Insect conservation psychology

People seek connectedness with nature, as evidenced by 8billion people per year visiting terrestrial parks alone. Yet the challenge is for people to appreciate and care for nature, including insects, on which we so crucially depend for so many services. Current environmental policy is often a dichotomy of mutually exclusive opposites: instrumental valuation vs. intrinsic valuation. This unhelpful division can be overcome by valuing nature through appreciation of spatial extent (local to global) relative to biological level (gene through population and species, to ecosystem) and understanding that human well-being is a two-way process of caring for nature nature providing a well-being platform for us. However, human relationships with nature are complex, as they are with insects too. The human brain is not well equipped to deal with topics that are complex, seemingly far away in space and time, and are nebulous. These topics beget inaction by the public at large on, for example, global change. Neither are we well equipped to value insects, despite scientific understanding of their importance to our well-being. However, we are at least rising to the pollination crisis, as we can relate to the tangible bee and our food security. To improve insect conservation awareness and action, we need to engage insect conservation psychology. Citizen science and Red Listing are playing major roles here, as is the camera, which magnifies and makes insects more meaningful to us. Using insect conservation psychology, we are better able to instill a culture of personal and social responsibility, and so create political will to drive insect conservation from paper to action.