Experiences of a changing environment: Strange beauty and normal change in the fire-adapted forests of Victoria, Australia

Natural environments are changing with shifts in fire regimes. A little-understood impact is change to the interactions people have with forests. Generally, forests invoke positive feelings, but wildfire changes both forests and people’s experiences of them. These were investigated with attention to the ever-changing physical characteristics of fire-adapted forests. In a mixed method approach, interviews were used to explore the subjective experiences of 57 adults in forests at different times since fire. A photo-based survey with 529 responses enabled further analysis of forest characteristics in experience. The Human-Environment Interaction (HEI) model guided analysis of experience events on four factors which shape them: the physical environment, activities undertaken, personal resources and social support. We found that bushfires create potent environments by changing the sense of enclosure, colours and dead trees in forests. Different levels of environmental potency combine with activities and personal resources to invoke different types of experience, the main ones being aesthetic (feelings of pleasure) restorative (relaxation) and loss/recovery (sadness mixed with hope). Personal resources are particularly important in the loss/recovery type. People who are connected to nature (one such resource), feel the loss of forest elements, but also notice forest recovery, which inspires hope. As fire frequency increases with climate change, experiences can be expected to become more negative overall. However, thought-based adaptations may be occurring in the spread of beliefs that forests are inherently dynamic and in the emergence of a fire aesthetic. Forest managers can assist people to come to terms with wildfires by providing access to forests postfire and by engagement to encourage adaptation.