Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Ecological and Social Resilience in Vietnam

研究生杰西飞，由博士监督。西奥多L。Gragson将调查越南湄公河三角洲环境历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将利用这项研究来测试关于生态恢复力和社会恢复力之间关系的新社会生态理论。因此，她将研究的过程中，由一个独特的事件或一系列事件在一个地方的环境历史上造成的生态系统的转变，转化为社会系统的变化，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催化。 这将通过以下方式实现：（1）记录美越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;（2）了解这些变化如何改变了人们在从自然灾害中恢复时用于科普作物损失的植物物种。 苍蝇将进行植被普查和定量民族植物学调查，从老年人那里收集关于家庭经济战略变化的口述历史，并采用堆分类方法，定量地比较那些森林被战时除草剂改变的人和那些森林没有被改变的人的活动。这项研究很重要，因为社会科学家发现，科学地理解自然灾害的影响需要研究，包括受极端气候或地球物理灾害影响的人口的社会和环境历史，以及这些人口中个人从灾害中恢复的不同能力。 在这一扩大的观点中，易受自然灾害影响的社会差异的根源与造成不平等获得承受严重环境波动和/或从严重环境波动中恢复所需资源的根本条件有关。 该项目将通过在非自然灾害的情况下测试这些理论来进一步发展这些理论。这项研究将有助于更好地规划减轻各种灾害的工作。它也将大大有助于研究生的教育。

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.