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In A Deeper Sense of Place, editors Jay Johnson and Soren Larsen collect stories, essays, and personal reflections from geographers who have worked collaboratively with Indigenous communities across the globe.

These first-person narratives offer insight into the challenges faced by Native and non-Native scholars to their academic and personal approaches during research with Indigenous communities. By addressing the ethical, political, intellectual, and practical meanings of collaboration with Indigenous peoples, A Deeper Sense of Place highlights the ways in which collaborative research can help Indigenous and settler communities find common ground through a shared commitment to land, people, and place.

A Deeper Sense of Place will inform students and academics engaged in research with Indigenous communities, as well as those interested in the challenges of employing critical, qualitative methodologies.

We know that our gas-guzzling cars are warming the planet, the pesticides and fertilizers from farms are turning rivers toxic, and the earth has run out of space for the mountains of unrecycled waste our daily consumption has left in its wake. We’ve heard copious accounts of our impact—as humans, as a society—on the natural world. But this is not a one-sided relationship. Lost in these dire and scolding accounts has been the impact on us and our well-being. You sense it while walking on a sandy beach, or in a wild, woody forest, or when you catch sight of wildlife, or even while gardening in your backyard. Could it be that the natural environment is an essential part of our happiness? Yes, says Eric Lambin emphatically in An Ecology of Happiness. Using a very different strategy in addressing environmental concerns, he asks us to consider that there may be no better reason to value and protect the health of the planet than for our own personal well-being.

In this clever and wide-ranging work, Lambin draws on new scientific evidence in the fields of geography, political ecology, environmental psychology, urban studies, and disease ecology, among others, to answer such questions as: To what extent do we need nature for our well-being? How does environmental degradation affect our happiness? What can be done to protect the environment and increase our well-being at the same time? Drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Lambin makes a persuasive case for the strong link between healthy ecosystems and happy humans. 

Unique in its scope and evenhanded synthesis of research from many fields, An Ecology of Happiness offers a compelling human-centered argument that is impossible to overlook when we marvel at murmurations of starlings or seek out the most brilliant fall foliage: nature makes our steps a little lighter and our eyes a little brighter. What better reason to protect an ecosystem or save a species than for our own pleasure?

We humans are difficult animals. We are the source of environmental degradation, the culprits of resource decline. We are reluctant to trust and easily angered. However, we are also the source of inspiration, compassion, and creative solutions. What brings out the reasonable side of our capacity? The Reasonable Person Model (RPM) offers a simple framework for considering essential ingredients in how people, at their best, deal with one another and the resources on which we all rely. RPM is a hopeful and engaging framework that helps us understand and address a wide diversity of issues. The 20 chapters of Fostering Reasonableness provide the conceptual foundations of the framework and applications examining contexts as diverse as a region, organization, the classroom, finding common ground in resource planning, education in the prison environment, greening in the inner city. Our collective hope in putting the book together is to encourage a way of seeing, a way of understanding and examining circumstances that might lead to more wholesome, adaptive, and effective means of addressing the big and little issues that depend on humanity’s reasonableness.

In dealing with environmental issues we are repeatedly confronted by the paradox that the biggest obstacle to a more humane world for people is -- people. Again and again designers, planners, citizen groups, policy makers, and managers set out to solve "real" problems and end up mired in "people" problems. This book attempts to apply the skills and insights of the behavioral sciences to this dilemma. The approach is untraditional, not only in its theoretical framework, but also in its focus. The emphasis is not on the environment itself, but on how people know and experience it, for we believe that the first priority is not specific answers to specific problems, but a greater understanding of the creature we are dealing with, a larger view of what people are like.
 

