Disaster by Choice: How our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes

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Though there is undoubtedly an asymmetry between understanding of science and nature, science advances to fill our factor of ignorance. As knowledge and learnings to improve management of would-be disasters grows, and stories of vulnerability by choice are ever more widely known. That said, the author asks who is responsible for adding to vulnerability and preventing future disasters — which opens a myriad of complex and varied challenges with inequalities only adding to vulnerabilities. The baseline is that we have options regarding where we live, how we build, and how we get ourselves ready for living with nature," Kelman maintains. "Nature does not choose, but we do. We can choose to avoid disasters and that means disasters are not natural."

Two, writes Kelman, politics and power games often create and perpetuate systems that make people vulnerable to natural hazards. Those in power often have little interest in opposing e.g. lucrative property development in flood-prone areas or spending money to retrofit existing buildings to make them safer from wildfires or heatwaves. Kelman describes rebuilding in the same places, somehow expecting a different outcome next time. He doesn’t mention that France buys up property at risk after a major disaster, preventing rebuilding and emptying whole towns, cutting its losses going forward. It should be his poster child. He found no experts to add light to the dark, didn’t interview anyone about rebuilding on the same spot, and found no trends gaining momentum or worth watching. They are manifestations of nature that have occurred countless times over the aeons of Earth's history. The disaster consists of our inability to deal with them as part of nature. We have the knowledge, ability, technology, and resources to build houses which are not ripped apart by 250 mile per hour winds. If we choose to, we can create a culture with warning and safe sheltering. A balance between pushing for self-reliance, local accountability, and national and international management, is required in making the change. Following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Zaire, the author highlights camps set up for refugees on the nearest flatland which happened to be hardened lava until the nearby volcano erupted. The ‘displaced became re-displaced’ further complicating the migration settlement process already vulnerable contending with ongoing conflict — another example of vulnerability by choice with limited options.At the heart of Ilan Kelman's book is a striking claim - 'natural' disasters don't really exist. Instead, it's suggested, there are natural hazards and we choose by our actions (or often inactions) whether or not to turn these into disasters. The 2020 fires continue this pattern. Despite the heat wave and the fires' intensity and extent, plenty could have been done over the long-term to avoid the witnessed catastrophe. Over past decades, cities and towns have expanded significantly into burnable areas. For the environmental events and processes we can deal with by reducing vulnerability, which are most of them, we are the real causes of disasters, not nature. Inadvertently or deliberately, in knowledge or in ignorance, disasters emerge through human choices, actions, behavior, and values. Closing this chasm between what we know and actually using this knowledge is not easy. Ilan Kelman also tells the stories of various cities that figured out they should work with nature and not against it. They raise streets above flood level, make use of floodplains for flooding instead of roads, rails and housing, require tall buildings to be earthquake-proof and so on. Zoning can prevent building on the sides of volcanoes. Power should be well above flood level. Common sense stuff that few implement.

And three, where money is spent, it is often not spent wisely. We tend to focus on reducing the hazard rather than reducing people’s vulnerability. Kelman makes this point by talking of the rather obscure area of earthquake modification, the pie-in-the-sky idea of trying to control tectonic shifts (reducing the hazard), rather than focusing on constructing earthquake-proof infrastructure (reducing the vulnerability). I feel his example of how we deal with floods would have been better here. To wit, we often build expensive defences that need continuous maintenance (reducing the hazard), whereas we should construct houses that can handle a flood or avoid such areas altogether (reducing the vulnerability). This can be both hard to accept and hard to unravel. A complex of factors shape disasters. They arise from the political processes dictating where and what we build, and from social circumstances which create and perpetuate poverty and discrimination. They develop from the social preference to blame nature for the damage wrought, when in fact events such as earthquakes and storms are entirely commonplace environmental processes. We feel the need to fight natural forces, to reclaim what we assume is ours, and to protect ourselves from what we perceive to be wrath from outside our communities. This attitude distracts us from the real causes of disasters: humanity's decisions, as societies and as individuals. It stops us accepting the real solutions to disasters: making better decisions. Others prefer to work on smaller scales and less ambitious steps. They demonstrate more direct, more tangible, and more immediate positive impacts, which they hope, in the end, might scale up to wider, deeper changes. Examples are managing forests to permit small wildfires and retrofitting properties to withstand earthquakes, all while changing our behaviour so that we can withstand wildfires and earthquakes without harm.Of course, however they manifest themselves there are myriad factors behind disasters and their consequences. They can arise from political processes dictating where and what we build, and from social circumstances which create and perpetuate poverty and discrimination. If you're more convinced by numbers, it's a phenomenon that lends itself to statistical analysis. The earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 was over a hundred times less powerful than the one that shook Japan in 2011 and its resulting tsunami, for example, yet the death toll was more than ten times greater. The difference lay in the vulnerability of the two communities. How could we withstand the 250 mile per hour winds of a tornado, faster than Japan's bullet trains, or the 2,200ºF temperature of lava, hotter than many potters' kilns? How would we feel if an "expert" lectured to us that it was not nature's fault, as we sifted through the few photos salvaged from the pile of debris that was once our home and our life? I take the view of turning information and awareness of nature’s hazards to harness change, preparing our built and living environments and acting with providence to vulnerability. Keen not only to respond when hazard turns to disaster, but to also prepare, plan, and be prudent. Which speaks to the quote on the book cover ‘how our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes’. Europeans imported and imposed a different perspective of bushfires. Flames were presumed always to be dangerous and damaging, so they were suppressed and fought. As settlements expanded into the bush, fires indeed became highly destructive and lethal, reinforcing the combat mode. The New York National Guard loads cars with meals to distribute to those in quarantine due to COVID-19. (Credit: The National Guard)