Breaking the intergenerational cycle of extinction of experience: Actions needed and pathways forward

Description

Masashi Soga, Kevin J Gaston, and colleagues examine, in a 2026 perspective article, why people's everyday contact with nature keeps shrinking across generations. They call the pattern the extinction of experience. As environments degrade, each generation grows up with a thinner personal ecology of direct encounters with the natural world. Borrowing ideas from behavioural genetics, the authors ask how such impoverished experience gets passed down inside families and households.

Two reinforcing routes emerge. Children can inherit an already reduced ecology from their parents. Rich experience can also fail to transmit when surroundings remove the chance, motivation, or ability to engage with nature. Either way the loss compounds, deepening disconnection and making recovery harder. The authors argue the cycle can also run in reverse. Policy, urban planning, education, and public health can jointly support engagement. Decline then turns into a self-reinforcing recovery that serves both biodiversity and human well-being.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13312371