How we Talk about Wildfires

In 2012, wildfires burned over nine million acres in the United States, and damage was estimated to be well over a billion dollars. Many climate experts have asserted that ferocious wildfires will continue to increase in the coming years (e.g., Flannigan et al. 2005; Pechony & Shindell, 2010; Westerling et al., 2011a, 2011b). One of the reasons for this increase is extended drought conditions; for instance, spring and summer temperatures are hotter than they once were (Westerling et al., 2006). Another reason is the accumulation of fuel (Gruell, 2001), and yet another is the expansion of the rural-urban interface (Theobald & Romme, 2007).

With the negative consequences of increased wildfire, including property damage, threat to human lives, and adverse health effects, it is important to examine how various stakeholders transmit and comprehend information about wildfires. It is especially useful to analyze how wildfire messages affect everyday people. Close analysis of how journalists and fire officials talk about wildfires, and people's understanding of what is said, could lead to better ways of communicating wildfire information, especially in emergency conditions. The media, especially television, plays an important role when it comes to reporting fire information, but some of that information is skewed or sensationalized for entertainment purposes (see Taylor & Gillette, 2005).

The aim of our presentation is to discuss a new, long-term study on climate communication, including wildfire discourse. Our interdisciplinary research team is currently investigating the language that reporters, officials, and everyday people use to describe wildfires, both in emergency and non-emergency conditions.

In one line of research, we use surveys to look at semantic framing, specifically, how slightly varying the wording of a report about a (hypothetical) wildfire, can affect people's attitudes about wildfire threat and influence what actions they take, if any (e.g., evacuate, protect their home). In other research areas, we have used this approach to show that altering grammatical form in a political message can alter voters' perceptions of candidates' electability (Fausey & Matlock, 2011; Matlock, 2012), or minor changes in the wording of questions about automobile collisions can change people's memory for accident details (Matlock, Sparks, Matthews, Hunter, & Huette, 2012). Here we look for similar effects with perceived threat and wildfire reporting.

In another strand of research, we conduct a corpus analysis of wildfire reportage from varied news sources extracted from the Internet TV News Archive (http://archive.org/details/tv). Here we investigate metaphors that describe the current state of a wildfire, often conceptualized as an ongoing battle in which the fire is seen as an enemy, moves like an agent with a destructive purpose, and as such must be contained. For instance, “Firefighters only have 10% of the massive wildfire contained,” “Firefighters are now battling a monster fire,” and “The fire jumped two freeways before the winds changed direction.” Each relates to basic metaphors found in other types of discourse, and are used to frame something unfamiliar or abstract in terms of something familiar and concrete (see Gibbs, 1994; Gibbs & Matlock, 2008; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Matlock, 2004; Matlock & Bergmann, in press). Using this TV News archive gives us access to hundreds of thousands of news reports, and allows us to examine how reporters describe wildfires.

The overriding goal of our research is twofold: to investigate discourse about climate across various domains and to provide guidelines on how to improve climate communication. The hybrid approach of using discourse analysis and surveys allows us to investigate how wildfires are presented by the media, how audiences interpret the news, and how people discuss information related to wildfire. The benefits of this work are far-reaching, and have implications for climate messages issued by newscasters, fire dispatchers, weather educators, and policy makers.

REFERENCES

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Matlock, T., Sparks, D., Matthews, J. L., Hunter, J., & Huette, S. (2012). Smashing new results on aspectual framing: How people talk about car accidents. Studies in Language, 36(3), 699–720.

Pechony, O., & Shindell, D. T. (2010). Driving forces of global wildfires over the past millennium and the forthcoming century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(45), 19167-19170.

Taylor, J. G., Gillette, S. C., Hodgson, R. W., & Downing, J. L. (2005). Communicating with wildland interface communities during wildfire. US Department of the Interior, US Geological Survey.

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Westerling, A.L., Turner, M.G., Smithwick, E.A.H., Romme, W.H., & Ryan, M.G. (2011). Continued warming could transform Greater Yellowstone fire regimes by mid-21st century. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(32), 13165-13170.