Kelsey Zlevor
Planning Consultant, Cameron McCarthy Landscape Architecture and Planning
Member of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission
“Lessons from Oregon's Historic Wildfire Season”
Originally published as a Viewpoint on the American Planning Association website
If someone told me a year ago I would spend part of 2020 masked and door-knocking in a pandemic, carrying my inhaler to combat smoke irritation, I would have thought that sounded more like a dystopian novel than real life. And yet, that was my memory of September: delivering meals at the Graduate Hotel in Eugene, Oregon, to families and seniors who had been evacuated from their homes.
That month, the Holiday Farm wildfire ravaged the ancestral land of the Kalapuya, Molalla, Winefelly, and Yoncalla tribes, as well as land of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, otherwise known as part of the Willamette Valley. The fire, one of several, was a disaster fueled in part by reduced rainfall and suppression of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) in current forest and fire management practices. The fire—much like the COVID pandemic—had disastrous impacts because it hinged on vulnerability. A disaster, in the words of Lori Peek, Director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, “happens when a natural hazard collides with vulnerable people and vulnerable infrastructure.” Vulnerability is a spectrum, and September underscored that increasingly more of us sit on it.
Americans are often indoctrinated to imagine environmental refugees as “other”: people we don’t know living in faraway places. But the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research defines environmental refugees as “people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat because of a marked environmental disruption that jeopardizes their existence and/or seriously effects the quality of their life.” Environmental refugees are our neighbors, friends, and families. In the Willamette Valley community, the Holiday Farm wildfire displaced ~2,500 people, resulting in a wave of environmental refugees, some unhoused temporarily and some permanently.
Planning with those populations is no far-off challenge. It is here, and it is now. And with the compounding national challenges of a pandemic, an economic recession, and a shortage of affordable housing stock, the added layer of environmental displacement will only continue to put a strain on the ability of individuals and families to achieve stability in all its forms. These barriers are even more significant for the communities society has long since disenfranchised because of their race, class, and ability.
Responding to all of these pressures will be an immense job—but it is also an invitation to drastically reimagine who we are as planners, and what it means to serve communities in the Anthropocene.
A new era of planning
In the wake of the Willamette Valley’s trauma, a group of architects, AIA Eugene and community leaders formed the Holiday Farm Advisory Committee. Made of architects, planners, landscape architects, engineers, professors, and allied professionals, we are currently working with leaders of the McKenzie Community Development Corporation in a pro bono capacity to help re-establish communities impacted by the fires. Coming off of my weekends with the Red Cross and supporting mutual aid efforts in September, I felt overwhelmed and lost as to how to move beyond triage and sustain momentum towards long-term recovery as a young professional and community member looking to volunteer. Learning about the formation of and subsequently joining the Advisory Committee helped me piece together what I felt in the moment: we needed a place where agile professionals could strategically pair key skills with local needs outside of the typical contract-based construct. The needs are constantly evolving, and the Committee’s response is based on the leveraged abilities, resources, and relationships of those who are present.
While still in the early stages of partnership, this committee highlights the professional response needed at local levels, especially from private practitioners and academia. And we are not alone—many small towns across the U.S. have formed systems for providing professional aid in the wake of increasing disaster.
I hope these responses are indicative of a new era of radical grassroots planning, one that is grounded in collaborative activism. Planning that not only prioritizes the most vulnerable in the face of climate change, but also seeks to build systems of support beyond fee-for-service structures. That honors and relationally incorporates Indigenous knowledge for stewarding the land we occupy, and acknowledges that everyday land-use action is climate action, because where and how we develop land impacts community resiliency.
How these principles manifest in each community will be determined by the people who live there, but my experience highlights that we must ask ourselves what we can give, and how we can get started. I am neither a refugee, nor a climate change expert. But I am a planner that has entered a profession with a weighty inheritance: the moral imperative to creatively seek ways to root social justice and climate activism into the bedrock of our profession in the post-2020 world. Just as we must adapt to our new climate, our profession’s way of serving must adapt, too.
It’s been several months since I was pushing food carts down the halls of the Graduate Hotel. In all that time, I’ve never stopped thinking about the future of planning, and a question posed by author and activist Naomi Klein: “History knocked on your door… Did you answer?”
Kelsey Zlevor is a planning consultant at Cameron McCarthy Landscape Architecture and Planning, and appointed member of the City of Eugene Sustainability Commission
