Forest Places of the Heart: Incorporating Special Spaces into Public Management

oday many forest managers are "caught in the crossfire" (Salwasser 1990) between competing interests and values for America's forestlands.If one accepts the thesis that public lands can be viewed by their constituencies in terms of both their utility and as the object of emotional attachments, and that affectlye ties with a place or landscape are important, then public land management planning should address both values.The following research uses grounded theory and empirical data to explore the emotional attachments . ,, between recreation visi- , tors and specific places in forests.A better understanding of such attachments is a positive and inevitable part of satisfying forest customers.The article then demonstrates that the USDA Forest Service's planning process and tools, as embodied in FORPLAN, are unable to incorporate emotions, preferences, or attitudes that are spatially dependent.Fortunately, other planning technologies and frameworks have the potential to incorporate into forestland management planning the sensitivity to place that the public requires.How-Discovering sites such as this watell, just a jw hundred pet from the main road, is a cwr in the degree of visitor investment in or kinship with a setting.ever, forest managers must be willing to listen and learn from the constituencies they serve rather than become embroiled in a losing battle for the last word.Chiwawa Sense of Place An example of emotional attachments to places is provided by indepth interviews of visitors to the Chiwawa River drainage in central Washington State 6qg.1).The recreation environment is appropriate for investigating emotional attachments to national forests since recreation is a primary means of daily citizen interaction with public lands.The primary objective of the study was to develop a typology of visitors based on their reasons for deciding to recreate in the drainage.Qualitative data were collected using nonprobability sampling techniques, and were analyzed using the grounded theory approach described by Glaser and Strauss (1967).The value of this methodology lies in the types and richness of the information collected.Clark and Downing (1984) found that a grounded theory approach was of greater assistance initially in representing the complexity of social behavior.For complete details on the methodology see Mitchell (1989).Descriptive data were collected from 120 group or personal interviews, lasting from 30 minutes to 2 hours, conducted with recreation users during May to September 1988.In addition, several interviews were conducted with managers and adjacent landowners in order to capture their perceptions of thc historical and existing use of the area.Conversational interviews centered around the reasons for visitation, but respondents were encouraged to discuss subjects of importance to them instead of responding to predetermined questions.A two-level typology was developed that describes the differentiation between visitors' relationships with their environ-NY.