Date of Award
2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Natural Resources
First Advisor
Rachelle K. Gould
Abstract
All people are connected to nature in non-material ways: nature can support mental well-being, be an integral part of cultural heritage or identity, underlie feelings of connectedness to place, provide aesthetic enjoyment, and more. As ecosystems shift rapidly due to climate change, development, mass extinction, and other stressors, it is important to understand whether and how these non-material relationships with nature are changing in response. However, most research exploring this question has not examined lived experiences of change, opting instead to model or estimate changes to non-material values. Additionally, studies must take into account the diversity of experiences of non-material values between places and between people in the same place. To address questions of diversity and change, scholars of non-material values must continue to expand the suite of tools available to them, identifying methods that can balance eliciting nuanced and detailed information with obtaining a relatively large sample size, and exploring creative approaches that can elicit values or experiences that may be underrepresented by more common methods.
This dissertation seeks to address these questions and challenges through a combination of place-based work in West Hawaiʻi and art analysis. The first study employs one-question interviews—an underutilized method based on the anthropological “freelisting” technique—to identify differences in non-material values between Native Hawaiians, non-Native residents, and tourists in West Hawaiʻi. The second study examines the ways non-material values are—and are not—changing in response to rapid environmental change in West Hawaiʻi. The in-depth semi-structured interviews comprising this study show that many non-material values are remarkably resilient to environmental change, and that West Hawaiʻi residents are both adapting to change and undertaking a range of resistance behaviors to protect those values for themselves and future generations. The final study asks whether and how art can uniquely contribute to our understandings of non-material values and environmental change, using Maya Lin’s artwork What Is Missing? as a case study.
Together, these chapters show that the relationships between environmental change and non-material values are complex, informed by colonial histories, personal identity, myriad social forces, and more, and furthermore that what we learn about them depends on the lenses we use to view them.
Language
en
Number of Pages
237 p.
Recommended Citation
Adams, Alison, "Diversity, change, and resilience of non-material values: Transdisciplinary studies in a time of ecological crisis" (2024). Graduate College Dissertations and Theses. 1916.
https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/1916