“There's a lot of life in a dead tree”: Attachment, loss, and the permeation of place through wildfire recovery in northern California

Place attachment provides a useful lens for understanding relationships with environments, highlighting how experiences, histories, social ties, and functional dependencies bond individuals with place. Disasters, however, threaten place, along with the social networks that provide support and reinforce ties to place. Here, we examine how dimensions of place attachment manifested in narratives about housing recovery after wildfires across northern California. Relying on 69 photo elicitation interviews with survivors that lost their primary homes to wildfire, we find that place identity, place dependence, and nature bonding were largely intertwined, mutually supportive, and pervasive within survivor narratives. We also find place detachment, or the straining and diminishment of place attachments, within many of the narratives. Given rising wildfire losses in California and across the world, understanding the foundational role of place attachment in the lived experiences of wildfire survivors is critical to ensuring that people and places endure rising threats from wildfire.