Psychological distance of timber harvesting for private woodland owners

Private woodland owners (PWOs) in the U.S.A. often do not actively manage their forests, and forest policies appeal to a small subset of owners that have management plans and participate in incentive programs. We address this policy disconnect by considering a new possible explanation; PWOs perceive forest management as an abstract and distant concept. Psychological distance (PD) is built on the premise that an individual's mental representations of objects and activities depend on four dimensions of distance between the individual and the object: spatial, temporal, social, and hypothetical. There are few applications of PD in natural resource and environmental research. Our objectives were to: 1) Understand the PD of private woodland owners; and 2) Evaluate how the four dimensions of PD are specifically related to the timber harvesting decision. We interviewed 32 PWOs in Maine, U.S.A. to understand their timber harvesting decision. Results suggest that PD can be described using frequency of harvesting, absentee ownership, co-ownership structure, and harvesting knowledge. PWOs with distant representations of harvesting require different policy mechanisms than those who are psychologically closer. PD is a useful theory in understanding forest management behavior by describing the extent to which timber harvesting is relevant to a private woodland owner. Social, temporal, and hypothetical distance can be shortened by offering frequent opportunities for woodland owner engagement like peer-to-peer networking and learning events and a deeper understanding of how timber harvesting promotes sustainable forest management.