Losing Ground: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana

4. This Is Our Home: Attachment to the Coast

39 4 tHis is our Home Attachment to the Coast We all know that certain places are special to some people. Because of the special meanings that some places hold, people often get attached, and this is certainly the case in coastal Louisiana. As in a remaining handful of locations around the U.S., many of those living along Louisiana’s coast have called their place home for generations. European settlement started during the beginnings of the nation and evolved uniquely from the rest of the United States, giving it further symbolic meaning for community members to develop an attachment towards. Notwithstanding its distinctiveness, the way attachment occurred in Louisiana was the same way it develops in many places. And, as with all of those who become attached to a place, it affects their daily experience of that place. From residents’ interpretations of their experiences of land loss, we can see how the region that is Louisiana’s coast is a part of how they view themselves . The attachment they have to the coast is the most important factor influencing their interpretation of land loss. For these residents, self-identifying with Louisiana’s coast is due to the significant life experiences that have occurred where place both served as a backdrop and played an interactive role. As I and my colleagues have noted, this feeling of connection to a place develops “through learned perceptual practice of intimate interaction with 40 This Is Our Home: Attachment to the Coast place” (Burley et al. 2007, pp. 349–50).1 Stated another way, place attachment is a bond of people to a physical environment based on cognition and affect which then influences behavior (Burley et al. 2007; Altman and Low 1992; Relph 1976; Tuan 1979; Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff 1983). It was during interviews that residents illuminated this definition of place attachment with personal experience and revealed the role that this region played in their lives. They transformed physical landscapes into symbolic landscapes through self-definitions (Greider and Garkovich 1994). In other words, this place became socially constructed according to the meanings residents gave it. In fact, all places are socially constructed in some way. This social construction occurs as place becomes imbued with symbolic meaning according to the values and beliefs embedded in the self-definitions of individuals. These components of identity and their concurrent values and beliefs are, in part, extracted from the larger culture (Proshansky et al. 1983; Boyer 1994; Greider and Garkovich 1994). For instance, residents of coastal Louisiana are likely to feel that they share similarities with other U.S. citizens; however, they also believe that they possess some characteristics specific to the region that makes them different from many other Americans.2 In turn, how they see themselves affects how they see place. Coastal Louisianians see the region they live in as being like other places in the U.S., but they also see “their place” as being very unique and having a physical landscape and culture that is unlike any other. These differences of how we see places based, in part, on self-definitions should not be surprising and was evident in Freudenberg and Gramling’s (1994) study, presented in chapter two, of the specifics of place that facilitated the acceptance of the oil industry in Louisiana. Again, all places are socially constructed. This does not mean that the physical elements of a locale play no role in how we see them, only that the physical has no inherent meaning beyond the symbolic meaning we decide to imbue it with.3 Actually, the physical context of place, the built and the natural, makes attachment possible. When individuals develop an attachment to place, first, they have significant social processes and experiences with and within a physical locale, such as someone’s first camping trip to Yosemite National Park or the spending of an exciting youthful summer in Brooklyn, New York, for example.4 These events, both in the actual event and the individual’s understanding of them, are influenced by the particular social context and components of identity.5 Next, these significant social processes and experiences that occur with and within a physical place produce sociophysical associations 41 This Is Our Home: Attachment to the Coast with place. As these personally noteworthy associative experiences accrue, attachment develops. Consequently, when we become attached to places, the physical elements become imbued with special meanings derived from experiences...