“The number one challenge we face in our fire management and fuels treatment program here in western Colorado is communication and public involvement,” says Tim Foley, fire management officer for the BLM – western slope of Colorado. “From working with private landowners on wildfire mitigation to building public acceptance for fuels treatment, we are always looking for new approaches and tools for public outreach.” Across the country, resource managers like Tim Foley are embracing the need for collaboration with local communities and the public in general. 

This is nothing new. For decades there have been calls and attempts to include the public in policymaking within land management agencies. In the past, these efforts have taken the form of one-way exchanges of information – producing forums such as the public listening session, the scoping meeting, and the public comment period. However, as the public has grown increasingly dissatisfied with these limited roles in natural resource policy-making, and agencies have turned to adaptive management models; there have been parallel experiments with more meaningful collaborative relationships. 

Responding to Social Change

One of the driving forces behind this development is the demographic and social changes that are occurring in rural areas - the steady expansion of the wildland-urban interface and the more rapid transformation of the rural countryside into “exurban” areas where escaped urbanites are fleeing congestion and sprawl. Vicky Sturtevant, a long-time researcher on forest communities and collaborative stewardship, says that the people who used to make up rural populations have changed in the past two decades. The expansion of an exurban population of rural residents in many parts of the country has spurred citizen involvement in public lands policy. “I know in Oregon, a lot of the people who move out into the forest are lone eagles. They tell their real estate agent that they don’t want to see anybody – they want to commune with nature. But, these people have been CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and managers of hospitals; and they have this tremendous amount of energy and know-how. After a while, the woods become tiresome for these sorts of people. They come down and want to be a part of something – they want to use their energy for something. In this case, its wildfire.”

 

Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park - Fire crew talking to park visitors on a prescribed burn fire line.

At the same time, public land managers have recognized that the success of their resource management programs often depends more on social and political factors than on biological and ecological ones. If the public is not on board with a particular policy - no matter the rationality of the strategy - there is serious potential for conflict that can delay or even prevent implementation. This means that agencies that always valued scientific and technical expertise in decision-making have to enter a murky arena in which values, politics, and emotions are often of primary importance. To do this successfully requires an institutional shift in leadership styles to a mode that is more open to citizens’ ideas and concerns, and more willing to try more innovative approaches to communication and public outreach. Kris Martinson, project leader for the model citizen-agency partnership - the Metolius Forest Management Project in Oregon, says, “Sometimes agencies forget that public interaction is two-way. Often, we ask questions and take information and never get back to people. It’s a loop. We want to be sure that we give feedback and say, ‘We’ve heard you. This is really great stuff.' And also be truthful and say that some of this is not something that we can use.”

The Social Science of Trust

While research on the social side of the ecosystem management equation has been embraced more slowly than say the ecological or biological aspects of fire management, a steady stream of focused research has begun to produce solid, empirically-grounded conclusions and recommendations. “The research has really matured,” says Bruce Shindler, a researcher who has worked on values, communication, and citizen-agency collaboration in fire management. “The focus has shifted from identifying obstacles and problems in agency-public relationships, to producing strategies and tools for building successful partnerships.”

Shindler and colleagues have found that social acceptability hinges on a public “understanding of the consequences of available choices.” So, for resource managers to build support for management initiatives they have to be able to frame the available options in ways that are clear and meaningful to the public. And, to build policies that are durable, resource managers will have to make and accept trade-offs that are relevant to peoples’ concerns.

The Oregon State materials illustrate the value of innovative approaches to communicating with the public: using different communication styles, using windows of opportunity, and providing information in terms people can understand. The video shows the remarkably original approach to fire education at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. During prescribed burns, the parks keep roads and trails open when possible to give visitors the chance to observe the projects. The parks try to take advantage of every opportunity to educate visitors about the fire program. Sometimes this involves giving tours or doing informal interpretation on the fireline. "That is one of the most successful things we do in terms of getting a really positive visitor response,” says Jody Lyle, a fire education and information specialist at the parks. “They are fascinated. They have never seen anything like that before. It is something that is completely outside of their experience.”

