Skip to main content
Author(s):
Toddi A. Steelman
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Communication & Education
Recovery after fire
Resilience

NRFSN number: 14736
Record updated:

There are fundamental spatial and temporal disconnects between the specific policies that have been crafted to address our wildfire challenges. The biophysical changes in fuels, wildfire behavior, and climate have created a new set of conditions for which our wildfire governance system is poorly suited to address. To address these challenges, a reorientation of goals is needed to focus on creating an anticipatory wildfire governance system focused on social and ecological resilience. Key characteristics of this system could include the following: (1) not taking historical patterns as givens; (2) identifying future social and ecological thresholds of concern; (3) embracing diversity/heterogeneity as principles in ecological and social responses; and (4) incorporating learning among different scales of actors to create a scaffolded learning system.

Citation

Steelman, T. 2016. U.S. wildfire governance as social-ecological problem. Ecology and Society. 21(4): 3.

Access this Document