Discourses of Place: Environmental Interpretation about Vermont Forests

ABSTRACT

Motivated by a lack of scholarly attention to the substance of interpretive messages and materials, this study examines discursive aspects of interpretative brochures available at forest recreation and tourism sites in Vermont, United States. Directive statements that instruct and guide visitor experiences—and the discourses to which they contribute—were analyzed for content, form, and meaning. Across the interpretive brochures, four broad discourses were identified: the natural forest, the recreational forest, the productive forest, and the dependent forest. Consideration of intertextuality revealed a fifth, hybrid discourse that linked forests to meanings of Vermont as a distinctive place. The convergence of these discourses across the set of brochures gives insight into the ways interpretation serves to both direct individual visitor experiences at particular sites, and to influence the development of larger-scale place meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse
• environmental interpretation
• forests
• place
• Vermont

Acknowledgements

Thanks are also extended to Walter Kuentzel, Cheryl Morse, and Robert Manning for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Program under Grant [# USDA-NIFA-MSCFR-003725].