Gender and Wildfire

Landscapes of Uncertainty

Christine Eriksen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317699668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In pursuit of lifestyle change, affordable property, and proximity to nature, people from all walks of life are moving to the wildland-urban interface. Tragic wildfires and a predicted increase in high fire danger weather with climate change have triggered concern for the safety of such amenity-led migrants in wildfire-prone landscapes.

This book examines wildfire awareness and preparedness amongst women, men, households, communities and agencies at the interface between city and beyond. It does so through an examination of two regions where wildfires are common and disastrous, and where how to deal with them is a major political issue: southeast Australia and the west coast United States. It follows women's and men's stories of surviving, fighting, evacuating, living and working with wildfire to reveal the intimate inner workings of wildfire response – and especially the culturally and historically distinct gender relations that underpin wildfire resilience.

Wildfire is revealed as much more than a "natural" hazard – it is far from gender-neutral. Rather, wildfire is an important means through which traditional gender roles and power relations are maintained despite changing social circumstances. Women's and men's subjectivities are shaped by varying senses of inclusion, exclusion, engagement and disengagement with wildfire management. This leads to the reproduction of gender identities with clear ramifications for if, how and to what extent women and men prepare for wildfire.

1 Between Three Fires

SETTING A FIERY SCENE

Saturday, 7 February 2009, was a sweltering hot day on the New South Wales Southern Tablelands in Australia. Even at eight o’clock in the morning as I drove through the farm gates to the property of the couple I was to interview, the weather felt oppressive. The air had already started to shimmer with heat. I remember wondering if I should have informed the local bushfire brigade that I was in the vicinity in case they needed an extra pair of hands over the weekend. I also felt relieved that I had only managed to line up one interview that day, as the heat was numbing. As the interview progressed the conversation wandered onto politics, feminism, and the need for wildfire risk engagement initiatives specifically targeting women. It was a heartfelt conversation that laid bare honest feelings of frustration and fear towards wildfire management issues. Four years later the passionate voice of the woman is as vivid in my mind’s ear as if the interview had taken place yesterday. Upon hearing that funds had not been secured to expand an innovative and successful trial of training courses specifically targeting women’s bushfire preparedness in South Australia, Nicola,¹ a public servant, exclaimed:

I’m not surprised. It probably occurred more directly, more immediately after the last batch of bushfires. The money dries up. The sympathy, emphasis and focus go to “Oh no, we’re running out of electricity, water and something other much more urgent”—whatever the newspaper headline is for the day. Give me an immediate political response! We always call it “The Daily Telegraph moment of truth”.² What’s the driver behind this according to The Daily Telegraph? Is this a policy announcement in response to The Daily Telegraph? Are we amending a policy in response to The Daily Telegraph? Or how will this policy be read by The Daily Telegraph? Because that is Australia: public, general…. What we need is a couple of women and children burnt to death in the next bushfire. I’m so sorry but it’s the tragic truth! We need the picture of the woman running down the road with kangaroos fleeing with her, hair on fire, for it to be that Daily Telegraph policy. “Women abandoned!!!” Unfortunately it’s an incredible driver of policy here because we have no commitment politically to the long term. (♀ NSW Feb. 2009)

Little did Nicola know that as she was telling this politically motivated tale, this worst-case scenario was actually unfolding that very moment seven hundred odd kilometres to the southwest in the green ranges that constitute the wildland-urban interface that surrounds Melbourne, Victoria. We were blissfully unaware of this natural disaster, as the property had no mobile or television reception. I returned to the bush cabin where I was staying to find the news reporting a suspected death toll of forty plus. By the end of the “Black Saturday” ordeal (as the Victorian bushfires of February 2009 came to be known) the extent of the death and destruction had reached historical and tragic proportions. Australia was yet again licking its burn wounds.

Across the Pacific Ocean in California, 2009 would prove itself to be an equally challenging year for wildfires. Only five months after Black Saturday the “Station Fire” swept through the wildland-urban interface of Los Angeles and the Angeles National Forest causing extensive damage. However, 2009 was but the tail end of two years with an extraordinary number of wildfires burning across northern and southern California. The forest and chaparralclad mountains that flank many cities in California make them particularly susceptible to the risk of wildfire. Los Angeles, for example, is surrounded by mountains like the walls of a medieval castle, from the green slopes above the iconic Malibu beaches to the north, east to the San Bernardino Mountains, and south to the shoreline at San Clemente. The classic Australian scenery of swaying eucalyptus trees that often dominate the sclerophyllous vegetation on the escarpments surrounding Australian cities paints a similar picture of landscapes susceptible to wildfire. Nevertheless, the respite from the hustle and bustle provided at the wildland-urban interface, despite the relative close geographical proximity to the city, continues to impel people to move to these wildfire-prone landscapes.

