Environment and Development -- Ninth Class: Disasters, Vulnerability and Insecure Environments

Last week in my Environment and Development course (ERST-IDST-POST-SAFS 3602H), we discussed disasters.  It's a consequential topic, perhaps never more so than over the last few years, with a succession of events, including hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes (and elections) that could readily be considered disasters.  Disasters have much to tell us about our relations with the environment, and the social construction of vulnerability and insecurity.

We started with some open brainstorming, identifying some recent disasters, and assembling a diverse list -- both "natural," such as hurricanes, and human-caused, such as mass shootings.

Then we considered a widely-held view of disasters, as events that are unusual, sudden, and that can be classified as either natural, or the result of a technological breakdown or human error (such as nuclear or chemical accidents).  We then challenged that view, through a series of steps.

Events both historical and contemporary illustrate, first, that there are few"sudden" disasters (most have a substantial history behind them), and that they also combine nature and human factors -- thus eliminating the notion, in all but a few cases, of a "natural" disaster.  Some of these cases looked back at episodes discussed earlier in the course, including last week's discussion of the current air pollution crisis in Delhi -- an intensely political event.  This led to a discussion of the Anthropocene concept, which among its implications includes further erosion of the notion of the "natural" disaster.

And from there, we went on to exploring the relations between disasters and development, through two Caribbean case studies: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico two months ago; and the Haitian earthquake of 2010.  In each case, extreme vulnerability to these events reflected long histories of inequality and environmental and economic injustice.  The Haitian earthquake in particular provides a useful case study with which to think through a three-part approach to understanding the immediate and long-term factors that shape disasters and vulnerability, in terms of "root causes," "dynamic pressures," and "hazardous conditions".

And finally, we considered how disasters can be deliberate: the result of specific policies, such as clearance of "slum" neighbourhoods (as in Delhi, for example), or villages flooded by dams.  The point I wanted to stress with these cases was that disasters must be defined, at least in part, in terms of human experience: if one's home is swept away, whether by a hurricane, or by policy fiat, the experience can be quite similar.  Such incidents can also relate to reconsidering the time scales of disasters -- and the useful concept of "slow violence".