The role of place identity and place attachment in breaking environmental protection laws

Place identity and place attachment have been related to several environmental variables such as appropriation, residential satisfaction, physical care taken of the neighbourhood, restorativeness, environmental attitudes and, especially, pro-environmental behaviour. However, the role of place identity and place attachment has not been analyzed in relation to anti-ecological behaviours such as transgressions of environmental protection laws. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship of place identity, place attachment and environmental attitudes to the personal and social norms that explain the likelihood of illegal behaviours against the environment. The sample was composed of men and women, aged from 19 to 70 years, who were resident in rural, urban or tourist areas of a territory under high environmental protection. The strongest predictor of environmental transgression is personal norms, whereas place identity and place attachment have no direct relation with future transgression or personal norms. Place identity influences environmental attitudes and social norms, which are both antecedents of personal norms. The results led us to reconsider the efficacy of interventions aimed at encouraging compliance with environmental laws by only emphasizing individuals' bonds with the environment, and the need to extend the study of the role of personal and social norms in environmental protection.     

Community Perception of Water Quality in a Mining-Affected Area: A Case Study for the Certej Catchment in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania

Mining-contaminated sites and the affected communities at risk are important issues on the agenda of both researchers and policy makers, particularly in the former communist block countries in Eastern Europe. Integrated analyses and expert based assessments concerning mining affected areas are important in providing solid policy guidelines for environmental and social risk management and mitigation. Based on a survey for 103 households conducted in a former mining site in the Certej Catchment of the Apuseni Mountains, western Romania, this study assesses local communities’ perceptions on the quality of water in their living area. Logistic regression was used to examine peoples’ perception on the quality of the main river water and of the drinking water based on several predictors relating to social and economic conditions. The results from the perception analysis were then compared with the measurements of heavy metal contamination of the main river and drinking water undertaken in the same study area. The findings indicate that perception and measurement results for the water quality in the Certej Catchment are convergent, suggesting an obvious risk that mining activities pose on the surface water. However, the perception on drinking water quality was little predicted by the regression model and does not seem to be so much related to mining as to other explanatory factors, such as special mineralogy of rock and soils or improper water treatment infrastructure, facts suggested by the measurements of the contaminants. Discussion about the implications of these joint findings for risk mitigation policies completes this article.     

Situating Hazard Vulnerability: People’s Negotiations with Wildfire Environments in the U.S. Southwest

This article is based on a multimethod study designed to clarify influences on wildfire hazard vulnerability in Arizona’s White Mountains, USA. Findings reveal that multiple factors operating across scales generate socially unequal wildfire risks. At the household scale, conflicting environmental values, reliance on fire insurance and firefighting institutions, a lack of place dependency, and social vulnerability (e.g., a lack of financial, physical, and/or legal capacity to reduce risks) were found to be important influences on wildfire risk. At the regional-scale, the shift from a resource extraction to environmental amenity-based economy has transformed ecological communities, produced unequal social distributions of risks and resources, and shaped people’s social and environmental interactions in everyday life. While working-class locals are more socially vulnerable than amenity migrants to wildfire hazards, they have also been more active in attempting to reduce risks in the aftermath of the disastrous 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire. Social tensions between locals and amenity migrants temporarily dissolved immediately following the disaster, only to be exacerbated by the heightened perception of risk and the differential commitment to hazard mitigation displayed by these groups over a 2-year study period. Findings suggest that to enhance wildfire safety, environmental managers should acknowledge the environmental benefits associated with hazardous landscapes, the incentives created by risk management programs, and the specific constraints to action for relevant social groups in changing human-environmental context.     

Perceptions of Wildfire and Landscape Change in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska

Despite a broad literature addressing the human dimensions of wildfire, current approaches often compartmentalize results according to disciplinary boundaries. Further, relatively few studies have focused on the public’s evolving perceptions of wildfire as communities change over time. This paper responds to these gaps by exploring perceptions of landscape dynamics and wildfire between 2003 and 2007 using a typological framework of intersecting ecological, social, and cultural processes. Designed as a restudy, and using key informant interviews, this research allowed us to observe risk perception as they are related to community challenges and opportunities in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. Risk perceptions were examined as an integral part of community and landscape change. Wildfire was a concern among informants in 2003 and remained a concern in 2007, although informants were less likely to discuss it as a major threat compared to the original study. Informants in the western part of the peninsula tended to express more concern about wildfire than their eastern counterparts largely due to their experiences with recent fires. Other important factors residents considered included changing forest fuels, the expanding wildland urban interface, and contrasting values of new residents. Underscoring the localized nature of risk perceptions, informants had difficulty describing the probability of a wildfire event in a geographical context broader than the community scale. This paper demonstrates how a holistic approach can help wildfire and natural resource professionals, community members, and other stakeholders understand the social and physical complexities influencing collective actions or inactions to address the threat of wildfire.     