The nature and consequences of aging depend on its environmental context, and the literature does not treat the various environmental dimensions in an integrated fashion. The authors introduce a general approach to the human ecosystem, highlighting theoretical and empirical issues necessary to an understanding of person-environment interaction related to aging. They then investigate in detail three aspects of the environment of older persons: residential and neighborhood, interpersonal support networks, and age-related attitudes. They give specific attention to the impact of the age composition of neighborhoods and interpersonal networks. The authors present findings from their interview survey of 1,185 community residents aged 60 and over. Major findings from the interviews include:

1. Despite objective neighborhood problems, older persons express high neighborhood satisfaction. This partly reflects limited residential options, as well as a passive and vicarious spatial experience. The environment is experienced in diverse ways; however, urbanism and personal competence shape the nature and outcomes of person-environment interaction.
2. Older persons have relatively robust interpersonal support networks. Perceived sufficiency of contact and support are more salient to morale than are more objective measures of interpersonal support.
3. Although attitudes toward other older people are generally favorable, patterns of age identity reflect a detrimental view of aging. There is little evidence that socialization for aging or age-group solidarity make aging “easier” in this regard.
4. Older persons exhibit moderate age homogeneity within their interpersonal networks, partly reflecting neighborhood age concentration. Contrary to the apparent benefits of planned age-segregated housing, age homogeneity in neighborhoods and networks does not contribute to well-being.

The authors examine three major themes in their concluding chapter; age itself does not “loom large” in the lives of these community residents, though age becomes salient under certain conditions; there is diversity in the implications of the environmental context for aging, in particular reflecting an “environmental docility” hypothesis; and aging must be viewed in interactional or transactional terms—older people “construct” the environment as a subjective entity.
 

"Rapoport is concerned with the meanings which buildings, their contents, and their inhabitants convey, and the conclusions which can be drawn therefrom for procedures of architectural design to satisfy the people who will ultimately live in these buildings. . . . A challenging book on a subject that has had insufficient attention in the past." —Man and Environment

"Fills a significant gap: it introduces the notion of environmental meaning so clearly that no reader will doubt the basic premise that the environment holds meaning as part of a cultural system of symbols, and influences our actions and our determinations of social order." —Design Book Review

"This is the second edition of a book first published in 1982. . . . Enthusiastic and inquiring as the reader is brought into the writer's thought processes." —Progress in Human Geography (England)

"It has merits not to be found in any other book in this much-discussed and little understood subject, to wit: it is short, it is simple, and it is useful. It is even, in parts, entertaining....a book which will help architects to do their job better." —Architecture Australia
 

An inquiry into how we engage with the world, and how solutions to environmental challenges can be found in the heart of our emotional relationships with places

"Van Gelder offers her most deeply personal stories as microcosmic examples of universal human experience, thus creating an empathic bond with her reader that conveys power and understanding simultaneously, and stimulates the reader's imagination toward reflection upon similarly personal stories of place. Van Gelder has modeled the relationship between story and place by telling placeful stories, and so has licensed the reader to do the same. Her writing throughout is rich and metaphoric. She is a gifted storyteller and a competent scholar, a combination to be treasured."
---Joseph W. Meeker, Professor Emeritus, College of Arts/Science, Union Institute and University, and author of The Spheres of Life, The Comedy of Survival, and Minding the Earth

Weaving a Way Home is an inquiry into the complex relationship between people, place, and story. In our memories and connections to a place, we are given one of the few opportunities to have deep relationships with place---relationships that cannot be described in words. Place can embody powerful emotions for us, and Leslie Van Gelder argues that we ourselves are places---geographical points possessing unique perspectives---that can feel displaced, replaced, or immovable. While the places of the external world can be accessed through maps and a good GPS system, our emotional landscapes are best reached through the sharing of stories.

In the tradition of writers Lewis Hyde, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Meeker, Steven Mithen, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams, Van Gelder uses both creative nonfiction narrative and evolutionary biological theory to explore complex terrain. Following Van Gelder's own travels, the book moves from the caves of the Dordogne lit only by the small beam of a flashlight, to an acacia thicket in Mozambique, to a black fly–infested bay inappropriately named Baie de Ha Ha in the inlands of Quebec, to the green line wrapped in barbed wire separating northern and southern Cyprus, to Abu Simbel's empty stone eyes in the Egyptian desert, and finally to the high road above Pelorus Sound on the rocky coasts of New Zealand. The author takes the reader to each place to create a storied landscape and explore new intellectual terrain. Van Gelder shows us that our collections of experiences, unique to us, can only be shared through the articulation of narrative.Weaving a Way Home will appeal to those deeply interested in knowing how we forge relationships with places and how that shapes who we are.

Jacket photographs: Garden gate: © iStockphoto.com/Richard Goerg. Iron fence: Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, Leslie Van Gelder.

Author photograph: Kevin Sharpe