Risk in the redwoods: contending for normalcy in timber country

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of a landslide that devastated a small rural community in the redwoods of northern California. This seemingly mundane event is used to explore several insights offered by recent literature on environmental risk, and illustrate the extent to which our reliance on modern, technologically complex industrial systems as the basis for risk scholarship may limit our understanding of the role of environmental risk in society. This landslide, and the political upheaval that followed it, point to the need for more rigorous sociological analysis of how hazards , rather than risks, are legitimated in political discourse through a process called 'normalization'; and of the complex of organizational structures of causation that encourage the development of risky situations, not only in modern technological systems, but in systems of society-environment interaction with a much longer history, such as the extraction and management of timber.