Place Attachment Primer: People
“Welcome home!” Auggie Gleason called to us from the other side of a locked gate. He circled the scene with a gestural arm before adding, “Sorry the place is such a mess.”
Alex and I had arrived at the steel Forest Service gate just moments before Auggie, Facilities Director and Jawbone Flats Caretaker for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, pulled up on a UTV from the opposite direction. I strained for recognition, but little of what I saw registered as familiar, no matter how I squinted at the scene that rose up around him.
“The last caretaker that came to visit me met me here and said, ‘Wow, you’ve really let the place go!’” Auggie laughed. We made our greetings then turned and faced up the Opal Creek drainage. Blackened trees stared us down. Most stood upright, some had snapped, sagged or slouched.
Swaths of blowdown intermittently changed the texture of the scene from our distance. The contours of the land, previously dressed in layers of soil and duff, an under canopy of flowers and shrubs, and an ancient forest overcoat, were visible. The whole place was rockier than I’d ever reckoned, flayed to the bone by the 2020 Beachie Creek fire that had kept us out of the Opal Creek Wilderness since.
But here we were, finally. I considered Auggie’s greeting as he unlocked the gate and we maneuvered through. Welcome home.
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Place attachment grabbed my attention before the Beachie Creek fire raged through the Oregon Cascades four years ago. In my role as a writer in an architecture firm, I often referenced the phenomena “sense of place,” and the two concepts are closely related. In an afternoon’s work that has stuck with me since, I discovered place attachment research while trying to understand and articulate what a repeated experience of a place might provide a client’s program participants living with disabilities and other barriers to outdoor recreation. A lot, I learned.
Place attachment is generally understood to mean the connection experienced between people and the places where their lives play out. Research on place attachment has proliferated in my lifetime, and environmental psychology researchers Robert Gifford and Leila Scannell have made an effort to organize findings into a framework that unites separate but related concepts within the field. Their 2009 paper published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, “Defining Place Attachment, A Tripartite Framework,” and the subsequent environmental psychology textbook chapter they co-authored, “Psychology of Place Attachment,” formed the foundation of my introduction to this science.
Gifford and Scannell’s three part framework asks, “Who is attached? How, or by what means?” and, “To what?” It then organizes place attachment research by the corresponding categories of People, Process, and Place. Much of place attachment research focuses on one or two of these three categories, and within Gifford and Scannell’s framework, their interplay and dependence becomes apparent.
Applying this same framework to my experience of Opal Creek has been a mental-emotional exercise in witnessing my own grief. I’ve used Gifford and Scannell’s work to understand what I am (and to a certain extent my community is) feeling and experiencing since the Beachie Creek Fire and why. Understanding that has helped me get curious about the larger story, the scene within which my own experience and this moment in time is nestled.
“Place attachment occurs at both the individual and group levels,” write Gifford and Scannell in Defining Place Attachment. They start at the smallest end of the scale: “At the individual level, it involves the personal connections one has to a place. For example, place attachment is stronger for settings that evoke personal memories, and this type of place attachment is thought to contribute to a stable sense of self. Similarly, places become meaningful from personally important experiences, such as realizations, milestones (e.g., where I first met my significant other), and experiences of personal growth.”
I considered my own biography against this list of factors. I found Opal Creek and Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, the environmental education nonprofit that operated from a private inholding at the heart of the Wilderness area, as a recent college graduate. I was newly arrived in the Pacific Northwest and searching for a community – both people and a place – that resonated more than what I’d left behind in the Midwest.
The realizations and milestones in Opal Creek came at the lightning pace of life in one’s twenties, a personal growth spurt that lasted the entirety of my six year tenure with the organization. Despite my Portland address, Opal Creek was the setting of my life for those years. My community was there, all my closest friends. I spent as many work hours as I could justify in the wilderness and a lot of my free time beyond that. I learned the physical place better than anywhere I’d ever lived. I loved its pockets and permutations. My purpose was woven into and throughout my belonging there. I discovered something unnamable but essential about myself in Opal Creek, and then doubled down on nurturing it in place as much as I could.
And, I was among friends.
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At the group level, attachment is comprised of the symbolic meanings of a place that are shared among members (Low, 1992). Group-framed place attachment has been examined in different cultures, genders, and religions. For example, attachment has been described as a community process in which groups become attached to areas wherein they may practice, and thus preserve, their cultures (e.g., Fried, 1963; Gans, 1962; Michelson, 1976). Culture links members to place through shared historical experiences, values, and symbols.
In addition, place attachment may be religiously based. Through religion, the meanings of certain places become elevated to the status of sacred (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2004). Revered places such as Mecca or Jerusalem or, on a smaller scale, churches, temples, shrines, burial sites, or divine places in nature, are central to many religions, and their sacred meanings are shared among worshippers. Not only do such places seem to bring worshippers closer to their gods, but reverence for, and protection of, these places essentially reflects one’s cultural fealty.
My experience of attaching to Opal Creek was neither unique nor isolated. I was part of a lineage of lovers of this place that was neither cultural, religious nor merely professional, but seemed to subsume all these categories. The work of preservation, historical experiences, values, symbols, the sense of the sacred, reverence for and sense of duty to protect – these were among the shared experiences that foundationed the Opal Creek community and contributed to our collectively held place attachment.
When Alex and I left Jawbone last Sunday afternoon, we drove straight to Hood River to connect with our Opal Creek community. Some of them had been into Opal Creek since the fire as part of the fledgeling restoration efforts, others hadn’t.
I can’t know exactly what it feels like for my closest friends also experiencing the loss of the Opal Creek we knew before the Beachie Creek Fire. I can say, though, that the friendships formed in that place have endured. That our connections to each other have actually strengthened in the past years. That, for me at least, being together is a balm against the ache of our collective exile from the place we love. That someday we’ll be back in that place together, laughing.
Continued next week.
