Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Ecological and Social Resilience in Vietnam

研究生杰西·弗莱在西奥多·l·格雷格森博士的指导下，将调查越南湄公河三角洲环境史上的一次重大人为干扰，以及这种干扰对当地农村农业社区的长期影响。Fly将利用这项研究来检验关于生态弹性和社会弹性之间关系的新的社会生态学理论。因此，她将研究由一个地方的环境历史上的一个独特事件或一系列事件引起的生态系统的转变转化为社会系统的变化的过程，这种变化是由历史上用于管理自然灾害造成的生计压力的应对策略的崩溃所催化的。这将通过(1)记录美国-越南战争期间除草剂战争导致的红树林物种组成和结构的变化来实现；(2)了解这些变化如何改变了人们在从自然灾害中恢复时获得用于应对作物损失的植物物种的途径。Fly将进行植被普查和定量的民族植物学调查，从老年人那里获得关于家庭经济战略变化的口述历史，并采用堆分类方法定量地比较森林被战时除草剂改变的人和森林未被改变的人的活动。这项研究很重要，因为社会科学家已经发现，对自然灾害影响的科学理解，需要研究受极端气候或地球物理灾害影响的人群的社会和环境历史，以及这些人群中个体从事件中恢复的不同能力。在这一扩大的观点中，对自然灾害的脆弱性的社会差异的根源与造成获得承受和（或）从严重的环境波动中恢复所必需的资源的机会不平等的基本条件有关。这个项目将通过在一个自然灾害的案例中检验这些理论来进一步发展它们。这项研究将有助于更好地规划减轻各种灾害。这对研究生的教育也有很大的帮助。

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.