Place attachment and flood preparedness

Does place attachment and the consequent emotional connections and ties that people have with environments affect their preparedness for natural disasters, such as floods? This study took up this research question for the understudied geographical region of Orissa, India. In particular, investigation focused on three kinds of place attachment, viz. economic, genealogical, and religious. Contextualized scales for place attachment and flood preparedness were developed for a survey. Data were collected from 300 residents in flood prone areas. Validity and reliability of the scales were established. Overall, place attachment was found to significantly influence flood preparedness. Hierarchical regression analysis was performed to determine whether the three factors of place attachment influence flood preparedness. Controlling for confounding effects of age and family type, regression analysis revealed that people having genealogical and economic place attachment prepared for floods, but those with religious place attachment did not prepare for floods. The implications of these findings for future studies are described.     

An empirical study on the public perception and acceptance of hydrogen energy in Taiwan

In this study, we extract factors by using factor analysis and then adopt them in a regression analysis to investigate the public perception and acceptance of hydrogen energy in Taiwan. Six reliable factors were extracted from the exploratory factor analysis of 29 5-point Likert-type items. Our regression results show that the public perception of hydrogen energy as a green energy, public belief in domestic hydrogen industries being able to conform to international safety standards, and public perception of the cost advantage of hydrogen gas over petroleum have significantly positive effects on support for the development of hydrogen energy in Taiwan. While people have a high level of concern about the safety of hydrogen and its associated technologies, the unsafe perceptions of hydrogen and its associated technologies have no significant effects on their support. In particular, public belief in domestic hydrogen industries being able to conform to international safety standards is a powerful factor that enhances support for hydrogen energy development.     

Place attachment and public acceptance of renewable energy: A tidal energy case study

Efforts by many governments to mitigate climate change by increasing deployment of renewable energy technologies have raised the importance of issues of public acceptance. The ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Backyard) concept, although popular, has been critiqued as an appropriate and valid way to explain local opposition. This study applies an alternative approach, empirically investigating the role of place attachment and place-related symbolic meanings in explaining public responses to a tidal energy converter in Northern Ireland, said to be the first grid-connected device of its kind in the world. 271 residents in two nearby villages completed questionnaire surveys, three months post-installation, following up preliminary qualitative research using focus groups. Although results indicated predominantly positive and supportive responses to the project, manifest by emotional responses and levels of acceptance, significant differences between residents in each village were also observed. Contrasting patterns of association between place attachment and emotional responses suggest that the project enhanced rather than disrupted place attachments only in one of the two villages. In regression analyses, place attachment emerged as a significant, positive predictor of project acceptance in both places, affirming its value in explaining public response. Place-related symbolic meanings also emerged as significant, with contrasting sets of meanings proving significant in each context. Implications of the findings for research on place attachment and responses to land-use changes, as well as for developers seeking to engage with residents affected by energy projects are discussed.     

Place attachment,place identity,and place memory: Restoring the forgotten city past

This paper investigates collective memory in inhabitants of two twin cities, Lviv (Ukraine, previously Lwów, Poland) and Wroc?aw (Poland, previously Breslau, Germany). Due to territorial changes in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II, the two cities changed their state belonging and—consequently—their populations. This study focused on memory of residence place and on its relationship with place identity and place attachment.     

Place attachment and place identity in natives and non-natives

Place attachment is an affective bond that people establish with specific areas where they prefer to remain and where they feel comfortable and safe. Place identity, however, has been defined as a component of personal identity, a process by which, through interaction with places, people describe themselves in terms of belonging to a specific place. Most research has observed positive correlations between these variables in populations that have maintained ongoing interactions over long periods of time. This work presents two studies in which we compare place attachment to place identity in samples differentiated according to birthplace and length of residence, and the magnitude of these bonds to different places. The results of the first study revealed differences between intensity of attachment and identity depending on place of origin and place assessed. The second study found that identity and attachment tend to coincide in natives, while individuals from other places give higher scores for attachment than for identity. Results from the two studies have enabled us to consider that place attachment develops before place identity, at least in the case of the non-natives. Both studies reveal that bonds are stronger with the city than with the neighbourhood, but that attachment and identity with the island are stronger than either of them.     

Place attachment and place identity: First-year undergraduates making the transition from home to university

This paper examines the issues emanating from the transition into a new social and cultural environment distant from the home, the context of which is provided by the transition from home to university. The study analyses the transitional process over a period of 5 months, using data obtained from in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observation of ten first-year undergraduates who moved to study at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. It explores the mediating variables that impact place attachment and place identity during the transition from home to university. Within this context consideration is given to how participants made sense of changes in their socio-spatial environment, the ensuing problems and challenges of doing so, and how these meanings affected self-perceptions and self-evaluations. The analysis demonstrates how participant's stories of the transition evince an abiding concern with the loss of place, manifest in terms of an erosion of a sense of belonging, attachment and continuity and an undermining of home's capacity to symbolise the self. The implications of such accounts for our understanding of place attachment and identity are then explored. The paper concludes by advocating a holistic approach to our conceptualisation of place, given that place meanings are constantly being evaluated and redefined in light of changing social and physical relationships with place and between people and place.     

