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Natural Resources

Weaving Nostalgia into Sense of Place in Working Landscapes: Evidence from Utah Ranchers Zubair Barkat*, Zubair Barkat, Jessica D. Ulrich-Schad,

Sense of place (SOP) in working landscapes describes how farmers, ranchers, and other land actors connect with the land they operate through emotional bonds, meanings, functional dependence, and identity shaping. We propose the inclusion of nostalgia, a bittersweet emotional reflection on the past, as a temporal and emotional thread woven through five SOP dimensions: place attachment, physical place identity, social identity, economic dependence, and physical place dependence. Nostalgia can intensify emotional connections, evoke memories, and reinforce continuity across generations amid environmental and land use change. Our argument draws on 14 in-depth interviews with Utah ranchers and is analyzed using thematic analysis. Although interviews did not explicitly ask about nostalgia, participants often reflected on memories, inherited practices, and emotional ties to land and livelihood, and these reflections appeared across SOP dimensions.

Nostalgia surfaced in narratives of a “deep, almost inborn connection to the land,” being “now in the fifth generation,” shared values “built on the past that we share for the future,” economic shifts where “the farm was making enough money to get by,” and biophysical change captured as “now it’s bone dry.” Across dimensions, nostalgia links the past to the present, connects emotion to action, and ties memory to land management practices, enhancing understanding of ranchers’ relationships with working landscapes. Framing nostalgia as a thread addresses challenges in SOP research in working landscapes, where practical livelihood dependency, emotional, and historical elements blend all at once. We also note limitations: memory and meanings are shaped by power dynamics, perspective, and lived experiences, and nostalgia can idealize the past and obscure tensions or alternative narratives. Future research can use multimethod designs and comparative studies across land tenures or regions. Beyond SOP, nostalgia may inform research on rancher value systems, socioeconomic change, and succession or transition planning in rangeland social ecological contexts.