Control de la silla

Natural landscapes, places, and spaces are more than just containers of natural resources, staging areas for enjoyable activities, a bit of ground on which to put a house, or the contributor of personal threat. They are locations filled with history, personal memories, and emotional and symbolic meaning. The symbolic meanings that a place may signify (from personal – childhood camping trips; to the publicly held – World heritage site) may cause individuals to form emotional bonds with the place in ways that result in place being incorporated into a person’s sense of identity (Kyle, Graefe, & Manning, 2005; Williams & Vaske, 2003). The question is then whether this could have implications for how people relate to hazards in this environment and whether it influences how they respond to the associated risk.

For example, if people are attached to forested environments, how might their support for bushfire mitigation and preparedness measures which involve

reducing, removing, or altering the natural environment, be manipulated? There is evidence to suggest that bushfire preparedness can be met with resistance by residents who feel a sense of attachment to such areas (see for example Eriksen & Gill, 2010). This may explain why vegetation modification is one of the least favoured and adopted bushfire preparedness adjustments (see section 2.6.1.2). Alternatively, people with strong attachments to place may feel a greater desire to protect their (living) environment and therefore more likely to adopt bushfire preparedness measures (see for example Paton, Bürgelt, et al., 2008). This brief discussion introduces both the complexity that can arise from the way people relate to place and complexities and diversity in decision making that will occur around risk management and preparedness.

3.1.1.1 Place attachment

The issue alluded to above, the matter of residents actually choosing to live in the environments that are the cause of their relative risk, introduces a seemingly neglected aspect of hazard literature, and thus represents a focus of present study. People’s attachment to the place they live, the subjective, emotional, and symbolic meanings they associate with these natural environments, places a great weight on how these residents in turn pay heed and interpret the risk information they receive. As a geographic term, ‘place’ commonly refers to a focus of meaning and felt value: “what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we endow it with value” (Tuan, 1977, p. 6). Defined by environmental psychologists, place attachment

represents a positive connection or bond between an individual and a particular place (Low & Altman, 1992).

Although this phenomenon has been described by various terms (e.g., sense of place, rootedness, insidedness), the notions of affect, emotion, and feelings are

agreed to be central to the concept (Low & Altman, 1992). Accompanying these emotional characteristics however, are also cognitions (thought, knowledge, and belief) and practice (action and behaviour). This conceptualisation stresses the interaction of humans and places, and involves in the interplay of emotions and effect, knowledge and beliefs, and action and behaviour. As such, place attachment evolves through people’s interaction with a space, and develops as they become family with the place and endow it with value (Kyle et al., 2005; Milligan, 1998). Others suggest that one of the reasons individuals assign importance to places (just as they do with activities, objects, and possessions) is that these places help identify themselves to others (Williams & Vaske, 2003); it helps answer the ‘who am I?’ question by answering the ‘where am I?’ question (Lai, Shafer, & Kyle, 2008).

In their mixed-method study of bushfire preparedness using an Australian sample, Paton, Bürgelt, and Prior (2008) determined through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of bushfire preparedness that one of the characteristics of the ‘preparing’ group was high attachment to place (e.g., strong attachment to home and property, strong environmental beliefs). These residents, whose environmental attachment was a salient aspect of their lifestyle, were happy to support/adopt measures with low environmental impact (e.g., mowing lawns, clearing ground litter). They were however reluctant to support any measures that would adversely affect their natural environment (e.g., clearing trees, controlled burns). As such, the authors suggested that attachment to place was related to bushfire preparedness, but only those measures which did not damage/effect those qualities of the living environment that they so valued. This therefore also provides further context for the earlier described common finding that residents are less likely to modify vegetation

on their property to increase their bushfire preparedness, and rather favour the adoption of more general property maintenance behaviour (see section 2.6.1.2). Place attachment has also been found to influence collective preparedness behaviour and community involvement. Jakes, Kruger, et al., (2007, p. 194) found in their study of wildfire preparedness in the United States that people who felt attached to place were “moved to take individual and collective action to improve wildfire preparedness, to be stewards of the place that holds great personal significant”. Similarly, Wandersman, Florin, Friedmann, and Meier’s (1987) study of

neighbourhood improvement groups in Israel and the United States, found that the members attributed attachment to their residential environment as one of the main reasons for their involvement.

Therefore, place attachment sentiments are not only held by individuals, but can also be collectively or consensually shared by families, community members, or even whole cultures (e.g., Jakes, Kruger, et al., 2007; Low & Altman, 1992). Others have suggested that attachment to a place can also be based on or incorporate other people including family, friends, other community members, or even culture (Kyle et al., 2005; Low & Altman, 1992; Williams & Vaske, 2003). As such, the social relationship that a place denotes may be the focus or at least incorporated in the individual’s attachment. Therefore, the role of attachment to place appears to be complex and integral to individuals’ bushfire preparedness decision making, if not at the individual level, then at the social level (and most likely both). For this reason, attachment to place represents a focus of this research.

Discussion thus far has demonstrated how social cognitive models of behaviour have been successfully applied (e.g., Paton, Smith, et al., 2008; Paton et al., 2005; Rohrmann, 1995; Sagala et al., 2009) to explain how individual (e.g., cognitive biases, cost-benefit analysis) and especially social factors influence whether residents at risk of natural hazards adopt preparedness measures. Whether residents act on the hazard information that has been provided to them has been consistently shown to be a function of influential processes within their social environment. As such, in developing a model of bushfire preparedness, these social factors, including residents’ sense of community and their involvement within their community must be accounted for.

Furthermore, the unique element of the bushfire hazard that sees residents actively choosing to live in areas that pose the greatest bushfire risks, suggests that such a model must include the seemingly pivotal role of place attachment in

explaining residents’ bushfire preparedness decision making processes. The present study therefore provides a unique contribution to hazards literature by incorporating and proposing place attachment as a pre-motivational factor that influences whether residents decide to prepare for bushfire or not. Specifically, the present study proposes (as will be outlined in the following section) that the nature of residents’ place attachment will act as an essential precursor to their subsequent bushfire preparedness decision making and thus represents the starting point in the Social Attachment Model of Bushfire Preparedness. This model is introduced and described in the following section.

3.2 Place and Bushfire Preparedness: Developing a New Conceptualisation