Efficient management of marine resources in conflict: An empirical study of marine sand mining, Korea

This article develops a dynamic model of efficient use of exhaustible marine sand resources in the context of marine mining externalities. The classical Hotelling extraction model is applied to sand mining in Ongjin, Korea and extended to include the estimated marginal external costs that mining imposes on marine fisheries. The socially efficient sand extraction plan is compared with the extraction paths suggested by scientific research. If marginal environmental costs are correctly estimated, the developed efficient extraction plan considering the resource rent may increase the social welfare and reduce the conflicts among the marine sand resource users. The empirical results are interpreted with an emphasis on guidelines for coastal resource management policy.     

Environmental perception: An odyssey of ideas

Convergent interests paved the way for multidisciplinary research in environmental perception and behavior, in which the Clark Group was an important focus. For me that fruitful conjunction began in the mid-1960s, when I taught at Clark and had just embarked on a large-scale assessment of observer responses to urban milieus. Through the early 1970s the Clark Group helped to catalyze perception insights generally and to guide my own work. Emigration to Britain in 1972 distanced me from that ambience and style of inquiry, but the Clark experience continues to inform by perceptual excursions into images of the past.Specific memories of Clark merge with general judgements about the fortunes of environmental perception research. By the early 1970s it was already clear that various drains on scanty human resources in this new field left insufficient concerted attention for theory and synthesis. The 15 years since have seen little fundamental progress. Much research seems narrow in scope, lifeless in tone, and trivial in its conclusions. Exciting advances can be found along a number of peripheries, but the centre seems devoid of spirit.     

Conflict and engagement: An empirical study of a farmer-extension partnership in a sustainable agriculture program

Stakeholder engagement is a crucial concept of extension education. Engagement expresses democratic values of the land-grant mission by providing opportunities for stakeholders to influence program planning, including setting the agenda and negotiating resource allocations. In practice, the concept of engagement guides the formation of partnerships among extension, communities, industry, and government. In the area of sustainable agriculture, however, stakeholders may conflict, presenting challenges to the engagement process. Results from a study of a Canadian sustainable agriculture program, produced using cultural anthropology and participatory action research, detail challenges of the engagement process that led to reconstruction of a farmer-extension partnership. Notable in the early phase of the reconstruction process were critical reflection, stakeholder forums, exclusion through caucusing, and coalition building. An argument for a neopragmatist view provides a theoretical basis for understanding counterintuitive dimensions of engagement revealed by the study.     

Jobs and the environment: An overview

This paper provides an overview of economic research on the relationship between environmental protection and employment. The paper addresses, first, the impact of existing regulation on overall employment rates, shutdowns and layoffs, and regulation-induced capital flight from developed countries. Second, the paper provides a framework for evaluating claims that, over the longer run, environmental protection measures will boost overall employment and provide the foundation for a robust, sustainable economy.     

A comparative analysis of predictors of sense of place dimensions: attachment to, dependence on, and identification with lakeshore properties

Sense of place can be conceived as a multidimensional construct representing beliefs, emotions and behavioural commitments concerning a particular geographic setting. This view, grounded in attitude theory, can better reveal complex relationships between the experience of a place and attributes of that place than approaches that do not differentiate cognitive, affective and conative domains. Shoreline property owners (N=290) in northern Wisconsin were surveyed about their sense of place for their lakeshore properties. A predictive model comprising owners' age, length of ownership, participation in recreational activities, days spent on the property, extent of property development, and perceptions of environmental features, was employed to explain the variation in dimensions of sense of place. In general, the results supported a multidimensional approach to sense of place in a context where there were moderate to high correlations among the three place dimensions. Perceptions of environmental features were the biggest predictors of place dimensions, with owners' perceptions of lake importance varying in explanatory power across place dimensions.     

An empirical analysis of productivity: Welsh coal industry

A non-homogeneous variable-elasticity-of-substitution production function is estimated using data for the Welsh coal industry. From 1961 to 1976 output declined, returns to scale increased and the elasticity of substitution fell. At the end of the period, the elasticity of substitution between capital and labour in the coal industry is still large and there may be room for greater employment in the industry at a time of high and rising unemployment, subject to other overall considerations. While marginal productivity of labour in physical terms has been stagnant, price rises in the industry in recent years have been in excess of what was needed to finance wage settlements. Perhaps price rises granted to the coal industry by the UK government were justified, but they require closer scrutiny.     

Of Bodies, Place, and Culture: Re-Situating Local Food

In the US, an increasingly popular local food movement is propelled along by structural arguments that highlight the inequity and unsustainablity of the current agri-food system and by individually based arguments that highlight personal health and well-being. Despite clear differences in their foci, the deeper values contained in each argument tend to be neglected or lost, while local innovations assume instrumental and largely market-based forms. By narrowing their focus to the rational and the economic, movement activists tend to overlook (or marginalize) the role of the sensual, the emotional, the expressive for maintaining layered sets of embodied relationships to food and to place. This paper seeks to show that cultural and nonrational elements are fundamental to local food discussions. It proceeds from the assumption that, without them as full partners, the movement cannot be sustained in any felt, practiced, or committed way. To this end, it discusses the concept of place and bodies in place, as well as the connections between the ecological and the cultural, the sensual and the scientific. It offers a new set of questions and conceptual tools with which advocates and activists may “ground,” and thereby revalue and restore, the promise and practice of local food.     

