The Foley Institute hosted yet another installment of its Coffee and Politics series Wednesday, this time a discussion about the sociological complications of wildfires.

Director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute Cornell W. Clayton introduced Professor Matthew S. Carroll to discuss the issues of wildfires and what can be done about them.

Carroll is an professor at WSU’s School of the Environment and has researched wildfires and their effects for more than 15 years. This presentation focused on the sociological impact of wildfires on communities.

Carroll said his presentation was based off a meta-analysis of case studies for the past 20 years with his colleague Travis Paveglio, a professor of conservation social sciences at the University of Idaho.

Carroll discussed the difficulty of keeping federally preserved land safe from fires.

“The reservation of public lands excludes the traditional means of firefighting,” he said.

Carroll said the problem with wildfires is not just that they burn, but there are other factors that come in to play. Some examples he provided were ecological changes and changes in human settlement patterns.

Another issue is the difficulty of fully containing fires.

“A tiny percentage gets away, and when they do, they create a lot of problems. Damaged lives, damaged homes, damaged property,” Carroll said.

Carroll also mentioned the huge expenditures that go into fighting wildfires, expenses which take over half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget.

He also discussed what is called the wildland-urban interface (WUI), which refers to the zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development. These lands and communities that are near or surrounded by wildlands are most at risk for wildfires.

Carroll presented a table of four community archetypes from his research that can be found within a WUI: formalized suburban communities, high amenity communities, rural lifestyle communities and working landscape communities.

He explained the sociological patterns of each archetype in terms of development. The suburban communities typically have more access to traditional firefighting capacities and have lower risk; working landscape communities have the highest risk.

Carroll said working with these communities, especially the high risk ones not equipped to properly combat fires, is essential to reducing the wildfire problem.

“The fire problem is ultimately about communities,” he said. “Smokey the Bear is not going to solve this problem.”

Reporting by Matthew Brunstetter