Abstract

Social-ecological resilience has been embraced by the United States Forest Service (USFS) as an organizing principle for forest planning and management; however, the extent and depth of its operationalization remain unclear. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of environmental impact statements, evaluating the presence or absence of various elements that indicate “resilience thinking” and “resilience speaking” and analyzing the associations between them. We found that the occurrence of most indicators of resilience thinking did not have a significant relationship with the prevalence of resilience speaking, but that some indicators of resilience thinking were present throughout a large proportion of documents. Our findings suggest that the operationalization of resilience does not depend upon high levels of resilience-related verbiage. Further efforts may be needed to bring agency actions and agency rhetoric into closer alignment to advance social-ecological resilience.

摘要

美国林务局 (USFS) 已将社会生态恢复力作为森林规划和管理的组织原则；然而，其运作的程度和深度仍不清楚。我们对环境影响报告进行了定量的内容分析，评估了表示“韧性思维”和“韧性说话”的各种元素的存在与否，并分析了它们之间的关联。我们发现大多数韧性思维指标的出现与韧性说话的流行程度没有显着关系，但在很大比例的文档中存在一些韧性思维指标。我们的研究结果表明，弹性的操作化并不依赖于高水平的与弹性相关的措辞。