On this real world, natural threats and hazards – cycles of flood and drought; hurricanes and winter storms; earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions; and more – are much in evidence. They are not merely features that make Earth a bit more interesting. They are consequential. We need to be clear-eyed about their nature and impacts. They are inevitable, inimical, and irreversible.
Start with inevitable. Extremes are in large part the way the planet does its business. They are not merely incidental – and not entirely without benefit. Fact is, hurricanes make substantial contributions to annual average rainfall in tropical regions. Winter storms contribute to the great polar heat transfers that keep Earth’s cold-season hemisphere warmer and more livable than it would be otherwise. The interplay of floods and drought has shaped the natural ecosystems that support human life. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions reflect the continuing drift and reconfiguring of Earth’s continental crustal masses.
Inimical. That said, the localized and direct impacts of hazards are momentous, and for the most part dire. Earth’s extremes kill. They maim, physically, during the events themselves, and then psychologically and spiritually, through their lingering effects on survivors over the months and even years that follow (think of the analogy to long-covid). They destroy property and disrupt lives and economies. They trigger evacuations, both temporary and permanent. These impacts are most evident to those “in harm’s way,” but they extend across whole regions and peoples. As John Donne said, “no man is an island.” But those of us who escaped the latest event tend to be rather complacent about the unending distress of those struggling to put their lives back together. The result is a fraying of the larger social fabric.
Moreover, these impacts are also almost wholly irreversible. Experts speak of “disaster recovery,” as if it were real, but in fact it’s closer to an oxymoron. New construction may replace the old that was carried away by flood or consumed in fire, but it’s new construction. A new community may occupy the former disaster site, but it’s made up of newcomers as much or more than by former residents. What we refer to as recovery is more a matter of the unaffected world nearby moving on obliviously[1].
All this creates human tragedy. That’s because it is not Earth’s extremes per se that do all this harm. It is a history of human decision, actions, and inaction that is the proximate cause. Ineffective zoning, and settlement in floodplains and atop seismic zones. Inadequate building codes. Poor construction. Political pressure from business interests. Complacency in the face of poverty and inequity.
And repeated failures to learn from experience and improve things.
After such tragedies, the default response is to rebuild as before, on the prior location (in the floodplain, or on the seismic fault zone).
Muddling through? Repeating a mistake but hoping for a different result? That’s not the stance we take towards other risks.
As one example: take aviation. When it comes to aviation, airframe manufacturers, airlines, and governments learn from experience, and improve design, manufacture, operation and maintenance. Despite an eightfold increase in commercial flights over the past half-century, deaths per year have fallen from the rate of some 1500 per year in the 1960’s to some ten percent of that figure. A commercial flight is nearly 80 times safer today than it was a century ago.
How different from living, say, in Florida’s coastal communities – where warmer climates, more intense storms, and sea-level rise increase disaster risk, and vulnerable infrastructure – roads, electrical power, etc. – make evacuation necessary and return home problematic at best. The dismal rise in property destruction and economic disruption have motivated some, me included (e.g., here, with my colleague Gina Eosco, and again here), to call for an analogy to the National Transportation Safety Board – a notional Natural Disaster Review Board that might mimic the success of the aviation community and make American living safer. In fact, the kernel of such ideas goes back even further. For example, Quarantelli (1987) provides a nice historical perspective on prior work at the National Academies and elsewhere, even extending back to DoD work in the 1950’s. Since then, social scientists have continued to weigh in[2].
Such ideas have failed to receive any traction. Why not? The reasons are many and varied, and in some respects compelling. But perhaps all that could change. More in the next post.
[1]There is something of an analog to this in natural ecosystems. Recall the documentaries you’ve seen on African wildlife. A prey species finds its routine disrupted by a predator attack; after the kill, the cameras pan back to show the prey species grazing seemingly unconcerned within eyesight and easy reach of the predators, as the latter focus on their newly-downed meal. Not unlike those prey species, human beings can sometimes seem resigned – fatalistic – when it comes to natural disaster.
[2]in 2001, a famous trio of social scientists – Gilbert White, Ian Burton, and Bob Kates – considered the growth in disaster losses in an article entitled Knowing better and losing even more: the use of knowledge in hazards management. They concluded that either (1) knowledge is lacking, (2) knowledge is available but unused, (3) knowledge is available but used ineffectively, (4) there is a time lag between the application of knowledge and the results, or (5) the best efforts to apply knowledge are overwhelmed by the rapid increase in vulnerability, etc. Only possibilities (2) and (3) are considered in this post.