Modernization and rehabilitation after fires and floods

The article analyzes the scope and forms of renovation and rehabilitation after abnormal heat waves, droughts, and floods. The most urgent question is as follows: how to combine renovation with the rehabilitation of compromised or destroyed social, biological, and technological systems, including individual human beings and their microcosm? Lack of systemic renovation makes it impossible not only to introduce technological innovation and to rehabilitate the ecosystems and people who have lost their homes in a fire, but also to preserve Russia as a whole, as a society brought together by shared values. In this context, rehabilitation implies a comprehensive process of restoring and/or recreating the social, biological, and technological systems that have been damaged or destroyed by wildfire, including individual human beings and their microcosm, for the purpose of returning such systems to a condition comparable to that before the natural disaster. The main reason behind the devastating forest fires that ravaged Russia in the summer of 2010 was an administrative crisis that, over the entire decade, had gradually driven the institutions of nature conservation and forest fire fighting almost to extinction. As a result, instead of preventing fires, all that the government organizations could do was to locate them and put them out. For all the interpersonal impact of the tragedy that occurred that summer, we believe that one of its most dire consequences would be the disruption of balance in the biosphere, which, among other phenomena, has led to a rapid succession of dramatically opposite natural conditions (extreme cold and heat, floods and fires), all with far-reaching and at times mortal risks. The key takeaway from the summer crisis of 2010 is that the rhythm of modern society’s life and activities is governed not by social institutions but by the biosphere, with its shifts, fluctuations, and other anomalies. Consequently, apart from building networks for taking precautions against such extreme natural disasters and informing the population about them (which is what the government speaks about), Russia also needs to review many of its institutional structures, the forestry sector first and foremost, and to reconsider the status of natural conservation sites. This will inevitably lead to the emergence of other political and organizational changes, in particular turning the nature preservation system into a network. What Russia requires is a whole renovation technology, as discussed many times in all social groups.

modernization, rehabilitation, biosphere, sociobiotechnosystem, primary eco-structure, fires, crisis, utilitarianism.

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