The fire calamity in Southern California is less about forests and more about the way government organizes activities in regards to forests, says a UC Davis organizational sociologist who studies disasters and how they happen.

"The catastrophic consequences of the fire resulted from the way that government manages population growth and forest resources in the United States," says Tom Beamish, an assistant professor of sociology and author of "Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis" (2002).

Beamish sees similarities between the current forest fires and his study of an oil spill in Santa Barbara that occurred over 40 years without much notice from the 18 federal and state agencies that had jurisdiction over the problem.

"None of the agencies or commercial organizations in Santa Barbara could see the leak as a 'spill,' and they didn't take responsibility for it because it took so long to become obvious," he says. "Likewise, over time, slowly dying trees in a forest or promoting overgrowth in forests based on routine fire suppression is just not dramatic enough to promote a change in policy. Nobody is watching until it starts to burn."

Arguing that the signs are always apparent before such catastrophes happen, Beamish says the fires occurred because the current governmental and non-governmental organizational systems are generally conservative and reactive.

"But being proactive means making difficult choices: It costs money up front, and it involves both assessing the risks in letting the forests go as well as risks in doing something about them. And then we have the inertia that is a normal part of organizational life," Beamish says. This resistance to making a change in routine conduct exists with any effort to fix organizational problems, he emphasizes.

Beamish predicts the Southern California fires will trigger superficial legislative fixes and changes in the way adjusters price home insurance.

"But I suspect, if the past is any indicator of the future, you won't see a dramatic change in what regulatory institutions do, and we will have similar problems with calamitous forest fires down the road," he says. "As a society, we accommodate problems that are small and incremental. Over time, disasters seem to just happen, and only then they get our attention. But, in fact, the signs of catastrophe were there to be seen the whole time."