Wetlands from a Psychological Perspective: Acknowledging and Benefiting from Multiple Realities

Abstract

Information sharing is a necessity among collaborating team members as well as with many constituencies. It is easy to take it for granted, until it fails to work well. The chapter is largely devoted to what leads to more effective and less frustrating information sharing. Rather than a long list of do’s and don’ts—which are not a very effective way to share information—we use a simple framework that makes it easier to think about the issues. The same framework turns out to be useful for discussing the role that wetlands play in the urban context. For the most part urban residents have little understanding of the experts’ criteria for successful wetlands efforts. To them the wetland is “nature” and nature matters. The chapter thus also includes discussion of the importance of nature to the human consumers of the wetland project. The framework that brings all this together, the Reasonable Person Model (RPM), focuses on how environments or situations people find themselves in can be more supportive of their effectiveness and reasonableness.