Sense of place as an indicator of community sustainability

Abstract

'Sense of place,' or the meaning and attachments that community residents have towards their community, is a potentially useful and somewhat neglected indicator of sustainability. Issues of human community need to be addressed in forest management. Recent considerations of forests as complex ecological systems to be sustained have tended to neglect human concerns. These include, but are not limited to, economic well-being: other 'subjective' indicators of quality of life are also relevant, and comprehensible via conventional scientific inquiry. Sense of place is one such indicator - although quantitative research on sense of place is in its infancy, it is readily understood through conventional social psychological measures, which have the advantage of being monitored over time or compared across settings.