Wildfire is a constant and ongoing part of Australia’s and the USA’s history, ecology and culture.³ In Australia, “Black Saturday” was but the latest in a long list of poignantly named bushfires that have seared this force of nature into history books and children’s storybooks alike. “Black Thursday” in 1851 and “Red Tuesday” in 1898 each claimed the lives of twelve people, over a million sheep and thousands of cattle in Victoria. A further seventy-one people died and over twenty thousand square kilometres burned on “Black Friday” in 1939 in Victoria. When bushfires encroached on Hobart on “Black Tuesday” in 1967, sixty-one people died in Tasmania. “Ash Wednesday” in 1983 claimed twenty-eight lives in South Australia and forty-seven lives in Victoria and burned a total of four thousand square kilometres across the two states. The “Eastern Seaboard Bushfires” in 1994 scorched over eight thousand square kilometres of New South Wales, encircling Sydney and consuming four lives and over two hundred houses. New South Wales was hit again in 2001 when the “Black Christmas” bushfires consumed three thousand square kilometres and over one hundred houses but thankfully no lives. In January 2003 almost 70 percent of pastures, forested plantations and naturally vegetated land in the Australian Capital Territory were burned by the “Canberra Bushfires”, which eventually claimed four lives and over five hundred homes on the fringe of Australia’s capital city, Canberra. Of course, there have been many more, mainly smaller and less damaging bushfires, at least in quantitative terms, throughout Australia (Howitt 1854; Stretton 1939; Pyne 1991; Ellis et al. 2004; Australian Government 2010).

Similarly, the “Station Fire” in California in August 2009 was but one of many wildfires that have been imprinted in the history of the USA. Burning over one hundred and sixty thousand acres and claiming the lives of two firefighters and 89 homes out of 209 destroyed structures, it is the largest and deadliest wildfire in the history of Los Angeles County. The historical fire records date back to 1825 and the “Miramichi Fire”, which burned three million acres across Maine and New Brunswick, killing 160 people. Despite the extensive scale of its destruction, the “Peshtigo Fire” in 1871 was overshadowed by the “Great Chicago Fire” that commenced on the same day; an estimated fifteen hundred people were killed as the wildfire consumed nearly four million acres of Wisconsin and Michigan. “The Great Fire of 1910” has gone down in history both for its destructiveness (burning three million acres across Idaho, Montana and Washington state whilst claiming the lives of at least eighty-six people, including seventy-eight firefighters), and for the way in which it shaped the wildfire prevention and suppression strategies that came to dominate the policies and practice of the US Forest Service for decades to come (Pyne 2001). Another wildfire that has captivated the public imagination was the 1988 wildfire in Yellowstone National Park, which scorched over one million acres of parkland and neighbouring areas following one of the driest summers in the history of the park. Whilst these wildfires are part of a long list of iconic American wildfires (Pyne 1982, 2004), one particular state stands out in records and statistics of monetary and human losses from wildfires: California. By mid-2009 seven of the ten deadliest and largest-loss wildfires listed by the National Fire Protection Agency were in California (NFPA 2011). The largest of these is the Oakland Hills Fire of 1991, which, despite its relatively small scale (1,520 acres), caused enormous damage as it spread from the wildland-urban interface into the cities of Oakland and Berkley killing twenty-five people and destroying 3,469 homes at an estimated cost of over two billion US dollars.

WHY GENDER AND WILDFIRE? CULTURAL RESONANCE AND GENDERED IDENTITIES

As a result of recent history, wildfire is a fact of life with mythological connotations for many Australians and Americans. Living with fire on the land is an image filled with cultural resonance, which has impacted on the moulding and upholding of national identities, culture and traditions. In urban areas the wildfire threat tends to linger on the edge of consciousness as, for example, images on a television screen (Collins 2006). In rural areas, on the other hand, wildfires are a harsh reality—a yearly threat that over generations has generated community institutions, gender roles, and a sense of belonging through community involvement in times of danger. Local volunteer fire brigades have served as communal centres since the late nineteenth century in both rural Australia and the USA (Pyne 1982, 2006; Mannix 2008; NSW RFS 2013; Clode 2010; Kissane 2010).

