Globally, around 0.78 billion rural people live in proximity to forests and have been considered “forest-dwelling” and/or “forest dependent”. Forest dependency has so far been mainly studied in material terms, while the non-material relationships to forests have been addressed less frequently. To fill this gap, the overall objective of this study is to assess forest-dwelling people’s relationship to their community, their livestock, and their forest landscapes through a relational values and human-nature connectedness lens. Using the Zagros mountains of Iran as a case study, we performed individual interviews with 35 villagers that live within forests landscapes and that are engaged in pastoral activities. Emerging themes were identified and categorized through qualitative analysis. We found that forest-dwelling people emphasized a complex array of values relating them to their community, their livestock, and their landscapes. These values included experiential, emotional, cognitive, and philosophical dimensions of human-nature connectedness. Respondents expressed an erosion of values and practices related to community, livestock, and landscapes and articulated very few positive visions for the future of these values and practices. We conclude that participatory processes and tools may be valuable for empowering forest-dwelling people to identify pathways toward a desirable future. We encourage forest conservation strategies to become socially inclusive by considering people’s deep relational values and their land stewardship practices.
