Abstract People across the world and the western USA are increasingly experiencing larger, higher severity wildfires occurring throughout the year and lasting longer than previously experienced in their lifetimes. More extreme wildfires have the potential to alter landscapes and lives, disrupting senses of belonging and initiating drastic environmental changes. I ask how, in the context of the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire (CPF) in Colorado, those who lived through it, those who study it, and those who fight and manage wildfire, engage in sensemaking to understand wildfire, post-fire impacts, and uncertainty. Drawing on sustained ethnographic engagement over 2 years with the upper Poudre Canyon community in northern Colorado, I offer empirical examples of how community members, practitioners, and scientists are making sense of the CPF, the flooding and debris flows which came after it, and how they relate to a transformed landscape subject to the material consequences of fire and flood. In response to experiences of extreme wildfire and the cascading hazards which unfold as a result, I suggest that people undergo a process of recalibration in ways of knowing the environment, in relation to past wildfires, present and future conflagrations, risk assessment, reconciliation with loss, and orienting toward ecological patterns and cycles. I find that recalibration is born out of cumulative sensemaking, indicating that people can cope with significant personal and environmental changes wrought by wildfire by engaging in processes of sensemaking over time. This paper highlights how sensemaking can shape our understanding and relations with the material world in a way that allows for broader temporal and ontological expansiveness in contending with extreme wildfires, post-fire flooding, and uncertain climatic futures.
Maya Daurio (Tue,) studied this question.