How, after so many years of wildfire as an endemic force in both Australian and North American landscapes are we still so vulnerable to wildfire? I wondered in hindsight, if we would have known or had time to react ‘appropriately’ if a wildfire of similar scale, intensity and speed to those in Victoria had hit the New South Wales Southern Tablelands that Saturday in 2009? My reflections on the events that unfolded that day and during subsequent wildfires in both Australia and the USA point to a strong link between wildfire, amenity migration, and gendered vulnerability in and through ‘place’—namely the wildland-urban interface (often referred to simply as the “WUI”). The description of fire fighting men as “mythologized heroes” by an Australian female interview participant is indicative of how the agency of wildfire over time has helped shape cultural identity:

The mythical building up of the bushfire volunteer … it’s very important that we always have that mythical icon. It has to be male. We cannot have, I mean, women bake the scones and sell them to raise money but we must have that icon. Bushfire always gives us that. You look at who they interview. Look at who they talk about in the newspaper articles. It’s about men. Once again, and a highly feminist, I realise, perspective but it gives us that connection to that mythical, mythologized hero that we have so not had in Australia due to our lack of war in the literal sense entirely. We mythologize it and bushfire gives us all of that. Gives us community. It gives us heroes. It gives us empathy. (♀ NSW Feb. 2009)

Yet through the ebb and flow of public and agency debates over how to solve the problem of wildfire at the interface between the city and beyond, the role of wildfire in moulding and upholding gender roles within Australian and American society has rarely been discussed. Gendered identity has been as good as invisible despite the acknowledged importance of identity in debates over the place of fire in changing landscapes. This is evident, for example, in the following quote by the environmental historian Stephen Pyne on the centrality of culture in wildfire debates. Although this elaborate description was written with Australia in mind, Pyne could have used the same words to define wildfire management debates in the USA. Gender is missing in both contexts.

Australia’s bushfire [debates are] inextricably bound up with questions of identity…. The practices of Australian fire quickly morphs into the politics of identity; geographic, professional, national. The fissures are many and cross one another, like veins in granite. City v. country; greenies v. farmers, graziers and loggers; ecologists v. foresters; those who live off the land v. those who visit it; those who believe bushfire is ultimately an expression of a nature beyond human contrivance, and those who believe humanity can, for good or ill, profoundly alter fire’s regimes. All perceive the contemporary fire scene as inappropriate; all demand that they be heard; and all recognise that bushfire forces society to choose, though what that choice means, or implies, is often as fluid and intangible as flame itself. (Pyne 2006, 9)

From the early stages of my research gendered dimensions of wildfire management stood out like a beacon in their effect on how women and men relate to and prepare for wildfire. Women and men have consistently upheld to me conventional views of wildfire management as “men’s business” in their narratives of living and working with fire at the wildland-urban interface. This was unexpected inasmuch as the research originally did not set out to test such dimensions. My colleagues and I developed two key conceptual arguments. First, wildfire is not just a natural phenomenon but is simultaneously a product of ongoing associations and negotiations in everyday life (Eriksen and Gill 2010). Second, wildfire is not a gender-neutral natural phenomenon but is an important means by which traditional gender roles and power relations are maintained (Eriksen et al. 2010).⁴ This book develops those findings by extending the examination of gendered dimensions of wildfire awareness and preparedness from southeast Australia to the US west coast. It furthermore examines the many similar and additional issues that emerged upon expanding the research into explorations of gender dynamics within wildfire management agencies, as well as Indigenous fire knowledge. Across the board, conscious as well as subconscious everyday decisions and dilemmas play a key role in wildfire susceptibility. Questions of priorities, trust, identity, fear, control, ecology, beliefs, lifestyles, and traditions are common threads running through the narratives that women and men have shared with me since early 2007. One core point emerges from them all: the importance of understanding gendered dimensions of wildfire. As it stands, the male-dominated field of emergency management is grappling with the safety needs of the growing number of women and men living and working in wildfire-prone landscapes at the wildland-urban interface internationally.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS: HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE

