Environmental psychology: Mapping landscape meanings for ecosystem management

An intellectual map is a good starting point for any effort to integrate research on the human dimensions of ecosystem management. We must remember going into such exercises, however, that every map maker imposes a certain point of view, sense of order, or set of conventions in the effort to represent the world. Just as there are competing ways to divide the landscape into ecological or social units, there are many ways to divide intellectual territory. One interpretation of the relevant intellectual domains to be inregrated and applicd to ecosystem management is the list of disciplines (chapters) that make up the present section of this volume. Also influencing how the world will be represented is the selection of authors to write these chapters. This chapter was described as social psychology in the original prospectus for the book, but we prefer to characterize our subject matter as environmental psychology. We explicitly excluded subject matter from behavioral psychology, humanistic psychology, personality, psychophysiology, and cognitive science, though these are all relevant. On a broad intellectual map, psychology is the place where individual differences in attitudes, values, and beliefs are usually charted. For the purpose of identifying and suggesting ways psychology can contribute to this integrated effort we need to briefly describe how we would locate environmental psychology on the intellectual map before discussing the details of the terrain within its borders.