Perceiving Climate Change Through Landscape: Divergent Views from Cape Ann, Massachusetts

Public perceptions of climate change are often explained through socioeconomic, ideological, or political factors but such accounts can overlook how perception is shaped through lived, embodied relationships with place. This study examines how residents of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, make sense of climate change, focusing on the mediating role of landscape. Drawing on three months of landscape fieldwork—including walking, semi-structured interviews, and cognitive mapping—the analysis identifies five interpretive positions on climate change: the Attuned, the Unsettled, the Insular, the Enduring, and the Defiant. These positions reflect distinct ways of reconciling scientific knowledge, personal experience, and landscape-based interpretation in understanding environmental change. The findings show that climate perception is shaped not only by access to information, but also by cognitive boundary-making, cultural narrative, and engagement with the material and symbolic qualities of place. The study shows how climate change perceptions are formed through embodied encounters with place and through the ways landscapes are constructed, contested, and experienced. It argues that sustainability efforts must engage these plural perceptual positions if they are to resonate within place-based communities.