Re-envisioning community-wildfire relations in the U.S. West as adaptive governance

• Published in: Ecology and society Vol. 20; no. 3; p. 1
• Main Authors: Abrams, Jesse B, Knapp, Melanie, Paveglio, Travis B, Ellison, Autumn, Moseley, Cassandra, Nielsen-Pincus, Max, Carroll, Matthew S
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ottawa Resilience Alliance 01-09-2015
• Subjects: Adaptation; Anthropogenic factors; Community relations; Ecology; Flammability; Forest & brush fires; Governance; Social psychology; States; Wildfires; New Mexico; United States > US; Nevada
• ISSN: 1708-3087

A decades-long pattern of increasingly large and destructive wildfires in places like the western United States, Australia, and the Mediterranean region has motivated a dialogue regarding the need to foster “fire adapted” or “fire resilient” human communities (Paton and Tedim 2012, Paveglio et al. 2012, Kulig et al. 2013, Prior and Eriksen 2013). This dialogue includes a range of academics, policy makers, and practitioners with interests in reducing the human, ecological, and financial toll of large wildfire events by encouraging more adaptive behaviors at the community level. Achieving the goal of greater community fire resilience, thereby allowing fire to play the regenerative role that it has played for millennia, is complicated by the multiscalar nature of the problem. The chief drivers of the wildfire dilemma in the U.S. West include episodic as well as longer term, anthropogenically driven climatic variability (Heyerdahl et al. 2002, Westerling et al. 2006); long-term wildland fuel accumulation because of a legacy of active fire suppression, past management practices, and other land uses (Covington and Moore 1994, Hessburg and Agee 2003, Miller et al. 2009); and the expansion of the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where human communities, structures, and infrastructure abut or intermix with flammable vegetation (Syphard et al. 2007, Theobald and Romme 2007, Hammer et al. 2009). These drivers intersect with a panoply of social, psychological, managerial, economic, and institutional challenges to create a seemingly intractable wicked problem (Carroll et al. 2007) for which there is no single or overarching solution.