A COMMUNITY-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES TYPOLOGY FOR THE NIAGARA ESCARPMENT1

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1 A COMMUNITY-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES TYPOLOGY FOR THE NIAGARA ESCARPMENT1 Author: SUSAN PRESTON ABSTRACT Environmental values typologies have been developed by social scientists and environmental philosophers in attempts to understand the meanings and values that society attaches to Nature. These can help communities and decision makers to further understand social attitudes and behaviours concerning the environment, including conflict, resistance, initiative, and commitment to environmental integrity. This paper discusses a tentative environmental values typology that has been developed for the based on interviews with residents of southern, central, and northern Escarpment communities. The typology is one result of doctoral research investigating the social significance of the Escarpment in the context of its associated villages, towns, and cities. There was a high degree of consistency in the values expressed by study participants in all three communities. Participant-expressed values were compared with values embedded in the Planning and Development Act objectives. Varying degrees of consistency between legislation/policy values and resident participant values are illustrated; three value sets of apparent importance to participants were found not to be adequately addressed in the Act or Plan that flows from it. Methodology, value interpretation and results are discussed. INTRODUCTION This paper illustrates aspects of research undertaken between 2000 and 2003 into the social significance of the in Ontario. Specifically it considers the issue of nonmaterial values: what they are, why they are important, and how they have been explored in three communities. The paper proceeds in three sections. Theory behind research on landscape and environmental values is discussed, followed by a brief overview of how this relates to my research, and finally, a tentative environmental values typology for the Niagara Escarpment is offered with observations about its relevance for planning. 1 The author gratefully acknowledges funding support for this research from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Heritage Resources Centre at the University of Waterloo. This paper represents a brief overview of one aspect of the research. More thorough coverage of this aspect and of other findings is forthcoming in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. 1

2 LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES The kinds of values that are referred to here are social, cultural and experiential - typically not economic or materialist. They are values associated with how people individually and collectively feel about landscapes and environments. They can be considered social and symbolic. These kinds of values have been investigated by scholars of many disciplines, although not typically in an integrated way. Social-symbolic values associated with human or built landscapes are often talked about in terms of concepts like sense of place, place attachment, place identity and community identity. The challenge has been that many people are unsure of just what these concepts mean - what their actual substance is. Values toward nature have been investigated in a different way; several people have tried to deconstruct these to a specific, elemental level. Some definitions are offered here based on an extensive review of literature from many disciplines. Sense of place has been defined as consisting of the feelings and perceptions that people have through experience of a place, as well as referring to the qualities of a place that make it distinctive from other places (Relph 1996; Hay 1998). The closely related term place attachment reflects people's emotional connections to places that arise through experience; these are often shared among groups of people and contribute to defining their relationship to that environment (Low 1992). Place identity has two principal uses: the first is the way in which a place informs the identity of a person or people (Proshansky et al. 1995), and the second refers to the identity of a place as a composite of its characteristic features (Relph 1996). Likewise, community identity may focus on the identity of a human collective (one definition of community) as well as on the identity (defining character, heritage, experiences) of a geographic space designated as a community. The differences in emphasis on people or place exist along a continuum rather than being distinctly separated, and are primarily an artifact of the scholarly discipline through which the concept is being considered. Psychologists and sociologists for example, place more weight on the human side of the equation, while geographers are often more oriented to the spatial or environmental side. Explorations of the values humans construct towards nature have been defined in terms of experience and function, and include (among others): moral; ethical; philosophical; religious; spiritual; inspiration; intellectual; education; symbolic; history; culture; identity; sense of place; therapeutic; well-being; wholeness; naturalism; nature appreciation; communing; recreation; escape; aesthetic; emotive: wonder, happiness, joy (Satterfield 2001; Davies 2001; Kellert 1996). Both sets of values described above can be considered as social-symbolic values. They have been shown to be important in understanding human-environment relationships, and are critical aspects 2

3 of what motivates people to make commitments, take initiatives, or engage in other forms of activism. As a result there is a clearly demonstrated link between these values and the capacity for sustainable communities and environments. RESEARCH ON THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NIAGARA ESCARPMENT My research was an investigation of the dynamics of these social symbolic values in planning, with the providing a case study area. By finding out what residents of an area feel about places and features in their local landscape, and comparing that with the way that landscape is managed in planning policy, a gap analysis could be performed to identify just what the implications of these values are for planning. In addition to broader research on Escarpment values from a wide range of documentary and other sources, I focused on three communities: Grimsby, where the Escarpment takes the form of cliffs near Lake Ontario; Creemore, in the central hills; and Owen Sound, in the Georgian Bay area where the Escarpment takes the form of deeply eroded valleys, some of which are submerged under water. These communities were chosen on the basis of numerous criteria addressing a diversity of land uses, planning issues, topographic character, economic conditions and governance frameworks. The research focused on Escarpment values at all scales international, national, provincial, regional, and local - and incorporated a broad range of techniques and resources. Primary research involved interviews with between 15 and 18 actively involved residents in each of the three communities and an analysis of institutional arrangements. Interview participants were chosen because of their activity in the community relating to natural heritage, cultural heritage, planning, or community involvement generally. The interviews were built around a core group of questions that focused on the identification of all natural and cultural places or features of the local area that were highly valued for their contribution to community identity. The questions approached this from a few angles, looking at valued places directly, as well as places of activity and events, places of inspiration, and also places of conflict or concern, initiatives in support of valued places and their assessment of the current levels of protection for valued places. From these interviews and other sources a broad analysis of the social significance of the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario was developed. In addition, the results of the over 100 hours of recorded interviews with 47 key informants in the three communities were distilled into a specific value typology. The typology was modeled structurally on those of scholars working with the values of Nature (e.g. Satterfield 2001), but the categories of value were derived from the interview content, rather than applying the content to sets of values already defined by other scholars. These are the values that participants expressed as the reasons why the Escarpment is important to them and to many other residents of the community - why they value it in terms of its contribution to community identity and more broadly in terms of the entire feature. Values held by other 3

