Rootedness, time, and participation in Environmental Psychology

Abstract

The notion of rootedness in Environmental Psychology presents a polysemic character and can be understood in different ways, which, however, emphasize the importance of the past and the recurrence of the lived environments in the constitution of personal and collective identity. The objective of this work is to collaborate with a more rigorous definition of this term. For this, it analyzes its use by central authors of this field of knowledge and tries to compare the meanings that it presents in their works. It is argued that the emphasis on the past time frame and the recurrence of the environment represents a limiting identity bias, which allows us to propose that rooting implies active participation in a collectivity, in order to articulate past, present and future in collective projects that are significant for the individual and his/ her group.