Interpretations of Calamity

From the Viewpoint of Human Ecology

K. Hewitt, K. Hewitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000698923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 1983, Interpretations of Calamity provides a provocative critique of the 'dominant view' of research into natural hazards. Throughout the world, there are now many people professionally engaged in the mitigation and control of risks & hazards, and the impact of continuing economic development will ensure that they are fully employed. There is a wealth of perspectives in the book, including weather and wheat yields in the Soviet Union and Canada, an historical view of underdevelopment and hazards in Ireland and the impact of a response to drought in southern Africa, the Sahel and the Great Plains of the USA. The book reflects the major themes of hazards in the context of economic development and social change. Most of the case studies are from the rural and agriculture scene. This book provides a unique view of the vital importance of food production and of the considerable, and sometimes calamitous, impact that frost, flood, storm and drought have on the wellbeing of millions of people and on the stability of the international economic system.

Part I
Natural Disaster: Mischance or Misnomer?

1
The idea of calamity in a technocratic age

KENNETH HEWITT

I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy. Bertrand Russell (1925)

Human communities may have always suffered losses from flood, drought or storm. The argument I wish to develop here, however, is that the prevailing scientific view of these problems is a quite recent invention. And by that I mean a partial and reconstructed view, carefully detached from almost all previous ideas of calamity, and reflecting the singular social context of its origins. That may not seem unusual. There is a widespread feeling that any topic or view not actively developed in the most recent studies and literature must be outmoded if not actually worthless. Equally, there is an assumption that this development depends upon the initiatives of established researchers and major institutions in, especially, the wealthiest industrial nations. Yet, for the scientific community a consistent forward movement is supposed to rest upon serious logical considerations rather than mere fashion. It presumes more comprehensive and precise empirical bases, in turn co-ordinated with increasingly powerful general concepts.

Contemporary natural disasters research is certainly rich in the results of scientific enquiries, whether in geophysics or the psychology of stress. The applications of scientific research are not, however, its definitive feature. It may have internal coherence or at least conviction. That does not alter my sense that it capitalises rather arbitrarily upon scientific discovery. Indeed it accords with ‘the facts’ only insofar as they can be made to fit the assumptions, development and social predicaments of dominant institutions and research that has grown up serving them. Moreover my assessment of it leads me to believe that such developments have become the single greatest impediment to improvement in both the understanding of natural calamities and the strategies to alleviate them. That is why I have felt justified in devoting most of this chapter to a critique of the underpinnings of the prevailing views in hazards research. As such, I may seem to stray far from the immediate interests of those concerned with flooding or earthquake disaster or weather-damage to crops. However, the worth and message of subsequent chapters that do focus on those phenomena depends not only upon their individual merit but on what they imply collectively about the state of hazards research. And essentially they go against the prevailing thrust of that research.

Looking across the range of studies and actions relating to natural hazards, I am suggesting that one can recognise a convergence of opinion or approaches; a sufficient consensus to speak of a ‘dominant view’. Dominance is evident in the resources allocated; in the numbers of highly trained personnel involved and the volume of their published works; in the public visibility and acceptance of these works; and perhaps most of all in the attachment of this view to the more powerful institutions of modern states. In the work of any subfield or study, the dominant view might be revealed by the literature quoted and emulated. It may appear in the terminology used or the audience anticipated. For example, the more visible work of geography or sociology seems to me largely to express such dependency even when making useful innovations.

What will be described as the dominant consensus has certainly not gone uncriticised, both within and from outside the various fields relating to natural hazards. Nor does it go unchanged. However, it seems that this consensus has gone forward resisting any fundamental criticism. Its changes have been chameleon-like exercises in superficial novelty – absorbing, co-opting or ignoring dissent at will. Of course, one must beware of giving it the attributes of a thing or actor. Rather, we have the convergence of a wide range of thinking upon a unified perspective that constitutes what Thomas Kuhn has called a ‘paradigm’ (Kuhn 1962), or more specifically what Edward Said calls ‘an academic-research consensus’ (1978, p. 275). For the dominant view of hazards is not merely enshrined in rarified language and technical apparatus, it is fully symptomatic of the social contexts in which it has arisen and that still form its main points of reference. Its strength depends less upon its logic and internal sophistications than on its being a convenient productive ‘world view’ for certain dominant institutions and academic spokesmen. In other words it is, above all, a construct reflecting the shaping hand of a contemporary social order. From a sociocultural perspective, it is itself a phenomenon requiring investigation as part of the so-called ‘social construction of knowledge’ (Mannheim 1952, Berger & Luckmann 1967).

The unease or outright criticism of accepted hazards interpretations in the chapters that follow seems to me to stem essentially from the struggle to articulate and to pursue intellectual and societal perspectives that the dominant view has served to stifle. Hence, behind the empirical and methodological detail looms the larger – and for social science the most fundamental of all research questions – self-conscious examination of the psychosocial underpinnings of thought, assumption and practice.

I shall not attempt here to review hazards research in a detailed fashion. In any case, there is no lack of reviews or lengthy studies of the various geophysical conditions involved. My purpose is rather to examine the styles of argument, the uses of information and managerial assumptions that divide off the dominant consensus not merely from other research, but from the variety of possible viewpoints and concerns of hazards research. I shall try to show the common ground that channels and reflects basic motivations and social contexts.

The dominant view in outline

The superficial features of the dominant view are not hard to discern, though it requires specialised, lengthy training to contribute to them. There is generally a straightforward acceptance of natural disaster as a result of ‘extremes’ in geophysical processes. The occurrence and essential features of calamity are seen to depend primarily upon the nature of storms, earthquakes, flood, drought. It may be accepted that ‘hazard’, strictly speaking, refers to the potential for damage that exists only in the presence of a vulnerable human community. Actual usage almost invariably refers to an objective geophysical process, such as a hurricane or frost, as ‘the hazard’. In turn, damage and human actions are defined by, or as responses to, the type, magnitude, frequency, and other dimensions of these processes (e.g. Smith 1957, Part I; Hewitt & Burton 1971, White 1974, Unesco 1980, Burton etal. 1978, Ch. 2; Grayson & Sheets 1979).

