Human-Nature Relationships and Religious Views in Indonesia

How people view their relationship with nature plays an important role in public support for environmental conservation. We conducted a large-scale survey to measure human-nature relationships in Indonesia, using the Human and Nature (HaN) Scale, which has been used in different countries for the past two decades. Considering the important role religions play in Indonesian lives, we were specifically interested in looking at how religions influence people's perceptions of human-nature relationships, which so far has not been explored sufficiently in other research that used the HaN scale. The results reveal the predominance of an ecocentric stewardship vision of the human relationship with nature, which comes in two distinctive but overlapping variants, a religious and a humanistic one. Moreover, we found different images of God/divinity associated with different types of human-nature relationships. Conservation policy communication in Indonesia can build on the widely shared notion of ecocentric stewardship.