What is the WUI?
The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). In California, it is the fastest growing land use and a leading cause of wildfire, natural area loss, and climate change.
How and why are people driven to live in the WUI? To help answer this, the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz has taken up a two year research project that Colleen Stone help’s to administer. In full, the project title is, “WUI Research for Resilience (WRR): Addressing California’s Climate, Conservation & Housing Crises.”
While there is no systematic research on what is driving this growth, the WRR team reports that many assume it is the result of people’s desire to ‘live close to nature,’ particularly in the post-COVID era. However, in this project the WRR team hypothesizes something else: that an increasingly powerful driver of WUI growth is California’s affordable housing crisis, with its role in displacing lower income residents from cities and into these remote, dangerous, and increasingly unequal areas.
In my own displacement and relocation to the Santa Cruz mountains as driven from downtown, I found myself immersed deep in WUI life while helping to lead a community-engaged research project about the WUI. – Colleen
To test this, WRR teams have conducted the first comprehensive study of the drivers and demographics of WUI growth — drawing on spatial statistics and mapping, surveys and interviews with WUI residents in Santa Cruz County, and ethnographic and historical methods. WRR teams mixed socio-spatial research methods further with fire and plant ecology to investigate the socio-environmental impacts of this uneven population growth in WUI areas. Impacts include the increase in commute sheds and carbon emissions, unequal capacity to mitigate fire risk, new challenges for habitat restoration, and potential obstacles to traditional land stewardship practices like prescribed burning.
The WRR teams are preparing data and research briefs to further explain their findings. The goals are to inform and inspire new approaches to regional resiliency planning at the nexus of climate and land policies, and housing justice.
Research briefs will be available on the WUI website: https://criticalurbanenvironments.ucsc.edu/projects/wildland-urban-interface-wui-research-for-resilience/
Life in The WUI
Living in any mountain town comes with difficulties, higher prices, and fewer service providers. It’s important to remain flexible and understanding. During electrical outages and times of extreme weather, I’m often afforded relief time from work as needed to tend to or accommodate Life In The WUI (eg: no internet/cell phone connection, road closures and detours, checking on neighbors, meeting service providers, clearing debris out of waterways to prevent flooding, wrangling escaped wet dogs, etc). In order to endure Life In The WUI, when weather devastates the earth, may we find this list of songs about rain and weather to be inspiring (compiled by Colleen Stone).
Colleen Stone is the co-founder of Stone Creative Works and an interdisciplinary cross divisional administrative coordinator managing academic research and publications.