The Influence of Place Attachment and Experience Use History on Perceived Depreciative Visitor Behavior and Crowding in an Urban National Park

Research on recreational place attachment suggests that place identity, or the emotional/symbolic ties people have to places, and place dependence, which describes a functional attachment to a specific place, influence the perception of social and environmental site conditions. Recent research, however, has found that place attachment is not always a predictor of such perceptions. This study investigated the influence of place attachment and experience use history on the perception of depreciative visitor behavior, recreation impacts and crowding in an urban national park. In 2006, 605 on-site visitors to the heavily-used Viennese part of the Danube Floodplains National Park were asked about past experience, place attachment, perceptions of depreciative visitor behavior, crowding, changes in visitor numbers during the past ten years, and recreation impacts on wildlife. Confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the two dimensions of place attachment. Linear regression analyses found that place identity and place dependence were related to some perceived depreciative visitor behaviors and visitor number changes but not to crowding, while experience use history additionally related to perceived crowding. Visitors with higher place attachment and past experience were more sensitive to social and environmental site conditions. Management implications of the findings are discussed.     

Effects of Place Identity,Place Dependence,and Experience-Use History on Perceptions of Recreation Impacts in a Natural Setting

It is generally accepted that recreation use in natural environments results in some degree of negative social and environmental impact. Environmental managers are tasked with mitigating the impact while providing beneficial recreation opportunities. Research on the factors that influence visitors' perceptions of environmental and social conditions is necessary to inform sound environmental management of protected natural areas. This study examines the effect of prior experience with the setting and two dimensions of place attachment (i.e., place identity and place dependence) on visitors' perceptions of three types of recreation impacts (i.e., depreciative behavior, environmental impacts, and recreation conflict). Principal components analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling were used to test the study hypotheses using data collected from 351 visitors through on-site questionnaires (response rate of 93 percent). The results show that prior experience exhibited a moderate and significant direct positive effect on place identity, place dependence, and visitors' perceptions of recreation impacts. Contrary to study hypotheses and prior research, neither place dependence nor place identity exhibited a significant effect on the dependent variables. The results show that prior experience causes visitors to be more sensitive to depreciative behaviors, environmental impacts, and recreation conflict. These findings raise concerns over potential visitor displacement and deterioration of site conditions. Implications for resource managers are discussed, which include education, modifying visitor use patterns, and site design strategies.     

The relationship between environmental activism,pro-environmental behaviour and social identity

Research on environmental activism remains poorly integrated and ill-defined and to date, there has been little examination of the relationship of environmental activism, pro-environmental behaviour and social identity. 131 students from an Australian University (M = 25.04 years old, SD = 8.17) voluntarily participated by returning an anonymous questionnaire containing an environmental activism scale, a pro-environmental behaviour scale and a social identity scale. The results revealed that while there was a significant relationship between social identity and environmental behaviour, only the citizenship component of environmental behaviour significantly predicted environmental activism. In other words, the relationship between social identity and environmental activism was indirect. This research presents the opportunity for further exploration of these relationships and to further investigate their relationship to inter-group processes.     

基于结构方程模型的环境风险接受度影响因素分析

随着社会经济的发展和城市化进程的推进,我国环境风险事故频发。与此同时,公众对于美好环境的需求日益提升,公众与专家和政府之间的风险判断差异是不同规模的群体性事件发生的主要诱因。为识别公众环境风险接受度的影响因素,本研究基于结构方程模型分析了11种环境风险的客观风险水平和公众感知到的风险影响度、场域了解度、政府信任度、社会经济水平等因素对公众风险接受度的影响。研究结果显示,社会经济水平、风险影响度、场域了解度、政府信任度均直接影响公众的风险接受度;客观风险水平则通过风险影响度的中介作用间接影响风险接受度。因此,为在经济发展过程中降低公众风险感知偏差对生产生活的影响,我国除了通过更严格的风险管控手段降低风险事故发生概率和影响范围外,还需要通过信息公开、公众参与和生态科普等方式增强公众对风险场域的了解度和对政府的信任度以提升风险接受能力。     

