When nature has agency: Traditional worldviews and contemporary environmental conservation

This paper examines the extent to which traditional worldviews and mental models of the natural world are related to contemporary environmental attitudes, policy preferences, and outcomes. We extract information from a corpus of traditional folktales to study how nature – such as animals, insects, and plants – is portrayed across societies. Specifically, we construct ethnicity-level measures capturing how frequently natural entities appear in a group’s folktales. Using natural language processing, we also develop syntax-based measures of the extent to which nature is portrayed as possessing agency, distinguishing cases where nature serves as an acting subject from those where it appears as an object acted upon. Our analyses find that traditional depictions of nature, as reflected in folklore, tend to be associated with contemporary attitudes more supportive of the environment and with better contemporary environmental outcomes, namely, biodiversity, forest cover, and seasonal surface water presence. Although the estimates do not establish a causal relationship, they are consistent with traditional cultural values being one factor that influences conservation preferences and environmental outcomes today.