Weather sensitivity and climate change perceptions of tourists: a segmentation analysis

ABSTRACT

Many communities rely on tourism spending, so it is important to understand any potential changes to tourist flows resulting from changing climate and weather patterns. However, tourists are not a homogenous group, as they have different motivations, values, and goals. Therefore, the purpose of this investigation is to better understand potentially varying perceptions and behavior of different tourist types, specifically in regards to their weather sensitivity, climate change concern, and behavioral intention for climate change mitigation. Tourists were randomly surveyed at 20 locations throughout the state of Maine in the United States (n = 704). Segmentation analysis on the activities tourists participated in yielded three segments of Maine tourists: non-nature-based tourists (50.6%), nature-based generalists (16.2%), and nature-based specialists (33.2%). Differences across segments were explored for perceptions of weather impacts, climate change concern, and mitigation intent. Additionally, weather sensitivity was analyzed based on type of overnight accommodations to better understand if this also had a role in differences. Non-nature-based tourists thought that weather variables were less influential during their travels in Maine than the other segments, while nature-based generalists perceived weather to have the highest influence. Additionally, nature-based specialists had the highest level of climate change belief, while nature-based generalists had the highest willingness to engage in climate change mitigation behavior. Results are useful to understand how segments of tourism demand may be altered with a changing climate, such as increased temperatures, precipitation, and storms, and what groups may be the most beneficial to target for marketing or educational efforts to reduce the impact of climate change.     

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge,Action, and Cosmopolitanism

Facing challenges to the civic purpose of higher education, some scholars and administrators turn to the rhetoric of engagement. Simultaneously, the political philosophy of cosmopolitanism has gained intellectual favor, advocating openness to the lived experiences of distant others. We articulate linkages between these two discourses in an extended case study, finding that a cosmopolitan ethos of engagement in a rural context can improve (1) understanding among people ordinarily separated by spatialized social‐ecological differences, (2) prospects for longer term environmental sustainability, and (3) the visionary potential of collaborative inquiry. Despite globalization of food systems and neoliberal shifts in fishery management, an annual fisheries forum facilitates coalitions that overcome dichotomies between technocratic and local knowledge, extending benefits to fishing communities, academia, and public policy. Iterative and loosely structured capacity building expands informally through affective processes of recognition and care, as decentralized leadership supports collective mobilization toward alternate futures.     

Squaring the Shield: William Ridgeway's Two Models of Early Greece

From the early 1880s the Cambridge-trained classicist William Ridgeway had applied cutting-edge anthropological theory to his reading of ancient Greek literature in order to develop an evolutionary account of the continuous development of early Greek social institutions. Then, at the turn of the century, he began to argue that archaeological evidence demonstrated that the Achaean warriors described by Homer were in origin Germanic tribesmen from north of the Alps who had but recently conquered Mycenaean Greece. The present paper inquires as to how Ridgeway reconciled these seemingly opposed visions of early Greek society. A fairly comprehensive survey of his writings leads to the suggestion that, in Ridgeway's opinion, Achaean invasion had left little lasting impact upon most early Greek social institutions, but that it had been responsible for a fundamental shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and that this shift was the key to the subsequent greatness of Greek—and so ultimately Western—civilisation.     

DEFENDING SPIRIT,SPIRITUALIZING MATTER: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE MEDICAL SCIENCES

This review essay discusses Larry Sommer McGrath's Making Spirit Matter: Neurology, Psychology, and Selfhood in Modern France (2020), a history of the philosophical current known as “spiritualism.” The book covers the long nineteenth century, focusing especially on the first part of the Third Republic (1870–1914), and studies how French academic philosophers confronted the discourses about human cognition and behavior that were produced by physicians—namely, physiologists and pathologists, phrenologists, neurologists, alienists, and psychiatrists. It describes how, while engaged in this confrontation, French philosophy took a peculiar shape, eventually influencing the development of some sciences—namely, psychology, which emerged progressively as a discipline at the crossroads of medicine and philosophy. In the second part of the essay, starting from a terminological analysis of a series of terms dealing with “spirit,” I consider the formation of spiritualism by adopting an approach that diverges slightly from the ones proper to history of philosophy and intellectual history. I inscribe the philosophical discourses in their contexts of emergence, paying particular attention to institutional macrostructures and their inertia. This provides another perspective on “spiritualism,” which may no longer be conceived as a current or a school; rather, it should be conceived as the effect of the conditions of possibility of academic philosophy in France. It seems to me that, starting from the beginning of the nineteenth century, because of the organization of the educational institutions, the French philosophers’ agenda consisted mainly in opposing all forms of materialism, mechanism, and determinism and in defending the legitimacy of their discipline.     

The Phinney Site: The Remains of an American Armed Vessel Scuttled During the Penobscot Expedition of 1779

During the autumn of 1999 and 2000, members of the US Naval Historical Center's Underwater Archaeology Branch conducted an archaeological investigation of a wooden-hulled shipwreck in the Penobscot River, Penobscot County, Maine. The shipwreck site, known locally as the 'Phinney Site', represents a middle-to-late 18th century vessel. Attributes of the vessel's construction and artefact assemblage indicate that it was American-built, owned, and operated. Data recovered during the excavations have established an association between the shipwreck and the 1779 American fleet of nine armed ships scuttled in the river near the present-day city of Bangor during the final days of the Penobscot Expedition.
© 2004 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Soil chemical identification of ten thousand years of prehistoric human activity areas at the Munsungun Lake Thoroughfare,Maine

Soils on a Palaeo-Indian to historic sequence in one Maine locale are analysed for chemical enrichment. To guide excavation of four discrete sites up to 4000 m², samples are collected in grid patterns and analysed for pH, Mg, P and Ca. Concentrations of Mg point to probable hearths to define some centres of human activity on each site. These correlate well with anomalies determined independently by magnetometric survey. Excavation of anomalies provides evidence of hearths, culturally diagnostic artifacts, but also features resulting from tree-throw and drainage variation. The P and Ca results develop definition and delimitation of activity areas thus refining directions for further excavation. Since P and Ca concentrations result from substantial or sustained human occupation, they show promise for preexcavation differentiation of habitation sites from limited and specialized activity sites such as lithic chipping stations. Soil chemical analysis provides both a synchronic and diachronic preview of site perimeters, size and activity areas. The consistent site definition at the Munsungun Lake thoroughfare is useful for explaining patterns as well as locating them.     

Against Women's Suffrage: The Case of Maine and New Brunswick

In the 1890s, those opposed to women's suffrage in the borderlands of Maine and New Brunswick held a lot of the same arguments, but expressed them in different ways, and with different outcomes. In New Brunswick, the most vocal adversaries were male and represented in the Legislative Assembly. In Maine, a group of elite women, mostly from Portland, led the fight to keep women from voting. This article will explore the motivations, comparisons, and differences between the anti-suffragists of the borderlands, as well as explain some of the outcomes of the anti-suffrage movement that are still present today.