Recovery and resilience in the Manning valley through a participatory environmental communication lens

Participatory environmental communication (PEC) offers a way of engaging in communication by inviting the participation of communities and their ways of knowing. As a process-oriented approach, PEC enables communities to use local knowledge and design solutions, by employing their unique perspectives and intimate experiences of the places in which they live. This case study is an effort to record and interpret a historically important moment in the author's own community, using the PEC lens, to discuss the lived experiences of a rural community and the actions they are taking to mitigate future impacts from natural disasters. It includes the author's personal experience of a natural disaster in the small rural town of Wingham in MidCoast of New South Wales, Australia. It reflects on how a community in crisis relies on networks of cooperation for disaster response and recovery.