It is always interesting to know a bit about the path that leads people to pursue a specific field of study. You completed a Master of Science degree in the Field Naturalist Program at UVM. This program crosses several disciplines to impart the knowledge and skills needed to understand natural landscapes and to be effective in preserving them by means of problem-solving and communication. You're particularly interested in ecosystems, biodiversity, and people's relationship with nature. What interests or events in your background led you to this field and where you are today?

Eric Hagen: As a kid in Wisconsin, my favorite things to do were wander through the woods and pour over library books about wildlife. I dreamt of being one of those biologists who lives in the canopy of a tropical rainforest studying the bugs, birds, and other creatures that live in that mysterious realm. But then as a teenager and college student I lost interest in being a naturalist and became more interested in agriculture. After my bachelor’s degree, I worked on a diversified livestock farm in western Massachusetts milking cows, driving tractors, and taking care of pigs, cattle, and laying hens. I also spent a couple years in construction, working as a carpenter. During those times I learned a new understanding and love for the cycles of life and death that support our human lives, as well as how I fit into those cycles in a tangible way.  After a few years of planning to have my own farm operation, I noticed that my heart wasn’t in it in the way that I once thought. Once again, I felt the old call to better understand and work more closely with the ecological processes of the Earth. I emailed a professor of mine from undergrad, and she had one recommendation for me: the Field Naturalist Program at UVM.

To explain my interest in biodiversity and human-nature relationships specifically, I see humanity as a small and amazing piece of the greater whole of nature, and nature as a beautifully complex system of cycling physical matter and energy (poured in from the Sun) organized differently in each moment as living creatures, water, geology, and atmosphere. Biodiversity is the closest scientifically measurable approximation of the health of these systems that I have found. Through my graduate studies I learned that in many ways we have the scientific knowledge to support and renew biodiversity, but what we are lacking is the political and cultural will. So this is how, as a physical scientist, I found myself interested in understanding how people experience the importance of nature, and how this sense of nature’s value can be strengthened. I think a major pathway for this is through relationships and stories that simultaneously build an intellectual understanding of what nature is and how it works, and an emotional understanding of its importance. Looking back, I think some of the disillusionment I felt with being a naturalist as a young adult came from seeing nature as discrete from people, and as such I saw environmentalism as simply the pursuit of a hobby under the guise of altruism. Now I strongly feel that at their best, the goals of ecological health and human wellbeing are in alignment, and I’m more comfortable being one small part of complex cultural and political changes moving towards a better world.

Conserving biodiversity is important for a number of reasons. Would you mind outlining some of those reasons for our readers?

Eric Hagen: Some scholars of environmental valuation like to organize the importance of biodiversity into three categories. First, many people believe that biodiversity, as a proxy for nature, is important in its own right, that it has nothing to do with humans. This is called the intrinsic value of nature. Second, it is also undoubtedly true that biodiversity is important because of what it provides for people in terms of resources and services. The natural world is responsible for producing oxygen, stabilizing atmospheric carbon, reducing erosion and flooding during heavy rains, keeping the Earth’s surface cooler, producing building materials, and providing food and fuel. This type of value is called the instrumental value and is often represented in dollars and treated as substitutable. In most construction, for example, a 2x4 is a 2x4, it doesn’t matter which forest produced it, only how much it costs. Conventionally, these two categories are where the discussion of the value of biodiversity and nature usually stops, but there’s a third category that I find to be really important: the relational value of nature. Relational values with nature describe the value created through our relationships with nature, where the value cannot be fully substituted. This type of value describes the love people have for a place, or the role that certain species, ecosystems, or landforms play in maintaining a personal identity or group culture. Relational values is a broad category meant to describe the emergent values that come from the way people live with and relate to the natural world, and I think it’s an important category to include because it prompts us to consider the diverse ways that people find value in their relationships with nature that can’t be ascribed a dollar value.

In an interview you mentioned the work that the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department has done to aid in Vermont's conservation efforts, including the Vermont Conservation Design. In what types of practical ways can the guidance and the maps be used by laypeople?

Eric Hagen: One of the most practical uses of Vermont Conservation Design is to use it to influence town zoning and conservation planning. Vermont Conservation Design is a combination of maps and land use guidance, and it tells us where the most important places are in Vermont for biodiversity and what types of land-uses are compatible with healthy ecosystems in those places. We need to take this overarching framework down to the town level where the community can decide how to develop in a way that is compatible with their local needs and with biodiversity. So, I really encourage people to join town meetings, talk to their selectboard, or, better yet, join their selectboard in order to incorporate Vermont Conservation Design into local planning.

How is Vermont doing in its efforts to conserve natural habitats in general and biodiversity in particular?

Eric Hagen: This is a tricky question, because I think it completely depends at which scale you’re considering this question from. If you just look at nature within the borders of Vermont, we are doing a pretty good job compared to most places in the U.S. This past month I drove from Vancouver, Canada, through the Midwest to Vermont, and I saw so many cornfields that used to be biodiverse prairies and forests. Here in Vermont, we’re doing pretty well because our land is harder to farm, so it was abandoned and allowed to regrow into forests again. That being said, forest cover in Vermont is starting to recede again through development pressures, and there is a lot to be done to take all of the knowledge we have regarding how to protect biodiversity and implement it so that future development is strategically located in order to maintain the biodiversity we currently have.

