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Title: Investigating Wildfire as a Catalyst for Community-Level Resilience

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2020

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Abstract: Wildfire is increasingly entering the global consciousness as severe events in California, Australia, and Greece elicit intense emotional response while exposing the consequences of a changing climate. In concert with uncertainties around climate change, policymakers, scientists, and activists call for supporting the resilience of social and ecological systems. Yet resilience as a concept is not monolithic. Resilience speaks to maintaining core structures and functions, but also adapting and transforming them so they may coexist with current and future disturbances. Questions remain over who decides which core structures and functions of a particular system are most valued, whether they should be adapted or transformed, and who benefits from system interventions. In an age where knowledge is situated by media outlets, policies, and worldviews, resilience is a goal that can be easily usurped by those who benefit from extant system structures and functions. Therefore, from a social justice framework, if resilience goals are to enhance equity and well-being, grassroots efforts must engage in creation and pursuance. In the case of wildfire, this includes mobilizing the communities which have and potentially will be exposed to wildfire events. Communities, a compilation of social and institutional structures, will need to consider and work within, or seek to modify, institutional barriers to pursue their resilience goals. Because wildfire does not recognize boundaries, local resilience goals will need to be situated in the fire susceptibility of the landscape in which communities are built. Overall, if resilience is to be a productive goal for communities to pursue, communities themselves must comprehensively articulate the values they wish to be resilient, identify the disturbances or perturbations those values need to be resilient to, select the form of resilience they wish to support, and ensure that resilience benefits are distributed equitably and fairly. Perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire events may indicate how successful community resilience building efforts are in articulating and pursuing resilience goals. Here, I 2 conceptualize community resilience as a process that allows communities to thrive during and between disturbance events such as wildfire. Utilizing this framework, perceptions of positive outcomes following a wildfire event indicate resilience efforts are achieving their aim. To study these dynamics with my thesis research, I utilized concepts from community resilience theory and assessed how individual perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire events were associated with community level resilience building efforts. I acknowledge the inherent limitations to employing individual perceptions in the study of community-level phenomena, as perceptions may not reflect actions taken to support community-level resilience and are subject to the conceptualization and definitions that each may ascribe their ‘community.’ However, by adopting individual perceptions to study community-level resilience, I sought to better understand which theorized community resilience efforts were viewed in a positive light by individuals affected by wildfire, thus shedding light on important individual and community-level dynamics related to wildfire and wildfire response. To pursue my research questions, I analyzed survey responses and facilitated group discussion dialogue, both conducted in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana and in the Methow Valley, Washington in the United States of America. In Chapter One, I review the literature on community resilience to wildfire, concluding with pertinent research questions guiding the following chapters. In Chapter Two, I built a multiple linear regression model to assess which community-level characteristics and wildfire impact factors were associated with individual responses to the statement “Wildfire events made my community stronger,” a metric of perceptions of community-level outcomes. Model results suggested that perceptions of strong leadership and community engagement, a sense of feeling at home in the community, effective communication with wildfire managers and access to wildfire information, adequate protection from wildfire, and contextual community and wildfire factors were associated with people perceiving positive community-level outcomes following wildfire. Interestingly, negative impacts caused by wildfire, an understanding of wildfire risk, loss of cellphone connection, internet connection, 3 and television service, a sense of community, gender, and age fell out of the final model, suggesting they did not affect perceptions of community-level outcomes, at least in these instances. Although these findings did not address the question of who benefits from community resilience building efforts, nor whom the survey respondents viewed as their community, they do suggest that certain community-level processes in the resilience literature and certain wildfire impact factors are associated with perceptions of positive community-level outcomes whereas others are not. To my knowledge, this is the first research study that empirically evaluates whether factors theorized to support community resilience are in fact associated with perceptions of positive community-level outcomes. Thus, this research contributes to resilience literature by identifying which social factors are associated with community resilience as a process, and supports managers, political figures, and community members investing in select social factors that support community-level resilience. In Chapter Three, I seek a more nuanced understanding of how perceptions of community-level outcomes may relate to community-level resilience through an analysis of notes and records from facilitated group discussions in the same two valleys in which the survey was conducted. From these discussions I found that individual perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire exposure were influenced by people in the valleys sharing resources during wildfire events, seeing wildfire agencies improve coordination and cooperation between and during wildfire events to support fuel mitigation and wildfire response measures, and increasing social investment in wildfire preparedness in the valleys. Taken together, my research suggests there is a connection between residents of the valleys perceiving positive community-level outcomes and residents of the valleys investing in measures that support community-level resilience to wildfire. These findings suggest that resilience literature can utilize perceptions of positive community-level outcomes as an indicator of community resilience, when appropriate caution is exercised. Additionally, these findings encourage managers, researchers, and politicians to further investigate why perceptions of community-level outcomes are positive or negative, 4 as it may reveal mechanisms behind the productivity (or failure) of community resilience building efforts. The Thesis Conclusion further summarizes these findings and calls for more empirical evidence on which factors are associated with perceptions of community-level outcomes, and what that may mean for community-level resilience.

Url: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12702&context=etd

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Authors: Clarke, L.J.

Institution: University of Montana

Department: W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation

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Pages: 1-105

Data Collections: IPUMS International

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization, Natural Resource Management

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