The term ‘gender’ has competing meanings and invokes a diverse array of feelings depending on how it is understood in any given context. ‘Gender’ has been accused of having become a ‘catch-all term … shorthand for which the longhand has either been forgotten or was never really that clear in the first place’ (Cornwall 2007, 70). This results in misunderstandings identified as a key barrier to gender analysis in disaster research and theory. One such misunderstanding is the way in which ‘gender’ often is perceived as a shorthand term for ‘women’. This obscures that ‘the tightly interwoven cultural and generational patterns that position women differently before, during, and after disasters are just as real for boys and men’ (Enarson 2012, 24). In this book, ‘gender’ is understood as a social construct not to be confused with the biologically given definition of ‘sex’:

In talking about gender, we are not talking about simple differences or fixed categories. We are talking about relationships, boundaries, practices, identities and images that are actively created in social processes. (Connell 2010, 30)

Power is a key driving force of gender—relational and contextual—because ‘gender always has a class, a race, an age dimension, and a cultural context, intersecting all other power structures’ (Enarson 2012, 24; see also White 2000). Gender is therefore inherently political as these are not just culturally defined boundaries but also social inequalities that shape social meaning. This is one of the key reasons why gendered axes of analysis in disaster research have such scope and value, as:

The concept of ‘gender’ can be used to bring into question naturalised assumptions about women, men and power, to illuminate the diversity of subject positions available to women and men in different contexts, and permit a closer assessment of the relational dynamics of power among as well as between them. What this kind of ‘gender analysis’ can reveal is the extent to which taken-for-granted assumptions about ‘women’ and ‘men’ deserve to be disrupted, and how getting to the issues of power at the heart of the matter provides a basis for solidarity and alliances across differences in ways that do not erase those differences. (Cornwall 2007, 76)

Integral to any in-depth understanding of how the relational dynamics of power among, as well as between, women and men play out in the context of wildfire is the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Like the concept of ‘gender’, hegemonic masculinity is relational and contextual. It is constructed discursively through specific practices at local, regional and global levels. The concept refers to the social dominance of hegemonic forms of masculinity over all forms of femininity as well as subordinated (non-hegemonic) masculinities—usually through the interlocking of traditions and legitimacy. It ‘embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’ (Connell 2005, 77). This hierarchy of gender relations is a pattern of hegemony rather than a pattern of dominance purely by coercive force (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). It revolves around cultural consent, discursive centrality, institutionalisation, and the subordination and marginalization of alternatives. Hegemonic masculinity thus implies a degree of consent from the subordinate social groups, founded on the asymmetry in hegemonic relationships that encourages assent by both parties (dominator and subordinate), despite such hegemonic relationships being ideologically premised. The ‘mark of hegemony’ is thus its successful claim to authority, rather than direct violence (Connell 2005, 77).

Hegemonic masculinity enables the cultural values and practices of men to be disseminated in everyday life in such a way that they become unquestioned. Research has furthermore shown how the normalisation of patriarchal relations through discursive practices is legitimised through the media (Agg and Phillips 1998; Liepens 2000), while institutional patriarchal structures resistant to change reinforce them (Alston 2005; Klenke 2011). Hierarchical social gender orders and patterns of hegemony are consequently reinforced by the everyday actions of both men and women. This has traditionally been linked to notions of masculine honour obtainable by, for example, providing adequately for the family, exercising control over women and children, or prioritising the evacuation of women and children first at times of danger. It also reflects hegemonic forms of masculinity in traditional rural professions, which portray the reliance on male physical attributes for the control of both technology and nature (Bryant 1999; Little 2002). This focus on stereotypically male qualities such as strength, stamina, grit and guts tends to render women invisible or at best as carers of men (Alston 1995, 2005; Bryant and Pini 2010; Poiner 1990). Discussions on the position of women in natural hazards and land management issues consequently frequently assume a premise of dependence of women on men as a baseline for understanding. This premise builds on ‘the equation of women with unruly and destructive natur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• 1 Between Three Fires
• 2 The Gendered Dimensions of Wildfire
• 3 Wildfire and Dilemmas of Everyday Life
• 4 Wildfire, Resilience and Sense of Belonging
• 5 Indigenous Fire Knowledge Retention: Spatial, Temporal, Gendered
• 6 Engaging Women with Bushfire Safety Issues
• 7 Toeing the Line or Breaking the Glass Ceiling
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index