We examined the effect of disturbances of varying intensity on the dominant modes of regeneration among woody plants in tropical dry forest in lowland Bolivia. Seed survival and density, mortality, height, crown area, and basal diameters of seedlings and sprouts were compared among four treatments of varying disturbance intensity (high-intensity burn, lowintensity burn, plant removal, and harvesting gap) over a period of 18 months following treatments. High-and low-intensity burns reduced densities of viable seed by an average of 94 and 50%, respectively. Tree seedlings were more abundant than tree sprouts in all treatments. There were few differences in seedling density among treatments. Sprouts were most common in the plant removal and low-intensity burn treatments than in harvesting gap and high-intensity burn treatments. Seedling mortality was higher than sprout mortality during the first year following treatments. Sprouts were taller, had more stems per individual, larger crown areas, and larger basal diameters than seedlings. Origin of sprout differed among treatments. Eighteen months following treatments, 85% of individuals >2.5 m tall were sprouts. Most seedlings >2.5 m tall after 18 months had established in high-intensity burn treatments. Sprouting individuals dominated regeneration after all treatments, however, in high-intensity burn treatments, sprouts were relatively less dominant due to smaller sprouts and larger seedlings after high-intensity burns. #

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Through its capacity to evoke systemic adaptation before and after disasters, resilience has become a seductive theory in disaster management. Several studies have linked the concept with systems theory; however, they have been mostly based on theoretical models with limited empirical support. The study of the Cuban model of resilience sheds light on the variables that create systemic resilience in the built environment and its relations with the social and natural environments. Cuba is vulnerable to many types of hazard, yet the country's disaster management benefits from institutional, health and education systems that develop social capital, knowledge and other assets that support construction industry and housing development, systematic urban and regional planning, effective alerts, and evacuation plans. The Cuban political context is specific, but the study can nonetheless contribute to systemic improvements to the resilience of built environments in other contexts.

Since the 1970s, human ecologists, geographers, Marxian political economists and others have insisted that there is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster. This assertion opened a space not only for exploring socioeconomic conditions that render marginalized populations vulnerable to natural hazards, but also for the formation of a field, the political ecology of hazards. A few political ecologists further interrogated the idea of a natural disaster, asking how different notions of 'the natural' circulate in post-disaster politics and with what effects. This article extends the latter approach by documenting how interconnected categories of 'nature' and 'state' were mutually constituted by narratives of politicians and elites after Chile's 2010 earthquake and tsunami. Drawing on media reports, we identify three distinct pairings of state/nature: (1) nature as manageable and the state as manager; (2) nature as out of control and the state as a police state; and (3) nature as financial opportunity and the state as prudential. Influenced by socioeconomic and historical factors, these state/nature pairings contradicted and reinforced one another in the disaster's aftermath and were deployed to reinforce top-down—rather than democratic—strategies of post-disaster reconstruction. This case offers an unusual approach to disaster politics by tracing how entwined and power-laden categories of state and nature condition the governance of disaster reconstruction processes.Key words: disaster, state, nature, socionature, political ecology of hazards, media disaster, earthquake, Latin America, Chile, 27F

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