The role of "place" in environmental communications - a fictitious formal talk, Part I.

As an academic hoop-jumping exercise, I was recently I was asked to develop a (fictitious) formal talk about the importance of “sense of place” in communication strategies for an audience of professional (but non-academic) environmental communicators. 

This is much, much longer than I would normally put on a blog post so I have broken it into three parts. I use a bit of humor and, perhaps, a bit too much 'stuffy' academic language but I tried to walk that tightrope as best I could. The whole thing was written within one eight-hour time span while locked in a room with no food or water.  I've left it more-or-less as-is, minus a lot of citations/references. **Disclaimer** I actually did have food and water, and the door wasn't really locked.

Here is Part I of my fictitious formal talk on the role of "place" in environmental communications. 

Hello and thank you for inviting me to speak here today. It is an honor and a joy to be afforded such an opportunity to talk about a topic that I enjoy so much. Please, please, hold your applause. No, really, have a seat. Please, that’s enough. Thank you.

What I will talk about today is the potential role for “place” in environmental communication. Broadly speaking, this is an area of social science research that is often referred to as “sense of place” research. It has seen a tremendous amount of research activity in the past several decades. I think you will find that unwittingly, or perhaps consciously, you have been using place-based strategies in your writing already. It makes perfect sense. Place is inherent in most if not all environmental communication. It is the social and physical environment, the natural biological and human-influenced world, that we write about in our columns and articles, our blog posts and podcasts. But you are here because you’re curious. There is a large, often contradictory, field of research regarding place and its various conceptual permutations.

             

The underlying assumption in a lot of environmental communication research is that people’s relationships to particular places are made meaningful through the discursive practices invoking those places. We talk about our lives to develop understanding, to know where we stand regarding the places that we love or, in some cases, the places we fear. If you’ll allow me just one aphorism, one that seems particularly apt when discussing the notions of place and its influence on our perceptions of the wide world, it is Miles’ Law: Where you stand depends on where you sit. 

How we see the world, how we relate our ever-changing internal élan vital to the equally ever-changing external complexities of modern life, depends on where we root ourselves, where we are emplaced. It depends on where we set bare feet on meaningful ground, the fertile soil, of identity and fulfillment. And it is not only this way for us in an air-conditioned conference room overlooking these beautiful red rock cliffs here in north central New Mexico. It is this way for everybody. Your audience also lives in these terms. It is unlikely, however, that they think in these terms. That is your job, our job. To connect. To empower through place. We help people realize their connections to the wider world. We change people’s thinking. We educate. If we’re really good, we change behaviors. We help save the planet, one backyard story at a time.

             

As I said, this is the focus of my talk here today: the importance of place in communication about environmental issues.  What is environmental communication if it is not place-based narrative? I will discuss first some of the background and admittedly murky conceptual territory in the ever-expanding field of place-based social science research. After we get a bearing on the basics I will provide some evidence of how place is thought to influence perceptions of the environmental itself. Finally I will offer some advice on how to incorporate place into narratives about the environment although, as I think you will find, many of you probably do this intuitively already. It is my hope then that this advice then will help guide your reporting and writing toward a more conscious application of place-based strategies.

To be sure, there are social science researchers who could spend an entire conference discussing the complex relationships between people and their environments. In fact, it happens with some regularity. This is not the task at hand, however. What I would like to provide is a brief overview of some primary concepts related to sense of place research. If you would like a more in-depth look, but one that is still accessible for people outside of academia, I suggest Trentelman’s recent (2009) article comparing the similar concepts of place attachment to community attachment from the vantage point of a community sociologist. If you are interested in the more philosophical roots of the topic, I suggest Williams’ chapter (2008) on the pluralities of place as it covers basic current theories, concepts, and philosophies in this arena. It is written primarily for natural resource managers but I believe you may still find it useful. References to these and other primary texts are found among the literature at the back of the room. Please help yourself.

Philosophers, visual artists, writers, songwriters, poets, and politicians have long recognized the emotional, affective, sociocultural, and spiritual aspects of place. These wide-ranging endeavors often get subsumed under the umbrella term “sense of place.” Research on sense of place has blossomed into a tremendous social scientific bloom ever since Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) first planted the seed among phenomenological researchers and humanistic geographers. Place research now involves multiple research traditions such as environmental psychology, sociology, humanistic geography, and phenomenology of landscapes. The use of place as a communications device has more recently been developed in the work of Cantrill and colleagues and will be part of what I discuss here today.

Relph emphasized the importance of living in a place, engaging in the “multifaceted phenomenon of experience,” in order to facilitate a sense of attachment. Space is said to become ‘place’ as community attachments deepen through local social networks and as personal meanings emerge in the context of a particular locale. Senses of place are based on symbolic meanings attributed to a setting and, as Stedman writes, “…it is possible for a single space to encompass multiple 'places,' reflecting the uniqueness of human culture and variations in experiences people have had with the landscape.” This perspective proves true if one were to conceive of a real-estate speculator, a rancher, an off-road vehicle enthusiast, and an earth-worm loving environmentalist standing in the middle of the same virgin meadow. All four would likely come to see the land as having quite different meanings and potential future uses.

Two of the most common notions within “sense of place” research are place attachment and place meaning. Though many researchers have used these terms interchangeably, place meanings generally represent the symbolic and evaluative beliefs which provide cognitive order for the physical world of the individual observer. Place attachment is generally described as an emotional bond, usually positive, that develops between people and the significant places in their lives. There are other theoretical and methodological elements of place research, including concepts such as place-dependence and questions of whether research should be pursued from a constructionist or positivist framework, but these are largely beyond the rather pragmatic scope of our confab today.