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- All Subjects: Environmental Management
- All Subjects: Collaborative Planning
- All Subjects: Glen Canyon Dam
- Creators: Camacho, Alejandro E.
- Creators: Sarewitz, Daniel
- Resource Type: Text
I begin by introducing the 2016 Fort McMurray/Horse River fire as a lens for exploring these questions. I then use the past one hundred years of fire history in Canada to illustrate the continual presence of fire, its human and social dimensions, and the evolution of differing fire management regimes. Drawing on extended ethnographic observation and interviewing of fire managers across Canada, I examine the varied provincial systems of response through following an active fire day in Alberta. I analyze the decision support and geospatial information systems used to guide fire agency decision-making, as well as the factors that limit their effectiveness in both response and hazard reduction modes. I begin Part Two with a discussion of mutual aid arrangements between the provinces, and critically examine the core strategy – interagency fungibility – used to allow this exchange. I analyze forecasting and predictive models used in firefighting, with an emphasis on comparing advantages and disadvantages of attempts at predicting future firefighter capacity requirements. I review organizational learning approaches, considering both fire research strategies and after action reviews. Finally, I consider the implication of changes in climates, politics, and public behaviours and their impacts on fire management.
This brief article, written for a symposium on "Collaboration and the Colorado River," evaluates the U.S. Department of the Interior's Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program ("AMP"). The AMP has been advanced as a pioneering collaborative and adaptive approach for both decreasing scientific uncertainty in support of regulatory decision-making and helping manage contentious resource disputes -- in this case, the increasingly thorny conflict over the Colorado River's finite natural resources. Though encouraging in some respects, the AMP serves as a valuable illustration of the flaws of existing regulatory processes purporting to incorporate collaboration and regulatory adaptation into the decision-making process. Born in the shadow of the law and improvised with too little thought as to its structure, the AMP demonstrates the need to attend to the design of the regulatory process and integrate mechanisms that compel systematic program evaluation and adaptation. As such, the AMP provides vital information on how future collaborative experiments might be modified to enhance their prospects of success.
The Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (AMP) has been identified as a model for natural resource management. We challenge that assertion, citing the lack of progress toward a long-term management plan for the dam, sustained extra-programmatic conflict, and a downriver ecology that is still in jeopardy, despite over ten years of meetings and an expensive research program. We have examined the primary and secondary sources available on the AMP’s design and operation in light of best practices identified in the literature on adaptive management and collaborative decision-making. We have identified six shortcomings: (1) an inadequate approach to identifying stakeholders; (2) a failure to provide clear goals and involve stakeholders in establishing the operating procedures that guide the collaborative process; (3) inappropriate use of professional neutrals and a failure to cultivate consensus; (4) a failure to establish and follow clear joint fact-finding procedures; (5) a failure to produce functional written agreements; and (6) a failure to manage the AMP adaptively and cultivate long-term problem-solving capacity.
Adaptive management can be an effective approach for addressing complex ecosystem-related processes like the operation of the Glen Canyon Dam, particularly in the face of substantial complexity, uncertainty, and political contentiousness. However, the Glen Canyon Dam AMP shows that a stated commitment to collaboration and adaptive management is insufficient. Effective management of natural resources can only be realized through careful attention to the collaborative design and implementation of appropriate problem-solving and adaptive-management procedures. It also requires the development of an appropriate organizational infrastructure that promotes stakeholder dialogue and agency learning. Though the experimental Glen Canyon Dam AMP is far from a success of collaborative adaptive management, the lessons from its shortcomings can foster more effective collaborative adaptive management in the future by Congress, federal agencies, and local and state authorities.
Still, the NPS remains committed to the preservation of our natural and cultural heritage. Yet the practice of that promise is evolving, slowly and iteratively, but detectably. Through explorations of legal and scholarly literature, as well as interviews across the government, non-profit, and academic sectors, I’ve tracked the evolution of preservation in parks. How is preservation shifting to address socio-ecological change? How has preservation evolved before? How should the NPS preserve parks moving forward?
The practice of preservation has come to rely on science, including partnerships with academic researchers, as well as inventory and monitoring programs. That shift has in part been guided by goals that have also become more informed by science, like ecological integrity. While some interviewees see science as a solution to the NPS’s challenges, others wonder how applying science can get “gnarly,” due to uncertainty, lack of clear policies, and the diversity of parks and resources. “Gnarly” questions stem in part from the complexity of the NPS as a socio-ecological system, as well as from disputed, normative concepts that underpin the broader philosophy of preservation, including naturalness. What’s natural in the context of pervasive anthropogenic change? Further, I describe how parks hold deep, sometimes conflicting, cultural and symbolic significance for their local and historical communities and for our nation. Understanding and considering those values is part of the gnarly task park managers face in their mission to preserve parks. I explain why this type of conceptual and values-based uncertainty cannot be reduced through science.