CESCO, French National Museum of Natural History, CNRS

Despite regular calls from scientists, the urgency of the environmental crisis still remains difficult for individuals and populations to grasp. In this sense, transformative changes are needed to rethink the way people interact with each other and with their environment. In this context, we explored the memories that people carry of their nature experiences, i.e. experiences of interacting with nature that arouse emotional, physical, spiritual or intellectual engagement. More specifically, we explored how these memories can generate interest in environmental change in Dakar, capital of Senegal with a growing urbanization, and in Ferlo, a rural Senegalese region inhabited mainly by Fulani cattle herders. We used a mixed methodology with a qualitative approach conducting 42 semi- structured interviews in Dakar and 40 in the Ferlo, and a quantitative approach conducting 600 surveys in Dakar and 300 in the Ferlo. In both study areas, respondents perceived and understood environmental changes thanks to their memories of nature experiences. Moreover, some respondents expressed a nostalgia for their familiar environment due to the environmental degradation they perceived, called solastalgia. In particular, respondents in the Ferlo remembered their past environment as a lifeworld that appealed to the imagination of the pastoral Fulani society: respondents were nostalgic for a past that allowed them to derive material benefits from their environment, but also to interact with that environment and with species that have now disappeared. Respondents missed these interactions because they attached intrinsic and symbolic values to them. Solastalgia could be mobilized to create a desire to fight against environmental change, as in both study areas, solastalgia was the main variable explaining environmental preoccupation. However, using solastalgia as an argument to fight against environmental change requires strengthening the capabilities of populations who may sometimes feel powerless in the face of change. This was the case in Dakar, where nature experiences derived more from individual experiences than in the Ferlo, and where the respondents felt that they were suffering from urbanization, overexploitation of resources and pollution. In both study areas, environmental and social changes lead to a transformation of nature experiences: these experiences were less direct in favor of more indirect experiences, they implied more urbanized spaces at the expense of more natural spaces, and their modes of transmission were evolving in favor of more numerical experiences. These results thus lead to a reflection on the consequences for the interest given to environmental changes: we conclude by encouraging new relationships with nature that go beyond the narratives of the crisis of biocultural diversity following Elands et al. and take into account the transformation of nature experiences.