Wildfire: A social and political perspective

Disasters are social events. A natural hazard becomes a disaster when it interferes with the lives and well-being of people and communities. How to prepare for, experience and recover from such events is a long- standing challenge and puzzle. Often, the most expedient solution is viewed as a combination of state support and regulation, and the use of technologically based practices to monitor, prepare and deal with the immediate and then ensue recovery. A corollary of this focus is that individuals and their communities require the capabilities to prepare for and address the possibility of disaster events as well as their actual occurrence and aftermath. In this seemingly rounded way, it is claimed that natural disaster can be dealt with in more or less effective and expedient ways. The problem is that these relations bring questions of power into play in stark ways, a feature that is usually overlooked in relation to disaster events. Disaster events therefore require sociological and political analysis.