Since we founded OneNature last year, people have asked me, “why?” Why start a new organization when there are already so many great conservation organizations out there? Why focus on human well-being and wildlife conservation? Can OneNature add anything new to the conversation?
The fact is, animals and nature make people happy and improve our well-being. I have been researching this connection for the past decade. During this time, there has been an increasing body of research that shows that the connection with companion animals is important for many areas of our happiness and well-being. The compelling evidence on nature’s role in our well-being is growing as well. Adequate research on the interconnection of wildlife and people’s happiness and well-being is still lacking.
We know instinctively that we are connected. Healthy, intact wildlife keeps our ecosystems thriving and pollinators allow us to keep food on our plates. And wildlife have value beyond their large economic value to sectors like eco-tourism and their critical values to the ecosystem. Wildlife have equally important but intangible values like making us happier, contributing to mental and physical health, contributing to our spiritual and cultural practices, and, of course, they have intrinsic value.
But our current system is based not on what makes us happy and supports our thriving, but on increasing productivity in the global economy. Because of that, global policies promote actions that put us all at risk. COVID-19, a virus that was catalyzed by exploitation of wildlife, has shown what can happen when we don’t measure and promote what is really important, and instead exploit our planet and wildlife for short term gain. The priorities of our system have made people unhappy, created an extinction crisis, and a planetary climate shift that will make Earth uninhabitable if we don’t change direction.
We started OneNature because we believe that NOW is the time to devote our efforts to changing the system to promote well-being of people, animals, and the planet. There is a movement to shift our policies from an emphasis on short term economic growth to holistic human well-being. We believe that to include ALL beings in these policies, we must be able to demonstrate the value to wildlife to people and develop ways to include these values in our well-being measures. We must do this now, before wild animals are gone. We founded OneNature to address this gap in understanding the true values of wildlife and contribute to transformative change that allows us all to flourish.
We believe that one critical aspect to understanding wildlife values is to learn from and support communities living most closely with wildlife and stewarding wildlife on behalf of everybody in the planet. Many indigenous and traditional societies still have a deep connection with the wildlife around them, a result of a worldview in which all of life is connected and valued. To understand and support communities like these, we have worked with experts to develop a survey that links community well-being directly with conservation. We partner with conservation organizations who want to use the most complete well-being research to help people and wildlife flourish. What we learn allows us to better understand how people value wildlife in these communities, better support those communities, and understand how to incorporate these values in policies and in our own lives. It is not only possible, but it is necessary to create the world we all want.
That’s why we founded OneNature and why we pursue our work with excitement, passion, and dedication.