Environmental Worldview, Place Attachment, and Awareness of Environmental Impacts in a Marine Environment

Abstract

Place attachment provides insight on why and to what extent individuals value a particular setting. Most investigations involving place attachment and environmental attitudes have been conducted in terrestrial settings; little work has addressed proenvironmental behavior in marine settings. The purpose of the current investigation was to extend Stern et al.’s work, which indicates that individuals’ environmental worldviews (EWVs) influence their attitudes toward anthropogenic impacts on the environment. We hypothesized a model wherein place attachment partially mediates the relationship between recreational visitors’ EWV and their awareness of consequences of negative impacts on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. We then compared this model with competing models. Our results suggest that place attachment is a useful addition to studies that use Stern et al.’s value-belief-norm model.