Framing fracking: scale-shifting and greenwashing risk in the oil and gas industry

In this paper, I examine corporate environmental communication on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and industry efforts to shape public perception of resource extraction and its impacts on the environment. I look at how the oil and gas industry (OGI) frames fracking to ease public fear by downplaying risk and shifting its scale with rhetoric presenting the benefits of this emergent technology. Contrasting and building on ecological modernisation versus risk society ideas, I use OGI print advertising supplemented by corporate social responsibility statements and other online material to critically evaluate framing in light of the practice of corporate greenwashing. Findings reveal OGI efforts to positively portray fracking in the interest of unfettered resource extraction and profits from energy production. Several themes emerge in OGI framing rhetoric, starting with the establishment of trust through education and claims of transparency and continuing with ideas touting safety and responsibility, scientific progress, economic benefits and jobs, energy security, environmental protection, and sustainability. On the whole, such rhetoric reflects ecological modernisation ideas that shift the perception of risk and its consequences, framing fracking in a way that obscures the negative impacts of dependency on a fossil fuel-based economy.     

Social Dimensions of Urban Flood Experience,Exposure, and Concern

With growing urban populations and climate change, urban flooding is an important global issue, even in dryland regions. Flood risk assessments are usually used to identify vulnerable locations and populations, flooding experience patterns, or levels of concern about flooding, but rarely are all of these approaches combined. Furthermore, the social dynamics of flood concerns, exposure, and experience are underexplored. We combined geographic and survey data on household‐level measures of flood experience, concern, and exposure in Utah's urbanizing Wasatch Front. We asked: (1) Are socially vulnerable groups more likely to be exposed to flood risk? (2) How common are flooding experiences among urban residents, and how are these experiences related to sociodemographic characteristics and exposure? and (3) How concerned are urban residents about flooding, and does concern vary by exposure, flood experience, and sociodemographic characteristics? Although floodplain residents were more likely to be White and have higher incomes, respondents who were of a racial/ethnic minority, were older, had less education, and were living in floodplains were more likely to report flood experiences and concern about flooding. Flood risk management approaches need to address social as well as physical sources of vulnerability to floods and recognize social sources of variation in flood experiences and concern.     

Climate change,natural hazards,and risk perception: the role of proximity and personal experience

Understanding public risk perception related to possible consequences of climate change is of paramount importance. Not only does risk perception have an important role in shaping climate policy, it is also central in generating support for initiatives for adaptation and mitigation. In order to influence public knowledge and opinion, there is a need to know more about why people have diverging attitudes and perceptions related to climate change and its possible consequences. By using representative survey data for Norway and multivariate analysis, the authors of this article show that differences in attitudes and perceptions are partially explained by factors such as gender, educational background, and people's political preferences. However, an important factor explaining people's perception of climate change and its possible consequences is their direct personal experience of damage caused by climate-related events such as flooding or landslide. Furthermore, the results show that personal experience of damage has the largest impact on the respondents' belief that there will be more natural-resource hazards locally than in Norway or globally. The results also show that merely living in a more exposed area but not having a personal experience of damage does not affect the respondents' concern towards climate change.     

城市垃圾分类与居民地方认同研究

垃圾无害化处理是环境治理不可或缺的一个环节，它不仅关系城市居民生存环境的健康程度，更直接影响公众对政府环境治理政策和治理效果的认知与评价。本文运用环境心理学理论，对折射出居民环境认知、个人偏好、预期目标和情感联系的地方认同进行问卷调查，发现社区居民对城市垃圾治理成效的评价及其对政府垃圾治理能力的评价与其地方认同呈正相关关系，同时，居民对政府关于垃圾治理法律法规的认同也能增强其地方认同感。本文建议，未来关于地方认同的研究需要聚焦于城市环境治理政策的传播效果，总结和归纳城市居民对环境治理成效的归因模式与其地方认同之间的交叉关系。     

