Affected by and affecting forest fires in Sweden and Spain: A critical feminist analysis of vulnerability to fire

Abstract

Usually, vulnerability is equated to weakness and resistance to strength. Drawing on a feminist critique of this conceptualisation, this article aims to discuss how vulnerability to forest fires and local action are mutually and contradictorily related. I analyse the ways in which people in two rural communities surrounded by tree monocultures in Sweden and Spain think, feel and act after being exposed to acute forest fires in 2018 and 2017, respectively. Attentively listening to the experiences of vulnerability during and after the fire in the two cases helps to explain vulnerability to forest fires as an emotional, care-related process that opens up contradictory and transformative interconnections between peoples, nature and the state. Also, looking at the two cases together, this article shows how vulnerability to fire is mediated through unequal expectations across Europe's North–South divide. By re-signifying the implications of vulnerability, disasters such as those analysed here can be seen as facilitators of radical transformations towards new rural futures in Europe's forests.