“It Is All Mine, Native!”: A Sense of Place in the Context of Informal Nature Management (the Case of Karakansky Pine Wood)

The article reveals the analytical potential of the concept of a sense of place in the annex to such large natural objects as suburban forests. On the data of ethnographic case-study held in 2021-2022 in the Novosibirsk region, shown how the biophysical characteristics of the natural-anthropogenic landscape, refracting through the history of life and individual experience of natural resource management, participate in the formation of place attachment, place dependence, place identity and place satisfaction. The components of a sense of place include both rational and irrational components, voluntariness and necessity, choice and lack thereof. Personal experience of pine wood users — rural residents, summer residents and city tourists — is characterized by different degree of rootedness in the landscape, which qualitatively and quantitatively measured by the duration of permanent and seasonal residence, the presence of generational ties with the place, features of environmental management practices. The experience of place, which shapes the value of the place and through it the components of the sense of place, can be both unifying, creating unconditional value, not based on comparison (native places), and individualizing, creating comparative satisfaction and attachment to place (place resource). Strong emotional experiences of unity with nature are balanced, and often reinforced by economic difficulties, which as a result leads to perception of the place not only as the “best”, but also as “native”, “own”.