by wutang » Mon Oct 02, 2017 11:40 am
Lady Murasaki wrote:We can't do much about the natural disasters but the human disasters can be helped.
Always worth remembering that natural disaster are social disasters
It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction – the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom. This is not simply an academic point but a practical one, and it has everything to do with how societies prepare for and absorb natural events and how they can or should reconstruct afterward. It is difficult, so soon on the heels of such an unnecessarily deadly disaster, to be discompassionate, but it is important in the heat of the moment to put social science to work as a counterweight to official attempts to relegate Katrina to the historical dustbin of inevitable “natural” disasters.
This isnt to ignore natural events but to realise that who lives and who dies, who suffers the most, etc is dependent on social factors
Whether a natural event is a disaster or not depends ultimately, however, on its location. A large earthquake in the Hindu Kush may spawn no disaster whatsoever while the same intensity event in California could be a catastrophe
There is a reason that the poor tend to get fucked more than the rich in the aftermath of a disaster
Vulnerability, in turn, is highly differentiated; some people are much more vulnerable than others. Put bluntly, in many climates rich people tend to take the higher land leaving to the poor and working class land more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. This is a trend not an iron clad generalization: oceanfront property marks a major exception in many places, and Bolivia’s La Paz, where the wealthy live in the cooler valley below 13,000 feet, is another. In New Orleans, however, topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients, and as the Katrina evacuation so tragically demonstrated, the better off had cars to get out, credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies, their immediate families likely had resources to support their evacuation, and the wealthier also had the insurance policies for rebuilding. Not just the market but successive administrations from the federal to the urban scale, made the poorest population in New Orleans most vulnerable
The whole piece in worth reading it goes into the different levels of preparedness that goes into different areas, how Governments response tend to favour rich over poor (to quite disasterous effects) and how the rebuilding afterwards is politically motivated (in Puerto Rico the US Government is using the crisis to force through a privatisation agenda, they did the same after Katrina.
[quote="Lady Murasaki"]We can't do much about the natural disasters but the human disasters can be helped.
[/quote]
Always worth remembering that natural disaster are social disasters
[quote]It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction – the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom. This is not simply an academic point but a practical one, and it has everything to do with how societies prepare for and absorb natural events and how they can or should reconstruct afterward. It is difficult, so soon on the heels of such an unnecessarily deadly disaster, to be discompassionate, but it is important in the heat of the moment to put social science to work as a counterweight to official attempts to relegate Katrina to the historical dustbin of inevitable “natural” disasters.
[/quote]
This isnt to ignore natural events but to realise that who lives and who dies, who suffers the most, etc is dependent on social factors
[quote]Whether a natural event is a disaster or not depends ultimately, however, on its location. A large earthquake in the Hindu Kush may spawn no disaster whatsoever while the same intensity event in California could be a catastrophe[/quote]
There is a reason that the poor tend to get fucked more than the rich in the aftermath of a disaster
[quote]Vulnerability, in turn, is highly differentiated; some people are much more vulnerable than others. Put bluntly, in many climates rich people tend to take the higher land leaving to the poor and working class land more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. This is a trend not an iron clad generalization: oceanfront property marks a major exception in many places, and Bolivia’s La Paz, where the wealthy live in the cooler valley below 13,000 feet, is another. In New Orleans, however, topographic gradients doubled as class and race gradients, and as the Katrina evacuation so tragically demonstrated, the better off had cars to get out, credit cards and bank accounts for emergency hotels and supplies, their immediate families likely had resources to support their evacuation, and the wealthier also had the insurance policies for rebuilding. Not just the market but successive administrations from the federal to the urban scale, made the poorest population in New Orleans most vulnerable[/quote]
The whole piece in worth reading it goes into the different levels of preparedness that goes into different areas, how Governments response tend to favour rich over poor (to quite disasterous effects) and how the rebuilding afterwards is politically motivated (in Puerto Rico the US Government is using the crisis to force through a privatisation agenda, they did the same after Katrina.
[quote]There’s no such thing as a natural disaster - Neil Smith
https://libcom.org/library/there%E2%80%99s-no-such-thing-natural-disaster-neil-smith[/quote]
