Promoting conservation through the arts: outreach for hearts and minds.

Emotions play a central role in the decisions we make. For example, we often make poor investment choices because we are driven by our emotions rather than rational judgment (Tversky & Kahneman 1991). On the positive side, when emotional input is added to learning experiences, it makes them more memorable and exciting. The brain deems the information more important and enhances memory of the event. Presenting facts alone is less likely to result in long-term changes in feelings and behaviors (Sylwester 1994; Weiss 2000; Cable & Ernst 2003). The arts offer a way to make an emotional connection to people, and the visual and performing arts can help conservation practitioners reach new audiences. Art can provoke reactions that typical education and outreach methods do not. Art has the potential to inform audiences or participants in a new way about conservation topics, and it can stimulate new dialogues and actions. By engaging multiple senses and emphasizing social interaction, the arts can provide people with emotional pleasure and support (Levinthal 1988). Medical practitioners find that incorporating movement, sound, art, and journal writing into their therapeutic practices helped patients identify feelings, explore unconscious material, gain insight, and solve problems (Rogers 1993). Writing and reading poems helped medical students better understand a sick patient’s feelings and their own relationship to disease and healing (Grace 2004). Applying these principles to conservation issues could foster closer relationships with nature and more creative solutions to problems. Ideally, conservation education and outreach promotes interdisciplinary understanding of the natural and built environment through the sciences, arts, and humanities. The theory of multiple intelligences suggests that educators should incorporate more integrated skill sets, including musical and kinesthetic intelligences, into activities to enhance learning (Gardner 1999). Using complementary intelligences in conservation education would foster environmental literacy for a greater variety of people. Yet conservation educators often focus solely on technical dissemination of scientific information and overlook other ways of understanding the world (Turner & Freedman 2004). This technocentric approach may not incite people to reflect on their values or personal behaviors (Job 1996) or inspire people to engage in sustainable land-use or consumption patterns. Use of the arts is an important yet little-studied strategy for effective conservation outreach. We describe several examples that provide evidence of how the arts can stir emotions and attract new audiences, increase awareness, improve classroom instruction, introduce new perspectives, and foster environmental stewardship. Encouraging a variety of ways of understanding the world should result in better care of it.