Abstract

This study explores what is important to people about an urban stream in an attempt to determine whether they value stream health because they make a connection between it and their own health. Understanding what people value about urban streams is necessary if improvement to stream health is a desired goal because those values influence the decisions people make and the actions they take within a watershed. Perhaps one mechanism that could be used to encourage positive environmental actions, or improve stewardship, is to use a language that connects the individual directly to the health of the environment he/she lives in. Use of the concept health, which is borrowed from the field of medicine, has the potential to engage individuals to think about and determine the condition of the environment they live in, just as they set goals for the level of their own health. To determine what was important to people about the creek and whether they made a connection between their own health and that of the stream, the Conceptual Content Cognitive Map (3CM) method (Kearney and Kaplan, 1997), along with supplementary questions were used. This study focused on those who interacted with the creek, either by living on it or being involved at the community level in creek related activities. Health, and the connections that are associated with it, mean different things to people and include personal emphases, defined in this study as physical, mental, and abstract, and impersonal emphases defined as community and environmental. If the concept health is used as a mechanism to improve stewardship, the differences in how people understand health need to be recognized and incorporated into strategies to recruit and maintain their involvement.