基于大数据的“邻避”设施环境社会风险评估方法研究

着力防范化解环境社会风险是社会和谐稳定的重要前提。本文基于国内全网2019—2020年关于“垃圾焚烧”的网络舆情数据，通过情感词典、TF-IDF关键词提取和人工识别方法进行“邻避”冲突的原因分析，在此基础上构建本土化的“邻避”设施环境社会风险指标体系和评估方法，结合环境、人口和社会等多源大数据，基于自然断点法对风险等级进行分类，以全国生活垃圾焚烧发电设施的重点区域为案例开展环境社会风险的分析评估。结果表明，担忧破坏生态环境、反对选址位置、担忧排放物有毒是贯穿2019—2020年两年的主要反对原因，占据反对原因的50%以上。之后，本文对各项反对因素进行归纳汇总，构建了12项指标的风险评价指标体系，其中环境因素、人口因素和社会因素为一级指标，其权重分别达到0.33、0.49和0.18，人口因素是影响程度最大的因素；对案例风险评估结果表明全国范围和六大重点区域的大多数设施拟建设于重大风险或特大风险地区，需着重关注这些地区的生活垃圾焚烧发电项目规划布局和风险防控问题。     

Introduction to the special issue: Place,identity and environmental behaviour

Research on identity has proliferated in recent decades, particularly within environmental psychology; the physical environment has been shown to have strong connections to a sense of self, and identity has proved to be an important mediator of behaviour. The concept of identity has been defined and measured, however, in a wide variety of ways. The goal of this special issue is to present some of the recent work tying identity to place and behaviour. In our opening essay we describe some of the distinctions among approaches to identity at different levels of specificity and scale and suggest some criteria to determine meaningful sources of identity, including impacts on cognitive processing, emotional responses, and behaviour. Although a monolithic framework is neither practical nor desirable, we encourage greater conceptual and methodological integration in future research on the interconnections among place, identity, and behaviour.     

Homeowner Attitudes and Practices Towards Residential Landscape Management in Ohio, USA

This study describes the results of a survey of 432 homeowners in Ohio, USA concerning their perceptions and practices regarding management of residential landscapes. The results reveal that outdoor residential environments are extremely important to homeowners, who tend to view their yards as serving multiple functions: a place to observe nature and to socialize as well as a place of beauty and recreation. Use of a lawn care company to apply chemicals is reported by 22 % of respondents, while 40 % either apply chemicals themselves or have someone other than a lawn care company do it. Logistic regressions reveal that factors influencing a homeowner's decision to employ a lawn care company or to apply chemicals themselves include: household income (+), perceived impacts on the environment (-), whether the next door neighbor does it (+), and type of residential environment (rural -, suburban and urban +). A theme that emerges throughout the study is the perceived importance of the role of the lawn in residents' sense of social status or acceptance in the neighborhood. This perception can be viewed as a positive in ensuring that residential environments are well maintained, but also as a negative resulting in environmental degradation or presenting a barrier to creativity in the development of alternative residential environments. Specific policy implications of these findings are that efforts aimed at educating homeowners about the environmental impacts of their lawn care choices are likely to have more success if they are directed at neighborhood groups rather than individuals, show that alternatives are easy to adopt, affordable, and can produce the characteristics of lawns that homeowners seek.     

A social topography of home and horizon: The misfit, the dutiful, and longing for home

The environmental perception wave at Clark University was already in full swing when Anne Buttimer arrived in Fall 1970 with curiosities about social space, ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, ‘home’ and ‘reach’, from a project on residential area design in Glasgow, Scotland. Lessons learned from the intense interaction between geographers and psychologists were enormously valuable for subsequent work with geography students at Clark during the 1970s. Since then she has worked on temporality and environmental experience, migration and identity, with colleagues in Sweden, and has pursued autobiographically-based approaches to questions of creativity and context and the history of geographic thought and practice. In retrospect, she claims, one of the most valuable results of the perception wave was to provoke awareness of the lenses through which reality is experienced by people in different cultures, and that includes the disciplinary cultures into which researchers themselves are socialized.     

The influence of place attachment, and moral and normative concerns on the conservation of native vegetation: A test of two behavioural models

This study examines the influence of place attachment, values, beliefs and personal norms about environmental action on the conservation of native vegetation in two primary production settings in South Australia. We use regression and multiple mediation analyses to test a base model of pro-environmental behaviour which includes variables from value-belief-norm (VBN) theory and then compare it to an expanded model which includes the same variables and five dimensions of place attachment. The expanded model including place attachment explained up to twice the amount of variance in native vegetation planting than the base model when controlling for all variables preceding behaviour, but the overall explanatory power was low (<22%). Place attachment had a stronger influence on the antecedents of behaviour compared with the behaviour itself, particularly nature bonding which was a significant moderate predictor of both personal norms and awareness of consequences in the two study regions. We assert that place attachment has statistically significant direct and indirect effects on variables included in VBN theory. Future studies may reveal stronger effects in settings where there are fewer resource and monetary costs associated with pro-environmental behaviour.     