I really believe, however, that we need to start looking beyond our borders in order to understand how we are affecting natural habitats and biodiversity. I’d have to do some literature review to get the numbers, but I am confident saying that Vermont imports more food, energy, and resources than it produces, and this means that we are dependent on resource extraction in other parts of the world. Oil isn’t being extracted from and spilled into the Niger Delta on behalf of the needs of people local to that area, it’s being extracted to support our car dependent lifestyles, airplane trips, and military. We build with timbers taken out of the forests of the Pacific Northwest and South America, our beef and pork is fed from cornfields that used to support tallgrass prairies and bison, our salmon comes from dwindling wild stocks or salmon farms that pump out disease and pollution. A similar story can be told for all of our commodities. On the whole, climate change is racing forward, and biodiversity is plummeting because of the resource intensive lifestyles we lead and the infrastructure we depend on. Under our current conditions we don’t have the luxury of seeing biodiversity as an apolitical issue, and we need to somehow work together to make better collective choices. One great thing about Vermont is that many people understand these connections and are working to try to make things better.

Do you really think the small efforts that states and individuals are making in their own environments can make a difference in the grand scheme of things? The scale of the climate problem seems so daunting…

Eric Hagen: It is incredibly daunting, but I don’t think we have any choice but to try. I used to be frozen by the immensity of climate change and biodiversity loss—incapable of imagining any real solutions that I could contribute to. But I think this is actually a form of arrogance. I don’t think any of us can hold the immensity of the changes that need to occur in our imaginations, and we will undoubtedly have to depend on the choices and insights of people we will never meet or influence. I think our job is to try, to take responsibility for what we are capable of understanding and changing and trusting in larger societal and natural dynamics that will always be beyond our comprehension. And if we do our best, and we’re lucky, this will lead to opportunities where larger scale change is possible.

I really think that global change and hyper-local change are interdependent and need to happen at the same time. On a personal note, I also feel that my emotional wellbeing is dependent on building good tangible relationships with the people, resources, creatures, and ecosystems that directly touch my life, and I become exhausted and ungrounded when I let go of this intention and attention. Taking care of myself by taking care of the relationships around me helps give me the energy and passion to engage with larger scale issues.

The book that you co-edited with Curt Lindberg, Our Better Nature: Hopeful Excursions in Saving Biodiversity, intertwines information about the "who, whys, and hows" of biodiversity conservation in Vermont and beyond with essays and on-the-ground stories of what ordinary Vermonters are doing to help promote biodiversity. I feel like, much in the style of Rachel Carson, you wanted to make the content of the book appealing to readers who might not be initially inclined to read a book about these issues. Is that so? If so, would you elaborate a bit on the goals of the book?

Eric Hagen: That is absolutely the case. It may have been overly ambitious, but we were really hoping to do three major things with the book. We were hoping that the book would be able to draw people in who aren’t inclined to think much about biodiversity and give them that magic spark that lights off a passion for understanding and caring for nature. At the same time, we wanted to create a framework for people who already care to take their passion and turn it into meaningful action. Our plan for this was to showcase to people the successful programs and strategies that we have here in Vermont and give them the inspiration to take these successes to their own communities. For Vermonters this looks like very clear instructions for action that will work within our Vermont context, and for people outside of Vermont we’re hoping that our stories will act as a case study that prompts ideas appropriate for other contexts.

Two of the essays in the book describe educational approaches to expanding Vermonter’s understanding of biodiversity. It seems that efforts in primary and secondary education must figure prominently in conservation efforts. This makes sense. UVM recently launched the Education for Sustainability Certificate of Graduate Study "to accelerate transformative societal response to the interconnected environmental, social, and economic challenges of our time…." Would you like to expand on the importance of such efforts and highlight any that may not be well-known?

Eric Hagen: What is politically and culturally possible today is not good enough to halt and reverse the ecological crises of our time. And so while we need to do everything within our power in the present to transform our societal response to environmental, social, and economic challenges, we also need to transform what is possible in the decades to come. This is the critical role that education plays. In order to change, a person needs to be able to see and understand the problem, and also care, and this is what a naturalist education can give. Done well, I also think a naturalist education can give people a sense of belonging and kinship within the world, a sense of interdependence between all beings, and also be a means for building trust and community among humans.

For many, the COVID 19 pandemic reconnected them to the healing aspects of nature. The news was filled with stories of the pleasure that people were taking in watching birds out their windows, gardening for the first time in whatever space they could, and breathing cleaner air due to reduced traffic. So, I don't think it will be a surprise for people to read in Tom Butler's essay  that, "our bodies and minds are attuned to wild nature…stress hormone levels show it. The direct, measurable, physiological effects in the human body of time spent in natural settings as well as psychological benefits are the focus of a fascinating and growing body of research."  Knowing that not everyone aspires to hike Mt. Mansfield, it seems that your book wants to show that people from all backgrounds and interests can both benefit from the effects of being in nature, wherever that is, and contribute to conserving biodiversity, at whatever scale they can. Is this so?  Would you elaborate on this idea?

Eric Hagen: This is absolutely correct. This approach might not be for everyone, but I think it’s important for people to see relationships with nature as analogous to relationships with people. Caring and supportive relationships with people are good for our health and wellbeing, and I think this can be true with nature as well.  We lay out in the book how exposure to nature provides evidence-based medical benefits such as improved cognitive and motor development; lower risk of psychiatric disorders; decreased stress, anxiety and depression; and general improved happiness and life satisfaction. And I think just like relationships to your friends or family, there’s no effort that’s too small, and no ending point in our journeys to getting to know and grow interdependently with the lives and places around us. I think the point is to start, to hold the intention to keep learning and paying attention, to seek ways to give back, and to see where the journey takes us. And though these efforts may seem insignificant compared to the immensity of climate change and global biodiversity loss, I think they are the emotional foundation and fuel for larger action.

Eric Hagen, M.S., is a 2020 UVM graduate of the Plant Biology Department's Field Naturalist Master's Program. He is currently working as a habitat ecologist in British Columbia. Eric is interested in biodiversity, ecosystems, and people's relationship with nature.