Local attitudes to land use in the Tully-Mission beach area of North Queensland

Abstract

Recently a new interdisciplinary field of research has emerged in geography which studies how persons comprehend the everyday physical environment, how they use it, how they shape it and how they are shaped by it. In seeking an understanding of the behavioural aspects of the total personal-societal-environmental system the exploratory research reported here focuses on the elucidation of people's attitudes towards changes in the pattern of land use in the Tully-Mission Beach Area of North Queensland. Within this context an attempt is made to highlight differences that exist between two local communities in terms of their land use attitudes and the influences which underlie them. The report therefore attempts to examine the forces underlying reaction to land use decision, rather than the type of reaction. It examines the information sources and the range and types of perception, and attempts to characterize attitudes so as to indicate their general direction or stance taken by local residents toward their local land resources. A survey questionnaire incorporating both attitude scaling and open ended question was. used to obtain data relating to land use and land use issues. It was shown that the two populations differ in their attitude stance toward land use. Variations in attitude/value system in relation to land use were then identified further by attempting to polarize individual attitudes and values into an economic utility or environmental preservation-conservation stance. This was achieved with the use of the Clustan 1C computer programme which sub-divided each community into groups with common attitudes and by such coalescence of attitudes the identification of two distinctly different groups in relation to land use stance: (a pro-conservation group and a pro-economic utility group) were identified. An analysis of the characteristics of each group was then undertaken to determine possible indicators of attitude orientation and intensity. The research concludes with a number of possible hypotheses relating to the characteristics of each land use group and ends with a discussion of the relevance of such findings to the decision making process.