The Futility of Reason: Incommensurable Differences Between Sustainability Narratives in the Aftermath of the 2003 San Diego Cedar Fire

Abstract

After the largest wildfire in California over the past century, natural resource agencies described how they could reduce vulnerability to fire hazard by sustainability managing fuel levels. A community coalition challenged this narrative by placing the fire within evolutionary time and describing how sustainability could be achieved through collective action within a dynamic and vulnerable landscape. The agencies rejected the coalition alternative as a dangerous and scientifically dubious distraction from their security responsibilities. In this clash, differing knowledge practices delimited the possibilities of citizenship and governance in which alternative sustainability narratives had meaning and significance. Ambivalence persisted because sustainability narratives were informed and justified by knowledge practices that were both driver and outcome of efforts to achieve different sustainabilities.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• security
• narrative
• disaster
• knowledge
• incommensurability

Notes

1. Architect Sim Vander Ryn, quoted in Dowie (1995, p. 205).

2. ‘Progressive era’ describes a period of US governmental reform from the 1890s to the 1920s, typified by a utilitarian approach to natural resources that provided for “the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time”, a phrase coined by Gifford Pinchot, the first Director of the US Forest Service.

3. Figure cited by publisher on http://www.sdnhm.org/research/birdatlas/ (accessed 8 April 2005). This amounts to an average of seventeen full eight-hour days per individual, or having an individual in the field watching birds around the clock over that entire time period.