Conceptual preambles and the development of a refined language of ‘risk assessment’ appear to have swept away the old unpalatable causality of environmental determinism seen in, say, Huntington’s work on storms (1945, Ch. 21). The sense of causality or the direction of explanation still runs from the physical environment to its social impacts. The most expensive actions and the more formidable scientific literature recommending action are concerned mainly with geophysical monitoring, forecasting and direct engineering or land-use planning in relation to natural agents (NAS 1980a & b, Soloviev 1978, Ang 1978, Yoshino 1971).

Few researchers would deny that social and economic factors or habitat conditions other than geophysical extremes affect risk. The direction of argument in the dominant view relegates them to a dependent position. The initiative in calamity is seen to be with nature, which decides where and what social conditions or responses will become significant. Here is the geophysicist Bolt (1978, p. 156) discussing an especially ‘bad year’ for earthquake disasters: ‘Paradoxically, despite these grim statistics, 1976 had slightly less than the average number of large earthquakes … [the] figures demonstrate that the misfortune of 1976 was not that more large earthquakes than normal occurred, but rather that more than usual occurred by chance in susceptible highly populated regions’ [my italic]. The implication always seems to be that disaster occurs because of the chance recurrences of natural extremes, modified in detail but fortuitously by human circumstances.

Likewise, the geography of risk is usually treated as synonymous with the distribution of natural extremes such as large earthquakes, and with the natural features directly associated with them such as faults, flood plains, drought ‘polygons’ and avalanche tracks. To be sure, reference is made to past major disasters in assessing risk (Swiss Re 1978). Some account may be taken of population density, or national economic ‘levels’, themselves measured and treated so as to seem commensurate with geophysical parameters (see Kantarovitch et al. 1970, Burton et al. 1979). In such terms, the Soviet geographers Gerasimov and Zvonova, for example, do speak of the difference between ‘the intensity of a disaster’ and the ‘potential danger’ which, they say, ‘remains the same’ (White 1974, p. 243). However, even geographers have for the most part been content to treat the geography of hazards as synonymous with the spatial distribution and frequencies of geophysical extremes. The maps in Sections IV and V of White (1974) are examples. (See also Strahler & Strahler 1973, pp. 218–25; Ayre 1975, Berlin 1980, vol. I.)

In the dominant view, then, disaster itself is attributed to nature. There is, however, an equally strong conviction that something can be done about disaster by society. But that something is viewed as strictly a matter of public policy backed up by the most advanced geophysical, geotechnical and managerial capability. There is a strong sense, even among social scientists for whom it is a major interest, that everyday or ‘ordinary’ human activity can do little except make the problem worse by default. In other words, the structure of the problem is seen to depend upon the ratios between given forces of nature and ‘advanced’ institutional and technical counterforce.

One can summarise the bulk of the work and expenditures within the dominant view as falling into three main areas:

• (a) An unprecedented commitment to the monitoring and scientific understanding of geophysical processes – geologic, hydrologie, atmospheric – as the foundation for dealing with their human significance and impacts. Here the most immediate goal in relation to hazards is that of prediction.
• (b) Planning and managerial activities to contain those processes where possible, through flood control works, cloud seeding, or avalanche defences, and where it is not possible, physically to rearrange human activities in accordance with the objective geophysical patterns and probabilities. That involves zoning, building codes and ‘fail-safe’ artifacts. A remarkable unity of language has emerged here to discuss geophysical processes, physical planning and the assessment of risks.
• (c) Emergency measures, involving disaster plans and the establishment of organisations for relief and rehabilitation. The ability to put in place the insights developed by geophysical research and planning is important here. Study however is necessarily subordinate to action. Action is most commonly and directly put in the hands of military, or quasi-military organisations. (Since most of the world’s people and land areas have little access normally to the products of modern geophysical science and management technology, it is through emergencies that they become involved in the perspectives of the dominant view.)

In terms of research, the main areas of expertise are those of the physical sciences and engineering. However, social sciences play a substantial role, notably in studying ‘crisis behaviour’ and emergency measures; or in focusing upon places and groups singled out by the experience, expectation or existence of major natural disaster in their area (Disaster Research Group 1961, Baker & Chapman 1962, Grosser et al. 1964, Brictson 1966, Dynes & Quarantelli 1968, NAS 1976, Hewitt & Burton 1971, White 1974, Haasetal. 1977).

There have been important social analyses that disagree more or less profoundly with the dominant view (e.g. Walford 1878–9, Part II; Sorokin 1942, Kendrick 1956, Lifton 1970, Copans 1975, McNeill 1976, O’Keefe et al. 1976, Torry 1978). However, in recent decades, social scientists have tended to concentrate increasingly upon direct socioeconomic and behavioural relations of the three areas of the dominant view noted above. They ask how individuals or groups appraise the risks of occupying areas classified as typhoon coasts or flood plains. The results tend to be compared with geophysical knowledge of typhoons and floods. They ask how people respond to forecasts, requests to conserve water and hazard-zoning legislation. They examine how people and institutions ‘cope’ when the volcano erupts or a crop is destroyed.

These interests seem entirely reasonable in themselves. They become less so as they are tributary to supposedly more sophisticated geophysical and engineering knowledge. Moreover, by this narrow focus upon information that centres the problem upon natural extremes and damaging events, they easily miss the main sources of social influence over hazards. B...