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Wildfire severity is increasing in the western United States. Simultaneously, many recognize that fire is a natural process and advocate for learning to live with fire. Indeed, the naturalness of fire can be an important reason provided to increase the amount of fire on a landscape. However, “naturalness” can be interpreted in incommensurate ways, such as the historic range of variability of a system or the absence of human influence. What makes wildfires feel natural or unnatural to the people who experience them, and how naturalness affects reactions to wildfires is underexplored. Using social representations theory, we examine the 2023 Lookout Fire at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA). We use semi-structured interviews (n = 40) to explore how the research community associated with the HJA mentally constructs and uses naturalness to emotionally process and make meaning from the wildfire. We find even in a community with advanced training in ecology, respondents use a variety of metrics to determine naturalness, including ignition source, fire behavior, and pre-fire landscape characteristics and fire history. Respondents consider a variety of factors, and there was not consensus on whether the Lookout Fire was a “natural” fire. In general, respondents who described the fire as more natural were able to come to a state of acceptance and excitement for future research opportunities sooner than respondents who described the fire as largely unnatural. This has important implications for wildfire risk communication for scientists and practitioners who want to restore fire as a natural process. While fires perceived (or framed) as natural may be more readily accepted, fires perceived as unnatural may take longer to process. Fires perceived as human-caused and especially as climate-exacerbated may be the most difficult for people to process after and during the fire, and may have the most resistance for being managed for purposes other than full suppression.
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Interviews with members of the HJA Community during the Lookout Fire, HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, 2023
This dataset records the interview instrument, analytical codebook, and summary of results for the 2023 Lookout Fire Qualitative Interviews. Data was collected in 2023 in Corvallis, Oregon, and over Zoom. Members of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA) community (e.g., university faculty and administrative professionals, agency scientists and personnel, students, alumni and emeritus from the aforementioned communities) were interviewed between September 26th and November 8th 2023. At the time, the fire had largely stopped growing (no significant runs occurred during the interview period), but the fire was not fully contained and the fire severity was not yet known by the community. Data collection is complete. The interview included questions about emotional reactions to the Lookout Fire, current and foreseen impacts to research at the HJA, social relationships and the fire, naturalness of the fire, and climate change, climate anxiety, and the fire. Interviews were semi-structured; while interviews were guided by the interview protocol, conversation was allowed to proceed organically. In total, 40 respondents were interviewed. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed inductively and deductively. A finalized codebook was developed iteratively; the included codebook are the final codes used to analyze the full dataset. Interview transcripts and other potentially identifying information is not available to protect respondent confidentiality and anonymity. This dataset summarizes the key interview results.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2025755
- PAR ID:
- 10647964
- Publisher / Repository:
- Environmental Data Initiative
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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