Culture and Resilience Following the BP Oil Spill: A Theory of Cultural Resilience

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Social Movements

Abstract

Culture plays an important role in communities’ abilities to adapt to environmental change and crises. The emerging field of resilience thinking has employed several efforts to better integrate social and cultural factors into the systems-level approach to understanding social-ecological resilience. However, these attempts to integrate cultural into structural models fail to account for variation and agency in the role cultural may play in influencing the experience of environmental crises and subsequent efforts to recover. We propose an alternative model that emphasizes the role of agency in culture by theorizing culture as a set of resources that potentially influence social, or community, resilience. By focusing on the impact of the 2010 BP oil spill on a small, natural resource-dependent community, we are able to closely examine taken-for-granted cultural practices and strategies that constitute residents’ perceptions of community resilience. Our findings reveal that not all cultural resources and strategies that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill.

Author

• Hannah Clarke, University of Arizona