Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

9-2018

Abstract

Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, describing how individual or recurrent disasters emerge from longue durée interactions between human and ecological systems. This approach underpinned many classic studies of the genre, including Donald Worster’s description of how the dust storms of the Great Depression emerged from a context of unsustainable agricultural expansion onto the American prairies, and Peter Perdue’s exploration of how chronic flooding in late imperial Hunan was the culmination of centuries of lakeshore reclamation.3 James Warren’s article in this special issue builds upon this tradition, embedding individual famines that struck the Philippines within the longue durée history of economic and ecological exchange.

Keywords

History, disasters, environment

Discipline

Environmental Studies | History | Physical and Environmental Geography

Research Areas

Humanities

Publication

International Review of Environmental History

Volume

4

Issue

2

First Page

5

Last Page

11

ISSN

2205-3212

Identifier

10.22459/IREH.04.02.2018.02

Publisher

ANU

Embargo Period

3-22-2022

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

http://doi.org/10.22459/IREH.04.02.2018.02

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