The parks also work to inform and involve local communities with the fire program. Information is posted around town, mailings are sent to local residents, and the fire information specialists work with reporters to develop stories for the local newspaper regarding fire management efforts in the park. Lyle says, “We all like to get information in different ways, and as an fire information officer I have to be aware of that, and try to put my message in a whole lot of different places and in a lot of different formats.

Making Research Accessible

The Fuels Synthesis Project is a pilot project of the Forest Service to develop multi-disciplinary tools and information for planning fuel treatment projects. A set of resources produced by the social science team on the Fuels Synthesis Project emphasize the value of public involvement and outreach in fire management programs. The social science team has distilled research into a series of synthesis publications on a variety of topics related to the human dimensions of fuels management, including: collaboration, aesthetics, communication, and social acceptability. Their publications and fact sheets present this wide-ranging research in an accessible and useable format, combining the results and lessons from many case studies and research efforts into practical strategies widely applicable to fire management challenges.

The synthesis of research on collaboration uses a number of successful case studies including the Applegate Fire Plan in Oregon, the Four Corners Sustainable Forests Partnership, and the Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council of Humboldt Co., California to outline the nuts and bolts of citizen-agency collaboration. The synthesis covers the benefits, stages, challenges, keys, and resources for collaboration. Vicky Sturtevant, the lead author on the collaboration synthesis says, “The strength of these materials is that there are many examples of actual, successful collaborative efforts and communication programs. The writing in all of the synthesis publications is directed towards the people on the ground working to implement these types of programs in their own areas. They are designed to give readers practical ideas and tools.”

A number of recent initiatives, such as the National Fire Plan and the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, have dramatically increased the level of support for collaborative efforts. Increased funding and policy support have dramatically expanded programs designed to improve community wildfire preparedness, such as FireWise, FireFree, and the Fire Safe Councils of western States. In an effort to assess what is actually being accomplished with all of this activity in community preparedness, a team of researchers led by Pam Jakes of the North-Central Research Station developed another set of case studies pertaining to community preparedness for widlfire. These case studies identify the steps taken by successful programs and the social conditions necessary to put the programs in place and sustain them. They show how communities and agencies have taken advantage of windows of opportunity (for example, the disastrous Florida wildfires of 1998) to build strong community preparedness programs. The case studies show how programs have used existing associations and organizations to piggy-back wildfire preparedness programs (Bend, OR, Red Lodge, MT, and Gunflint, MN). In other cases, innovative public education campaigns are described that gear messages to local concerns and take advantage of local forums for dissemination (Wedgefield, FL and Long Island, NY). The lessons gleaned from the case studies are being put to use. According to Pam Jakes, “Managers have told me that their community leaders find the stories about other communities extremely credible.  These leaders are trying out ideas and adapting them to their circumstances to help build preparedness.” Jakes says that it is encouraging that the successes they documented are helping to build programs in other areas, as communities build upon the success of others.

A central message of much of the social science research related to fire management is that collaboration should not be viewed as an onerous task, or as another obstacle or challenge to project implementation. Many programs have found collaboration to be a beneficial tool. Strong partnerships and public support can lead to resource management programs that are more resilient and more comprehensive. In fact, many land managers have found that bringing the public and other agencies into their fire management programs can help prioritize tasks, reduce delays from lawsuits and conflict, and spread the work around among a variety of groups and organizations. Leanne Mruzik is a BLM fuels management specialist with the Seven Basin Neighborhood Fire Planning Project in  Oregon. The Seven Basins project involved the Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregon State University extension, Seven Basins Watershed Council, and the BLM.  Mruzik says, “We were all driven by the common knowledge that the Seven Basins area is one of the highest risk areas for wild fires, and had some of the largest past fire events in Southern Oregon to prove it.  We all knew that something had to be done, and the only way to get it accomplished was by working together.  As a group we have developed priorities of where we need to focus our efforts. That has helped me try to organize how I am going to approach this. There are a lot of areas that haven’t been treated.  In my whole career I am not going to get everything completed that needs to be done, and having this group really helps pull out the high priority areas and gets more work done than we could as individuals or as single organizations.”