Environmental perceptions of Irish and Bavarian pupils: an empirical study

The present study deals with the evaluation of environmental/ecological perceptions of secondary school pupils. It has two major objectives. Firstly, to administer a measurement instrument to explore ecological/environmental perceptions for a sample of approximately 900 Irish secondary school pupils aged between 12 and 16 years. The operation and use of three subscales, environmental behaviour, utilization of nature and consideration for conservation, was based on a previous study undertaken in Bavaria, but its structure, dimensionality and reliability was further assessed using psychometric procedures. Secondly, the study monitored the differences in these dimensions between Irish and Bavarian pupils. Common items within the subscale structure were selected from both samples to form a truncated item selection and to function subsequently as the basis for the final factor analysis applied to the combined Irish–Bavarian sample. Comparisons on this basis indicated substantial differences in attitudes and environmental behaviour between pupils from both regions: the Irish sample favoured less conservational values, but more patronage for the utilization of nature and it revealed less willingness to take and plan action in individual environmental behaviour. In addition, the Irish sample disclosed a significantly greater gender difference in the two subscales.     

Human Habitat,Space and Place

This article is a conceptual contribution on how to make human habitat more sustainable. Taking Heidegger’s conception of “dwelling” as a starting point, a new form of understanding the organization of the city as a human habitat is proposed. It is argued that human habitat is today in crisis and that such crisis has its roots in a spatial understanding of human dwelling, disregarding its temporal-historical dimension. For long time, the city has been considered as a physical “place” and its organization—the urban planning—has been addressed in terms of “locating” (building). Many of the challenges in organizing habitat are the result of reducing the organization of the city to the organization of physical space. One of these is the conflict between preservation and development, a central issue in approaching sustainability. The aim of this article is to propose a new perspective on the organization of human dwelling, which overcomes the spatial-based conception of habitat and involves its temporal dimension. The meaning of human “habitat” as a historical process for developing “habits” will be recovered, and the implications for organization of the city considered. Human habitat is above all an ethical space (ethos), constituted in a spatial–temporal process of developing learning and capabilities. This habitat can be shared and developed infinitely so that a pathway is opened for overcoming the logic of competition and the conflict between sustainability and development. Finally, three forms of the human habitat as an “ethical space” are proposed.     

An empirical study on the driving mechanism of proactive corporate environmental management in China

Environmentalism in China is under transformation from the traditional command and control model to emphasize the advantages of economic tools and encourage the participation of the public. Firms are much more aware of the importance of environmental issues, and some of them have practiced environmental activities beyond compliance. In order to help understand the driving mechanism of proactive corporate environmental behaviors from the firm’s perspective, this paper identifies the drivers affecting the proactive environmental management level (EML_p) based on the institutional theory, and gives an empirical study on the firms based in Changshu city of Jiangsu Province, China. The usable data, collected from the 117 valid respondents in a questionnaire survey, indicates that EML_p is still moderately low currently. Less than 10% of the samples are practicing all the six categorized types of voluntary environmental activities. The econometric exercise confirms a significantly positive effect of the externally mimetic pressure on EML_p, which may attribute to a higher sensitivity of Chinese companies to the market factors. However, the roles of the general public and industrial associations are not significant, showing the marginal power of selected normative pressures. Regarding internal factors, firms, which view environmental issues as opportunities and often arrange internal environmental training, are more likely to adopt proactive environmental activities. More concerns from the general public like neighborhood communities and mass media shall be addressed to enhance the normative power to improve EML_p in China from the future perspective.     

Theory of the physical environment: An introduction

This paper suggests a way of classifying human physical environment according to its location and function. Environmental science is viewed as a branch of ecology, and the concept of the complex ecosystem is introduced. By using differential equations, the author draws attention to four factors that must be considered when evaluating the effect of any environmental agent on a human subject: the agent's extensive quality of rate of flow, its intensive quality of concentration or intensity, duration of the subject's exposure, and the uniformity of agent's stress in space and time. The environmental agents, individually or in jointly acting groups, produce environmental stress, which acts on the subject to produce strain and its contingent symptoms. The microclimate in this setting can be classified according to the type of stress involved. The human physical environment may be evaluated in three ways: objectively, subjectively, and from the standpoint of regulations or standards. The benefit or advantage of using this equation in evaluating or measuring the human physical environment is discussed.     

Errant corporations, diffuse responsibilities, and the environment: ethical issues in the Orica case study

The papers in this volume deal with various aspects of the HCB legacy at the Orica plant at Botany. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they are concerned with questions of ethics; with the just distribution of burdens and benefits; with just processes for disposing of dangerous industrial waste; and with a just custodianship of the Botany environment. These ethical issues illustrate the difficulty of securing corporate accountability, and the elusiveness of responsibility within organisations. This paper reflects on some of the issues for ethics raised by the Orica case and their significance for corporate ethics.