Sense of place: An elusive concept that is finding a home in ecosystem management

Abstract

One of the great and largely unmet challenges associated with ecosystem management is treating people as a rightful part of ecosystems. In many ecosystem models, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, there is still a tendency to treat people as autonomous individual agents outside the ecosystem, at best a source of values to be incorporated into decisions, at worst agents of catastrophic disturbances of an otherwise smoothly running system. Many scholars have made suggestions for bringing social concepts and variables into ecosystem models and assessments (Driver et al. 1996; Force and Machlis 1997). Far fewer have demonstrated how day-to-day land management might change when people are recognized as part of the ecosystem.

Citation

Williams, Daniel R.; Stewart, Susan I. 1998. Sense of place: An elusive concept that is finding a home in ecosystem management. Forest Science. 96(5): 18-23.