Community Recovery Following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Toward a Theory of Cultural Resilience

ABSTRACT

Culture plays an important role in communities’ abilities to adapt to environmental change and crises. The emerging field of resilience thinking has made several efforts to better integrate social and cultural factors into the systems-level approach to understanding social–ecological resilience. However, attempts to integrate culture into structural models often fail to account for the agentic processes that influence recovery at the individual and community levels, overshadowing the potential for agency and variation in community response. Using empirical data on the 2010 BP oil spill’s impact on a small, natural-resource-dependent community, we propose an alternative approach emphasizing culture’s ability to operate as a resource that contributes to social, or community, resilience. We refer to this more explicit articulation of culture’s role in resilience as cultural resilience. Our findings reveal that not all cultural resources that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• culture
• environmental sociology
• natural-resource-based communities
• oil spill
• resilience

Acknowledgments

We thank Kyle Puetz, who provided feedback at multiple points throughout the development of this article, as well as Kelly Bergstrand and the rest of the Healthy Gulf Healthy Communities team. Additional thanks go to Peter Taylor and the anonymous reviewers at Society & Natural Resources whose comments helped improve this article. Special thanks to our community partners for their enthusiastic participation in the design and implementation of this study: Darla Jones, Alabama Seafood Association; Rose Cantwell, Sue Colson, and Leslie Sturmer, Cedar Key Aquaculture Association; Francine Ishmael, Citizens Against Toxic Exposure; and Joe Taylor, Franklin’s Promise Coalition.