Up to now, politics and societies from all over the world have sought an economy that is built on the idea of continual growth to establish a wealthy future and achieve societal prosperity. At the same time, people have neglected to consider that the resulting environmental pollution is the largest cause of disease and death in the world today. Therefore, it appears sensible to ensure that people’s well-being and nature’s well-being is uncoupled from profit-orientated aims. To break the circle of continual growth and the decreasing well-being of humans and nature, individual sustainability traits that are able to foster a transition to sustainable development need to be explicitly identified. Today’s young people will presumably face an even more severe level of consequences resulting from continual growth, which will reach far into the future, thereby affecting the living environment of future generations even more drastically. Therefore, this dissertation aims to answer the question of how young people possess and profit from their sustainability traits in terms of well-being. This work approaches this question by empirically investigating different interrelations between environmental values, the perception of environments (including the perception of naturalness and the perception of aesthetics), environmental concern and well-being in the context of young people. The empirical section is divided into three parts that investigate the different relationships step by step. These three parts are based on three different quantitative questionnaire surveys of young people in Germany. In the first survey (N = 229; Mage = 13.27 years, SD = 2.37 years), the relation between secondary school students’ human-nature relationship as a sustainability trait and their well-being was investigated. Analyses showed that the sustainability trait of human-nature relationships was significantly related to young people’s age-dependent well-being through nature perception in terms of naturalness and aesthetics as well as through individual nature connection. Young people were shown to profit from nature as resource for their own well-being. A positive human-nature relationship could be described as an important requirement for people to achieve sustainable development. In a second inquiry, university students (N = 237; Mage = 22.12 years, SD = 3.09 years) with a focus on the interrelations of sustainability traits that showed relations to people’s well-being in past research were surveyed. The results describe the interrelations between the specified sustainability traits of environmental values, a newly developed scale that theoretically and empirically validated affective nature connection, cognitive nature connection, and environmental concern. The findings indicate that the chosen sustainability traits mutually contribute to each other’s impact and do not preclude each other. Future research based on the results of the two described studies will likely show that sustainability traits are desirable characteristics and useful attributes that are available all over the world, no matter what a person’s age. As a final step, secondary school students’ environmental concern and well-being were quantitatively surveyed (N = 2173; Mage = 14.56 years, SD = 1.45 years) to analyze how environmental concern as a sustainability trait predicts young people’s well-being. The children’s and adolescents’ sustainability trait of environmental concern was able to predict young people’s well-being, with a clear dependence on age. The obtained outcomes supporting the aim to possess nature as a resource of well-being need to be considered in terms of young people’s age. Youth seem to experience sensitive periods of time in which the youth’s sustainability traits evidently act differently than in other stages of life. Hence it is important to point out that especially young people need age-appropriate treatment in terms of education for sustainable development to successfully foster young people’s sustainability traits. The main goal of this dissertation was to explore and identify in-depth insights into young people’s sustainability traits and their interrelations as well as the connections to young people’s well-being. As such interrelations between sustainability traits and well-being meet the aims of sustainable development as well as political and societal aims for a healthy future life environment for everyone which is expected of continual (economic) growth up to the present time, age-dependent education for sustainable development could address the need for young people to become progressive decision makers who create future-proof solutions for themselves and others, considering the constitution of a worthy life for present and future generations.

Cette étude sociologique porte sur la Municipalité régionale de comté (MRC) Antoine-Labelle dans la région des Hautes-Laurentides au Québec. Historiquement, depuis le début des années 1900, la forêt a constitué la principale assise économique et sociale de la MRC. Depuis 2005, « la crise forestière » frappe durement cette région québécoise. Un mouvement de la transition s’est installé au sein de la communauté régionale. À l’intersection de la nature et de la culture, le terroir se présente depuis lors comme l’une des voies privilégiées de la résilience. À travers le terroir, c’est le « vivre de » et le « bien vivre ensemble » que les habitants cherchent à repenser dans leur région. Aujourd’hui, plusieurs initiatives mettant en valeur le terroir régional, notamment des projets d’agriculture biologique, sont repérables à l’ensemble du territoire des Hautes-Laurentides. Plus qu’une simple ouverture économique, le terroir est porteur de nouveaux récits sociaux et symboliques dans la région. Dans ce mémoire de maîtrise, notre objectif est précisément de mettre en lumière les représentations sociales du terroir de certains acteurs du domaine agroalimentaire de la MRC Antoine-Labelle. Nous cherchons à comprendre comment le terroir se construit, se pense, se vit et se raconte dans cette région. En interrogeant dix-sept acteurs, notamment des agriculteurs, des artisans du domaine alimentaire, des chefs, des restaurateurs et des représentants de la gouvernance régionale, ceux-ci montrent que ce concept est porteur de valeurs sociales et environnementales qui répondent à de nouvelles aspirations au sein de la communauté. Non sans difficultés, le terroir renvoie pour les acteurs interrogés à des valeurs d’autonomie, de qualité de vie, de convivialité, de conscience écologique, d’éducation et d’espoir pour la relève à venir. Cette étude sociologique du terroir dans les Hautes-Laurentides jette finalement un éclairage nouveau sur le bien-vivre en région rurale au Québec. / This sociological study is about the Regional County Municipality (RCM) of Antoine-Labelle in the Hautes-Laurentides region of Quebec. Since the early 1900s, the forest has been the main economic and social base of the MRC. Since 2005, "the forestry crisis" has heavily affected this region of Quebec. A transition movement has emerged within the regional community. At the intersection of nature and culture, the terroir has appeared as one of the preferred pathways toward resilience. Through the terroir, it’s the ideas of "living" and "living together" that inhabitants are sinking to rethink in their region. Today, several initiatives which highlight the regional terroir, including organic farming projects, have emerged throughout the territory of the Hautes-Laurentides. More than just an economic opportunity, the terroir brings with it new social and symbolic narratives in the region. In this master thesis, our goal is precisely to highlight the social representations of the terroir of some actors in this field of activity in the Antoine-Labelle RCM. We seek to understand how the terroir is constructed, conceptualized, lived and told in this region. By interviewing seventeen actors, including farmers, artisans, chefs and representatives of regional governance, we show that this concept carries social and environmental values that express new aspirations within the community. For the actors interviewed and not without its challenges, the terroir refers to values such as autonomy, quality of life, friendliness, environmental awareness, education and hope for the next generation. This sociological study of the terroir in the Hautes-Laurentides sheds new light on what is meant by “living well” in rural Quebec.

The thesis is about environmental values that we encounter in our everyday life. The thesis also talks about environmental justice dialogues and tensions that play in Bangladesh. The thesis, in the first place, explores how an environmental planning and resource management approach causes a particular type of environmental injustice; i.e., non-recognition of access to the decision making process of local ethnic communities, which identifies them as adivasi meaning indigenous, poses a threat to their livelihood and culture, and obstructs the process of environmental protection in Bangladesh. / The existing theories of environmental justice and four case studies conducted in Bangladesh have been used to interrogate the research findings. I argue, along with Low and Gleeson (1998) that for environmental justice, recognition of environmental needs for every entity as an ingredient of human dignity should be basis of the planning process. The research findings also suggest that , at all levels of decisions, fair access to decision, information and justice for all entities should be an integral part of environmental planning and resource management. / The thesis explores avenues for fair access to justice, meaning redress and remedy of environmental injustice, in the context of Bangladesh. I argue that capillaries of justice such as Salish, a process and institution for public interest negotiation (PIN) embedded in Bangladesh culture, can be reinvented. In addition, access to information should be a prerequisite for meaningful deliberation at all levels of decision making and dispute resolving processes.