Perceptions of risk and connection to landscape

This article first appeared in the Summer 2015-16 edition of Fire Australia magazine. By Brenda Leahy.

Flanked by the Bunyip State Forest, about 90 kilometres east of Melbourne, Tonimbuk (population 317) is one of Victoria’s prettiest and, sometimes, most dangerous places.

In summer, when heat, wind and fuel conditions converge into severe fire weather, the natural beauty of this densely forested landscape turns Tonimbuk into a place of high  bushfire risk.

Seasoned locals Mike and Elaine Harrison, like so many others around them, co-exist with the risk because Tonimbuk  -  reportedly derived from Aboriginal  “to scorch or burn”  -  is “home”.

Filled with about 40 years of memories, of family, friends, lives lived and lost, home for the Harrisons means much more than the house, possessions or a place on a map. It’s about deeper connections with the landscape, beyond the front gate to the local town hall, the scrubby ridges, pastures and thickly forested hillsides that trail into distance.

“ … No matter where you are, when you come back it’s like putting on a good old comfortable coat. You’re home,” explains Mike Harrison. His story of home within his beloved landscape features in an innovative, online training and development tool kit published recently by AFAC.

House, Home and Place: A Visual Mapping Tool Kit for fire and land managers uses stories to help explain why people want to live in fire-prone communities, illustrating some of the values and beliefs that shape their connections to home and place.

The tool is based on the research of Professor Ruth Beilin and Dr Karen Reid of the University of Melbourne from their Social Construct of Fuels in the Interface project for the Bushfire CRC. It was evolved into a practical tool kit as a research utilisation initiative through the CRC, AFAC and its member agencies.

In their studies, the researchers found that emergency services agencies could benefit from ‘stepping into the shoes’ of local residents to understand their perspectives on bushfire in the landscape and their responses to risk. Factors investigated included what people meant by ‘house’, ‘home’ and ‘place’ and what things they valued in terms of their homes and communities, and why.

Using this local knowledge and insights, according to Dr Reid, agencies would be better equipped to support people anticipate and reduce the risks to their homes and communities.

Place-based approach

Bushfire CRC lead end user Mike Wouters from South Australia’s Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (DEWNR) wanted to understand why residents did not appear to assess hazard and risk on the same terms as agencies or respond as they had expected to their general fire safety messaging. The key question was:  what did people value most in their homes and communities?

A place-based approach, according to Dr Reid, helped to explain to agencies how residents attached meaning to the landscape in their everyday lives and how this influenced their thinking about risk and the place of fire.

“The field work with our colleagues from DEWNR confirmed that people were not ignorant of bushfire risk. It showed that their understanding of that risk was far more complex, reflecting their sense of self and how individually valued assets – for example, trees, wildlife or buildings - were inseparable from the broader landscape context," she said. This laid the ground work for the development of the toolkit.

The findings highlighted that people’s sense of home and place extended well beyond the house to being part of the local landscape, according to Mike Wouters. This had implications for bushfire education, as traditionally, he says, some fire safety messaging had focused on the “house” and the structural or physical aspects of preparation, such as cleaning gutters and making fire breaks.

During the project, the researchers also ran workshops with South Australia’s Country Fire Service, the Tasmania Fire Service and Victorian fire and land management agencies, the Country Fire Authority, Department of Environment Land Water and Planning, Emergency Management Victoria and Parks Victoria.

House, Home and Place: A Visual Mapping Tool Kit, was released by AFAC in 2015. It features a package of videos, including personal stories and a range of printable resources on how to use and apply the tool.

The tool kit is essentially a visual mapping method and interview technique delivered in a workshop format. The method can be used by anyone interested in working closely with communities to strengthen their capacity to mitigate and recover from natural hazards.

Residents work in small, facilitated groups to sketch, or mud map, their home within the local landscape, reflecting on how they live within and use that space every day. As they talk, draw and interact, they are also encouraged to consider hazards and risks such as bushfire.

A key benefit of this method, according to Dr Reid, is that it can start productive conversations about risk and how to manage it. These free flowing conversations, she says, reveal deeper insights that cannot be gleaned from typical question and answer style interviews or surveys.

“The process of visual mapping helps unlock deeper held intuitive ways of knowing. It helps explain why certain things are important, and provides an opportunity to pause and reflect on the decisions we make and the actions we take … In this way, the deeply held assumptions we make about the landscape are reflected right back at you on the paper.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a local, a land manager, firefighter or scientist, we all draw on our intuitive ways of knowing, as well as our rational knowledge . But the intuitive is much harder to access than the rational way of knowing, because it’s deeply embedded in our thoughts and assumptions. By going through this process we can understand better where people are coming from.”

The human side of risk

Communication consultant Tom Lowe, who was engaged to translate the research into a tool for practitioners, says he used video storytelling and narrative to put a human face on complex and abstract concepts.

 “Managers and practitioners often talk about people's values in broad terms. This may be because everyone has a slightly different take on the world, and it would be almost impossible to take into account the depth and breadth of views that are out there,” he explains. “As a result, we tend to gloss over the reasons for people's connections to place in an attempt to avoid overcomplicating decision making.”

In developing the House, Home and Place materials, he aimed to demonstrate “what connects people to their surroundings” as well as bring to the fore the “stories behind people’s view of the world”.

 “Fire and land managers don’t necessarily need to remember every individual story, or respond to everyone's demands, but I do think it is important to be aware of the richness of experience that lies behind each story.

“By starting from the ground up, and engaging in discussions with local people about about their connections to place, practitioners should be able to extract a more detailed sense of where people agree and where they disagree.

“The House, Home and Place materials will not provide decision-makers or communities with all of the answers, but they should give people the confidence to start a discussion and not be afraid to listen to people's stories.”

You can download the tool kit at http://asp-au.secure-zone.net/v2/index.jsp?id=672/1915/7419&lng=en

‘It showed that their understanding of that risk was far more complex, reflecting their sense of self and how individually valued assets – for example, trees, wildlife or buildings - were inseparable from the broader landscape context,’ she said. This laid the ground work for the development of the toolkit.