2025/06/11 by Maya Daurio · 2 voices
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Disaster Management and Resilience #Fire effects on ecosystems
paper · doi:10.1080/00187259.2025.2499680
openalex publication_date 2025/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Wildfires initiate a disturbance cascade in montane watersheds, often resulting in post-fire flooding and debris flows. These cascading hazards have cascading consequences for people’s lives that are not easily enumerated and occur over longer time horizons than are accounted for in post-fire response mechanisms. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork involving participant observation and interviews, I examine the complex circumstances of people’s lives in a rural, unincorporated community in northern Colorado following the Cameron Peak Fire in 2020. I demonstrate that while social and ecological disturbances can occur in a kind of feedback loop, tracing ecological disturbances can help us anticipate and respond to social ones. Drawing on existing ecological frameworks of the wildfire-flood disturbance cascade to interrogate the wildfire-social disturbance cascade enables the possibility of responding to wildfire in a way that explicitly links social-ecological systems. Conceptualizing wildfire as dual disturbance cascades—social and ecological—could facilitate research that examines the implications of flooding and debris flows following wildfire in a more systematic way.