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Cultivating values: environmental values and sense of place as correlates of sustainable agricultural practices

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Abstract

To assess whether and how environmental values and sense of place relate to sustainable farming practices, we conducted a study in South Kona, Hawaii, addressing environmental values, sense of place, and farm sustainability in five categories: environmental health, community engagement and food security, culture and history, education and research, and economics. We found that the sense of place and environmental values indexes showed significant correlation to each category of sustainability in both independent linear regressions and multivariate regression. In total, sense of place explained a larger share of the overall farm performance. However, each indicator showed relative strengths; environmental values showed significantly higher correlation to environmental and educational practices. Furthermore the scales were complimentary, and the use of both scales greatly improved prediction of good farming practices from a multiple-impact perspective. With implications for community and environmental impacts, results suggest that a more comprehensive view of farmers’ environmental values and place connections may help illuminate individual farmers’ decisions and sustainability-related practices.

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Notes

  1. Due to the length of the survey, we provide the final list of items and response statistics as a supplementary table (see Table A1 in the Appendix).

  2. Respondants were allowed to indicate multiple ethnic backgrounds if they identified as multicultural.

  3. Age and NEP (r2 = 0.02; p > 0.12); age and sense of place (r2 = 0.01; p > 0.72); education and NEP (ANOVA p > 0.61); education and sense of place (ANOVA p > 0.87).

Abbreviations

NEP:

New ecological paradigm

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Acknowledgments

We thank the many people who contributed to this article, the surveyors and the surveyed, and the many who contributed feedback throughout the process. This project utilized funding from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, the Switzer Foundation, Stanford School of Earth Science, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Ngai Tahu Research Centre.

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  1. Department of Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Hawaii, St. John Plant Science Lab, Room 102, 3190 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Noa Kekuewa Lincoln

  2. School of Education and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 212 Cubberley, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Nicole M. Ardoin

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Correspondence to Noa Kekuewa Lincoln.

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Lincoln, N.K., Ardoin, N.M. Cultivating values: environmental values and sense of place as correlates of sustainable agricultural practices. Agric Hum Values 33, 389–401 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9613-z

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