Dislocating identity: Desegregation and the transformation of place

Whatever other changes it engenders, desegregation invariably produces a re-organization of space and place, a fact whose implications the psychological literature on the process has generally disregarded. The present article begins to address this gap. Drawing on research on place–identity processes, we argue that desegregation may alter not only the relationship between self and other, but also the relationship between self and place. As such, it may be experienced as a form of dislocation: an event that undermines shared constructions of place and the forms of located subjectivity they sustain. In order to develop this idea, we analyse a series of interviews conducted with holiday-makers on a formerly white but now multiracial beach in South Africa. The analysis demonstrates how white respondents’ stories of desegregation evince an abiding concern with the loss of place, manifest in terms of an erosion of a sense of place belonging, attachment and familiarity and an undermining of the beach's capacity to act as a restorative environment of the self. The implications of such accounts for understanding personal and ideological resistance to desegregation are explored. The paper concludes by arguing that this problem provides an opportunity to conjoin environmental and social psychological work.     

Risk perception, risk communication, and stakeholder involvement for biosolids management and research

An individual's perception of risk develops from his or her values, beliefs, and experiences. Social scientists have identified factors that affect perceptions of risk, such as whether the risk is knowable (uncertainty), voluntary (can the individual control exposure?), and equitable (how fairly is the risk distributed?). There are measurable differences in how technical experts and citizen stakeholders define and assess risk. Citizen knowledge and technical expertise are both relevant to assessing risk; thus, the 2002 National Research Council panel on biosolids recommended stakeholder involvement in biosolids risk assessments. A survey in 2002 identified some of the factors that influence an individual's perception of the risks involved in a neighbor's use of biosolids. Risk communication was developed to address the gap between experts and the public in knowledge of technical topics. Biosolids management and research may benefit from applications of current risk communication theory that emphasizes (i) two-way communications (dialogue); (ii) that the public has useful knowledge and concerns that need to be acknowledged; and (iii) that what may matter most is the credibility of the purveyor of information and the levels of trustworthiness, fairness, and respect that he or she (or the organization) demonstrates, which can require cultural change. Initial experiences in applying the dialogue and cultural change stages of risk communication theory--as well as consensus-building and joint fact-finding--to biosolids research suggest that future research outcomes can be made more useful to decision-makers and more credible to the broader public. Sharing control of the research process with diverse stakeholders can make research more focused, relevant, and widely understood.     

The measurement of place attachment: Personal,community, and environmental connections

Place attachment has been researched extensively in the social and behavioural sciences over the past two decades. However, it is challenging for researchers to assimilate the mixed messages presented in the place attachment literature and to understand the multiple place attachment terms. In this study, a four-dimensional model of rural landholder attachments to their natural resource management region was conceptually and empirically developed with the aim of developing an integrated approach to the measurement of place attachment that clearly distinguishes between different elements of place scholarship. A 29-item place attachment scale with the dimensions of place identity, place dependence, nature bonding, and social bonding was tested on a random sample of rural landholders in the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges in South Australia (N = 320). The majority of respondents were male (69.3%) and the average age was 59 years. The scale was reduced to 20-items and then administered simultaneously and in the same response format to rural landholders in two other areas of South Australia: the Northern and Yorke region (N = 664) and South Australian Murray-Darling Basin region (N = 659). In both studies, the majority of respondents were male (85%) and the average age was 55 years. Exploratory factor and reliability analyses of Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges and Northern and Yorke datasets produced a five-dimensional model of place attachment with high reliabilities. Social bonding divided into the constructs of family bonding and friend bonding. The refined five-dimensional model was then examined for convergent validity, with moderate but significant correlations found between individual attachment constructs and dependent variables expected to be related to the construct, such as place identity and length of residence, and nature bonding and time currently spent in nature. We used confirmatory factor analysis to test the goodness-of-fit of the South Australian Murray-Darling Basin (SAMDB) dataset to the proposed five-dimensional model and then compared its fit to the traditional two-dimensional model of place identity and place dependence. The five-dimensional model provided moderate fit for the SAMDB data. We conclude with a discussion of the validity and reliability of the five-dimensional model and its future role in place attachment research.