Education has been shown to be able to change a person’s attitude towards pro-environmental actions. However, such attitudes do not always translate to actions. Based on the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) model (as cited in Clayton & Myers, 2009), values can affect attitudes, which in turn affects behaviour. A person’s value and belief should be consistent, else education will be fruitless. With a ecocentric value orientation, a person is more likely to form attitudes that accept pro-environmental ideas in daily life. For an attitude to be translated to actions, the person must form a positive assessment of his or her own ability and that the behaviour does not deviate from peers. Hence, we see that education can be a complex issue as changing behaviour is not a simple process.
Although there is no statistics on human value orientation towards tropical forest in the 1970s, it is highly possible that values back then had been less ecocentric. Based on the VBN model, a behaviour stems indirectly from one’s values. As we see more action taken to bring down deforestation currently, we can guess that values towards forests have been improving compared to decades back.
Attribution of responsibility is another key factor that can allow change. People may think that deforestation is such an important issue that they would not have a say on it and that what each of them do will not contribute to any change. Their thinking may be that government should be the one to take action. Hence, government has to ensure public knows they have a part to play.
Many Southeast Asian countries now have parks, which is a man-made forest, in their environment. When encouraging people to care for forests, an important note to take is the method used to transfer information to people. Methods of education requires to be interesting to garner attention, yet that interest may also cause public visit to the forests. However, it may not be the best idea to have people visiting these natural forests. We see negative impacts, whereby forest visits ended up with feeding the wild animals and in the long run, they became dependent on public’s visits for food and food web may be affected. Other impacts may be poaching, scaring species away from their natural habitat or causing animals to become immune to human beings. Hence, urban parks have been incorporated in people’s neighbourhood. Nature reserve parks, such as those found in Singapore, include trails for people to trek while learning more about how is it like in a tropical forests. People also do go to parks as an alternative to relax and carry out recreational activities. On the other hand, wilderness camps and excursions to national parks and wildlife centres is another method of educating people on the benefits of nature. It is a method that is gaining popularity, despite the high cost, as such eco-tourism gets people psychologically and physically involved in the wild.
(Photo Credits – Education: http://flighered.com/2012/01/13/maybe-the-time-is-not-now-to-go-into-education/ )
(Photo Credits – Park: http://leonefabre.blogspot.com/2011/10/jusr-few-of-parks-in-singapore-to.html)