Our environment's value seems to be diminishing due to a combination of human advancements and climate change, and people do not really seem to make an effort to care or feel badly about it. To understand why people do this, researchers decided to work together and run MRI brain scans to see how humans make and rank these environmental decisions. The two researchers, Nik Sawe and Brian Knutson, observed twenty people who were deciding whether or not to donate their money to national and state parks. They found that by showing their participants positive images of the environment people tended to feel happy and stimulate the part of the brain that associates with good memories. However, showing them pictures of damaged and destructed land and parks made the participants feel negative, which in turn stimulated the negative memories in their brain. The researchers predicted that they would be more likely to donate money after seeing the negative images. They then proposed that the people weren't basing their values off of the positive memories or aspects they had of a place, but instead on the anger they felt towards seeing a happy place being destroyed. Sawe and Knutson decided that when it comes to environmental decision making, people's emotions and the cost-benefit of a situation actually compete with one another. "'The value we derive from the natural world may be clearest only when that world is threatened,' Sawe said". This analysis shows that further steps can be taken in finding new ways to create smarter decisions.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/eco-brain-study-091115.html
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/eco-brain-study-091115.html