The natural environment has long served as a refuge. Historically, natural areas protected people and other species from physical dangers; they continue to play that role, and people have created specific refuges for species that are in danger of extinction. In modern times, more metaphorically, nature has inspired, comforted and provided an escape from the stresses of society. But in an era in which human activity has degraded the environment, its role as a refuge is more complicated. Many who care about the environment frame addressing environmental problems as a matter of individual responsibility—we must change our attitudes or our behavior (rather than changing the structures and systems that people operate within) in order to protect the environment and maintain it as a resource and a refuge. That is particularly compelling when human activity is the primary source of the threat the environment faces. The personalization of responses to environmental degradation can follow from its role as refuge: we owe nature our own personal care and sacrifice because of its importance to us.

This approach is understandable: perhaps we should be held responsible for protecting something that has served as a refuge and that our actions contribute to threaten. But this focus on individual responsibility may backfire, both because environmental problems are ultimately structural rather than individual and because framing an individual responsibility to protect transforms our relationship to the environment into something that exhausts rather than refreshes us. Instead, we need to work for structural change so that those of us who care about the environment can find refuge in it, safe in the assumption that systems around us are set up so that we can operate in ways to protect it while going about our daily lives. This chapter explores the relationship between the environment as a source of refuge and the responsibility to protect it. Ultimately, it argues that this responsibility is not individual but collective, and not about the behavioral decisions of people or groups, but about changing the structures within which those decisions take place. If we want the environment to be a refuge, it is up to us to act collectively to work to protect it in a systemic way.

What is a Refuge?

The concept of refuge differs across many fields.