Cultural Acceptability of Alternative Pit and Quarry Rehabilitations

Abstract

Pit and quarry sites from sand, gravel, and rock extraction must be rehabilitated by law in Ontario. Adjacent and nearby landscapes affect local residents’ perceptions of the success of rehabilitation in terms of how the former extraction site “fits” the landscape. Along with ecological imperatives, the ways in which rehabilitation is designed to fit a social landscape warrants investigation. It would benefit local people, the aggregates industry, rehabilitation designers, and policy makers to have more information about how rehabilitation projects can embrace local ecological and social contexts by considering how people might perceive the acceptability and cultural value of a rehabilitation. We explored this question in southern Ontario using an online questionnaire to gather responses to a series of photographs, some of which were simulated, showing a range of landscape conditions that might occur around pits and quarries. Respondents were considerably concerned with forest loss, and to a lesser degree with habitats like wetlands and streams. Though housing perceived to be suburban was disliked, housing clusters in a rural area did not suffer the same result. People did not consistently choose a single focus as most desirable. Instead they responded to attributes within the context in which the rehabilitation occurred.