The view of forest margin villagers towards the environment and the relation to forests condition: A case study of Golestan province

Forest conservation is one of the challenges of sustainable development. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the villagers' views of the environment and forests. For this purpose, residents of rural areas of Golestan province were studied using the survey research method. The sample size was estimated as 364 using the Krejcie-Morgan table. Required data were collected by a questionnaire which its validity was confirmed by experts' opinions and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach's test. After analyzing the data with SPSS19 software, the results showed that the tendency of the villagers to the new environmental paradigm is moderately appropriate, and their attitude towards forest land-use change is moderate. Residents in villages near high-degraded forests had less tendency towards the new environmental paradigm and had more tendency towards forest land-use change. The tendency towards the new environmental paradigm had a negative and significant correlation with the attitude towards land-use change, indicating that with the improvement of villagers' view towards the environment, their tendency to change the forest lands decreased. Implementation of participatory programs in order to improve the attitude of the villagers towards protect nature and forests and also explain the environmental, economic, and social functions of forests for villagers are the suggestions of the present study.