Environmental learning and the social construction of an exurban landscape in Fremont County, Colorado

Across the rural American West, the restructuring of rural capitalism has transformed production landscapes into those increasingly structured by the development and consumption of natural and cultural amenities. This project used principles from symbolic interactionism, ethnographic methods, and the analytical framework of regional political ecology to understand the role of environmental learning in negotiating the new management regime associated with amenity-based capitalism in rural Fremont County, Colorado. The study found that most amenity residents participate regularly in social learning about the environment through a variety of interpersonal and organizational behaviors. In addition, they are responding collectively to environmental risks and opportunities associated with wildfire, noxious weeds and invasive grass species, prospective uranium mining, and restoration of cultural-landscape features. Ultimately, the practices of environmental learning concern how private properties and assets will be managed relative to the social construction of the environment as an amenity for personal consumption. Conservation and management prospects in this and other rural areas in the postindustrial world can be enhanced by understanding the microsociology of exurban geographies and by engaging the social forms and processes related to this distinctive landscape construction.