ABSTRACT
Contemporary crises such as the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, and the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that struck northeastern Japan in 2011, have begun to attract a good deal of scholarly attention to environmental disasters. Such disasters have usually been viewed as sudden and unexpected events. But recent historical research by Ted Steinberg (2000, 2001), Greg Bankoff (2003), Christof Mauch (Mauch 2009; Lübken and Mauch 2011), Christian Pfister (2011) and others (Langston 2012) has identified long-term patterns of vulnerability to “natural disasters”. In addition, their work analyzes how communities in disaster-prone areas have adapted to risks and challenges over time, providing important insights for minimizing the impacts of catastrophic events in the future. It becomes clear that “natural disasters” are not wholly natural but are also the result of social, technological, and economic decision making (low-income communities, for example, often have to live in the riskiest areas).