4 residents were offered on the basis of participant s active involvement in the life of the community and their awareness of local issues and events. Aesthetic; moral and ethical; recreation; and sense of place/place identity/community identity values were very high in all three communities. Spiritual, inspirational, therapeutic, and emotive values were high in two communities and moderately high in the third. Naturalistic values, which include experience of nature, curiosity, discovery, nature appreciation and education were moderately high in all three communities. The Escarpment was consistently valued moderately high as cultural heritage, containing community memories and bearing witness to human history. Ecosystems function and ecology were among the reasons given for why the Escarpment was important to local people at a moderate level compared with the above cited values. Interestingly, very few participants in each community felt that the Escarpment was important to them personally for economic or utilitarian reasons. Finally, it was important to only a few people in each community as a lifestyle amenity. Consistency in this description is based on the breadth between communities in numbers of participants expressing a value: less than 20 % difference: very high, 21-40% difference: high, 41-60% difference: moderate, 61-80% difference: low and % difference: very low. Frequency rankings within each community are based on the number of participants expressing a value: 13-15/17: very high, 10-12: high, 7-9: moderate, 4-6: low, 1-3: very low. While this is very interesting in its own right, it becomes even more useful when compared with the values contained in the legislation. Values conveyed in the Planning and Development Act (1973), which informs the Plan (1985; 1994) were identified from its eight core objectives. Ecologic; historic (cultural heritage); recreation; aesthetic; experiential (through ensuring public access) are explicit in the objectives, while naturalistic (referring to undeveloped) and sustainability (referring to protection of water quality) could be inferred with caution. When the community-based interview participant-expressed values are compared with those in the Planning and Development Act, the areas of agreement range from strong to none. Although there are many points of importance here (for detailed analysis see Preston 2003), there are just a few items to be commented upon in the present paper. First, the legislation and plan have more in common with local values than many people realize, providing a strong foundation and potential for significantly improved resident engagement in Escarpment planning and stewardship initiatives. Second, the naturalistic (undeveloped) value expressed in the legislation was in fact a major aspect of the participant-expressed value of moral/ethical (protection), but the moral and ethical motivation for this value is not clearly a feature of the legislation or plan. Third (and finally), some of the local values that are not reflected in the institutional arrangements are in fact high priority values that were expressed by most people in all three communities. These include the moral/ethical; sense of place and identity; and spiritual/inspirational/therapeutic 4

5 values. This discovery gives practical, substantive form to understanding some of the value-based issues that are driving conflicts and independent conservation initiatives. One of many questions that can be asked on this basis is, would planning for the be improved if these values were explicitly acknowledged in the institutional arrangements? REFERENCES Davies, Anna What Silence Knows - Planning, Public Participation and Environmental Values. Environmental Values 10 (1): Government of Ontario (1973). Planning and Development Act. RSO 1990, c. N2. Amended to 2002, c.17. Toronto: Queens Printer. < Hay, Robert A Rooted Sense of Place in Cross-Cultural Perspective. The Canadian Geographer 42 (3): Kellert, S.R The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society. Washington D.C.: Island Press. Low, Setha Symbolic Ties that Bind: Place Attachment in the Plaza. In Place Attachment, eds. Setha Low and Irwin Altman, New York: Plenum Press [1985]. The Plan (1994) Office Consolidation May 2, Georgetown, Ontario:. Preston, Susan M Landscape Values and Planning: The Case of Ontario s Niagara Escarpment. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Proshansky, H.M., A.K. Fabian, and R. Kaminoff Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self. In Giving Places Meaning. Readings in Environmental Psychology, ed. Linda Groat, London: Academic Press. Relph, Edward Place. In Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: the environment and humankind, eds. Ian Douglass, Richard Huggett, and Mike Robinson, London: Routledge. Satterfield, Theresa In Search of Value Literacy: Suggestions for the Elicitation of Environmental Values. Environmental Values 10 (3):

6 CONTACT Susan Preston Heritage Resources Centre University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON Susan Preston recently completed a Ph.D. in Planning through the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Waterloo. She is now a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University, affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, continuing her research on the relations between values and environments. 6