Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Ecological and Social Resilience in Vietnam

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Graduate student Jessie Fly, supervised by Dr. Theodore L. Gragson, will investigate a major anthropogenic disturbance in the environmental history of the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, and the long-term consequences of that disurbance for local rural farming communities. Fly will use this research to test new socioecological theories about the relationship between ecological resilience and social resilience. Accordingly, she will examine the processes by which the transformation of an ecological system, caused by a unique event or series of events in the environmental history of a place, translates into changes in social systems, catalyzed by the breakdown of coping strategies historically employed to manage the livelihood stress wrought by natural hazards. This will be accomplished by (1) documenting changes in the species composition and structure of mangrove forests as a result of herbicidal warfare during the American-Vietnamese war; and (2) understanding how these changes have altered people's access to plant species used to cope with crop loss when recovering from natural hazards. Fly will conduct a vegetation census and a quantitative ethnobotanical survey, elicit oral histories from elders on changes in household economic strategies, and employ pile sorting methdologies to quantitatively compare activities of those whose forest was altered by wartime herbicides with those whose forest was not.This research is important because social scientists have discovered that scientific understanding of the impact of natural disasters requires studies that encompass both the social and the environmental histories of populations affected by extreme climatic or geophysical hazards and the differential ability of individuals within those populations to recover from the events. Within this widened view, the origins of social differentiation of vulnerability to natural hazards have been linked to underlying conditions that create unequal access to resources necessary to withstand and/or recover from severe environmental fluctuation. This project will develop these theories further by testing them in a case of unnatural disaster. The research will contribute to better planning for mitigation of disasters of all kinds. It also will contribute significantly to the education of a graduate student.