Land use, resource management, and place: A case study in three counties of northern Idaho and northeastern Oregon.

摘要

Local leaders, resource managers, scientists, and academics throughout the non-metropolitan western USA seek to understand the impacts of sociodemographic change and population growth on landscapes and communities; how to influence these impacts in predictable ways; and what sorts of wants and needs the changing population might have from their landscapes and their communities. I focus on these issues in three case-study areas of northern Idaho and northeastern Oregon. I use a mixed methodology that combines statistical modeling of survey-based questionnaire data, a social attribute mapping exercise for mapping values on large landscapes, and geographic information systems simulation modeling. These methods are employed to develop a better understanding of the nature of the land use changes occurring; to quantify the impacts of sociodemographic changes on beliefs about land use, resource management, and people's psychological relationship with place; and to compare the empirical structure of values for the landscape reported in a mapping exercise to theories of environmental values.;Through the results of four independent research articles, I show that my case-study areas are changing rapidly both on the landscape and socially. Residential development is increasing rapidly and appears likely to continue to do so. While this growth brings about a change in the psychological relationship people have with places, growth doesn't appear to spur new types of conflicts over land use and resource management. Instead sociodemographic change and population growth are more likely to bring new voices to the diversity of existing beliefs about land use and resource management. Finally, I find that although the population of a place may be changing rapidly, that the landscape reflects a wide diversity of values for people, that there is a large degree of overlap in these values, and that structurally they reflect landscapes that provide both material (social/economic) and postmaterial (personal/environmental) qualities.;The four articles reflect on the complexity of social and ecological interactions. The findings are presented in the context of case studies. The relatively consistent patterns among the three diverse case-study areas indicate that future studies that employ experimental designs may find similar results and have more generalizability. The four articles are supported by a series of appendices that include research instruments and descriptive results not presented elsewhere.