Attachments to special places on public lands: An analysis of activities, reason for attachments, and community connections

People develop a type of attachment to some places on public lairds that constitutes a unique "sense of place" that involves emotional connections with and intense caring for these landscapes. These emotional attachments to places (locales regarded as "special places") are important for ecosystem management strategies and other efforts to incorporate considerations of social factors into the management of public lands. Such connections with places can be a source of heightened levels of concern about management practices. This inductive analysis of open-ended survey responses (n = 434) explores the types of activities people do at special places and reveals the importance of recreational activities in people's connections with special places in southern Utah. The primary reasons why places on public lands are regarded as special are because of the environmental features of a place or because of interactions with significant others at the locale. The reasons a place is considered special do not vary according to the activities done at special places. An analysis of four communities with different social/cultural orientations to public land use and management reveals that these orientations are related to the activities people engage in at places they consider special, but not the reasons places are regarded as special.