is right,” with regard to nature and the environme...

The debate over protecting nature for humans' sake (instrumental values) or for nature's (intrinsic values) is a cornerstone of environmental policy. We propose that focusing only on instrumental or intrinsic values may fail to resonate with views on personal and collective well-being or " what is right " , with regard to nature and the environment...

An age-old conflict around a seemingly simple question has resurfaced: why do we conserve nature? Contention around this issue has come and gone many times, but in the past several years we believe that it has reappeared as an increasingly acrimonious debate between, in essence, those who argue that nature should be protected for its own sake (intr...

Stakeholders' nonmaterial desires, needs, and values often critically influence the success of conservation projects. These considerations are challenging to articulate and characterize, resulting in their limited uptake in management and policy. We devised an interview protocol designed to enhance understanding of cultural ecosystem services (CES)...

Understanding cultural dimensions of human/environment relationships is now widely seen as key to effective management, yet characterizing these dimensions remains a challenge. We report on an approach for considering the nonmaterial values associated with ecosystems, i.e., cultural ecosystem services. We applied the approach in Kona, Hawai‘i, usin...

The environmental sector is often characterized by ‘wicked' problems: problems that are ever-changing and difficult to define, have multiple causes and affected parties, and lack a clear solution. To explore scholars' suggestion that wicked problems necessitate leadership that is collaborative and transformational, this study analyses how community...

Ecosystems provide many of the material building blocks for human well-being. Although quantification and appreciation of such contributions have rapidly grown, our dependence upon cultural connections to nature deserves more attention. We synthesize multidisciplinary peer-reviewed research on contributions of nature or ecosystems to human well-bei...

Globally, most restoration efforts focus on re-creating the physical structure (flora or physical features) of a target ecosystem with the assumption that other ecosystem components will follow. Here we investigate that assumption by documenting biogeographical patterns in an important invertebrate taxon, the parasitoid wasp family Ichneumonidae, i...

All plant species identified during vegetation sampling. (DOCX)

Elaboration of Methods. (DOCX)

Ecological restoration is an increasingly important component of sustainable land management. We explore potential facilitative relationships for enhancing the cost-effectiveness of restoring native forest understory, focusing on two factors: (1) overstory shade and (2) possible facilitation by a fern (Dryopteris wallichiana), one of few native col...

The ecosystem services concept is used to make explicit the diverse benefits ecosystems provide to people, with the goal of improving assessment and, ultimately, decision-making. Alongside material benefits such as natural resources (e.g., clean water, timber), this concept includes-through the 'cultural' category of ecosystem services-diverse non-...

Themes of place, situatedness, and locale are increasingly prominent in environmental education literature and practice. Sense-of-place research, which considers how people connect with places and the influence of those connections on engagement with the environment, may have important implications for environmental education. Prior place studies h...

Background/Question/Methods: Scholarly discussion about cultural ecosystem services – what they are, how to “measure” them, and how to incorporate them into decision-making – is enriching our understanding of the intangible ways that ecosystems benefit people. We field-tested a possible first step in “measuring” – or eliciting how people think ab...

A focus on ecosystem services (ES) is seen as a means for improving decisionmaking. In the research to date, the valuation of the material contributions of ecosystems to human well-being has been emphasized, with less attention to important cultural ES and nonmaterial values. This gap persists because there is no commonly accepted framework for eli...

We explore perceptions of the film Avatar in Kona, Hawai`i using a mixed-methods study that included surveys (n = 146) and semi-structured interviews (n = 15). Quantitative analyses indicated that Native Hawaiians were more likely than Caucasians to express a sense of cultural pride related to messages in the film. Analyses of the qualitative data...