Wildfire Narratives

Contacts: Michal Russo, Paige Fischer, and Heidi Huber-Stearns

The Western wildfire crisis is an intractable challenge - despite investments in scientific research, policy, and management actions, impacts are getting worse. The wildfire community has diverse perspectives about how we got here, why we should care, and what we ought to do about it. That diversity can provide a wider and more comprehensive perspective of wildfire issues, but it can also lead to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and conflict. Whether or not experts agree with those perspectives, when experts dismiss or delegitimize them, they unintentionally make the crisis more intractable.

This research is an investigation of the different ways thought leaders are thinking and talking about the Western wildfire crisis. We conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews with 60 thought leaders to identify the underlying conceptual frames that shape their views about the causes and impacts of the western wildfire problem and how society ought to address it. Based on those interviews, and reinforced by published documents, conferences, websites, podcasts, and films, we identified 9 distinct wildfire narratives, or depictions of the Western wildfire crisis. We illustrate these findings as a wheel summarizing key areas of commonality and differences across the narratives. Our findings reveal significant friction driven by the underlying cognitive frames wildfire experts hold. However, the way experts talk about the crisis also reflects a blending across multiple narratives. In other words, experts describe more than one explanation for why we are facing a crisis and what society ought to do about it. This suggests that cultural, disciplinary, and political lines may be blurring, signaling an opportunity for establishing connections across historically divergent communities of practice. Ultimately, gaining a better understanding of the array of Western wildfire narratives may facilitate greater self-reflection and reconciliation in practice.