Sustainable Alaska: Lessons from Alaska

How nature experiences can inspire action

Forest bathing walks guided participants through sensory immersion in local natural settings. (Photo by Melissa Dolese)

By Melissa Dolese

Despite widespread awareness of global environmental challenges, information and data alone rarely catalyze meaningful behavioral change. Even when concern is high, a "psychological distance" often persists between daily life and the implications of behavior, suggesting that intellectual knowledge is insufficient to inspire stewardship. 

Research indicates that humans possess an innate affinity for life, a phenomenon known as biophilia. Disconnection from the natural world not only impacts individual well-being—contributing to apathy or inaction—but also diminishes the "relational closeness" required for environmental advocacy. Conversely, nature connectedness is associated with increased vitality, mindfulness, and compassion. Fundamentally, pro-environmental actions are prosocial: they benefit both human communities and the more-than-human world on which we depend. 

Because data alone rarely closes the gap between concern and action, psychological research suggests that emotional, embodied, and social experiences—often called "peripheral routes" to attitude change—are essential. Experiences that engage the senses, imagination, and social bonds can cultivate motivation in ways that facts alone may not. 

At the University of Alaska Southeast, we tested this idea during Earth Day 2023 with three participatory experiences designed to reduce psychological distance from nature: 

Reflective workshops invited participants to write personal climate stories, imagining the future of threatened ecosystems and reflecting on their feelings, values, and motivations to act. This approach engages temporal distance—thinking about the future—and strengthens relational closeness. 

Story-sharing circles encouraged communal reflection, connecting participants with each other and with the broader ecological world. By situating individuals within a social and ecological community, these circles reduce social distance and foster prosocial engagement. 

Forest bathing walks guided participants through sensory immersion in local natural settings. These walks fostered awe, mindfulness, and embodied awareness, reducing spatial distance and deepening the felt connection to the more-than-human world.  

Across all three interventions, participants reported heightened feelings of connection to nature and stronger environmental attitudes. Simply put, feeling close to the natural world influenced how they thought about using and protecting it. Reducing relational distance—psychologically bridging the gap between self and nature—emerged as a central mechanism in motivating both reflection and action. 

While Alaskans may already feel a strong connection to the environment, these findings carry lessons for the Lower 48 and other regions where urbanization, daily pressures, and social isolation can make environmental issues feel distant or abstract. By designing experiences that cultivate relational closeness, communities can translate concern into meaningful engagement and stewardship. Pro-environmental behavior becomes a prosocial orientation: caring for nature is inseparable from caring for other humans and the ecosystems we collectively rely on. 

The University of Alaska Southeast will hold its Earth Day Everyday event series again this year. (Logo from University of Alaska Southeast)

Alaska’s landscapes—its forests, glaciers, and oceans—offer fertile ground for cultivating these connections. Even brief, thoughtfully structured experiences—whether reflective, communal, or immersive—can strengthen relational closeness, enhance environmental identity, and reduce utilitarian attitudes toward resource use. By nurturing these connections, we equip individuals and communities to respond more effectively, ethically, and collaboratively to ecological change, not just here in Alaska, but wherever people seek to bridge the gap between care and action. 

Please join the UAS Sustainability Committee this coming April, for a series of participatory events aimed at fostering this relational closeness to nature. Events will be posted on UAS Connect.  

• Melissa Dolese is an assistant professor of psychology in the Department of Social Sciences on the Áak’w Kwáan campus at the University of Alaska Southeast. Sustainable Alaska is a regular feature by the University of Alaska Southeast Sustainability Committee. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Alaska Southeast.