To Lose One’s Place: Confronting Environmental and Community Change on the Northern Great Plains

A task of accelerating importance for sociologists is grappling with the social implications of environmental change. Though a global phenomenon, environmental change also has local impact and, central to our study, alters how places are known. Scholars are granting more attention to conceptualizing how local environmental change is experienced as loss. Thus, arising from a premise that loss plays a role in the remaking of place, in this paper we ask: What does it mean to lose one’s “place”? To explore the intersection of the sociology of loss and placemaking, we turn to a case from the prairie of northeastern Montana to explore the sociology of loss, where local cattle ranchers are confronting a moment of profound environmental change affecting both their homeplace and their place in society. Driven by complex demographic and socioeconomic phenomena, ranchers long embedded in the community and deeply attached to place are grasping to maintain an emplaced identity some feel is being erased by a host of ambitious public and private land initiatives. In this study, we draw on oral histories collected from ride-alongs and archival interviews to interrogate the spatio-temporal fluidity of place. We find that despite individuals’ epistemological differences shaping their unique senses of place, a history of public-private land controversies create common ideas around what it means to be a “good” neighbor and land steward. Interwoven through these narratives of place construction, however, are expressions of loss as a place known through these shared ideas change in ways that erase its identity. Thus, we situate loss as integral, yet often hidden, in the process of placemaking (and remaking). Centering loss in the face of environmental change furthers rural and environmental sociological work in understanding the conjoined relationships between people and their place(s).