ABSTRACT
Human communities have always suffered losses from flood, drought or storm. Contemporary natural disasters research is certainly rich in the results of scientific enquiries, whether in geophysics or the psychology of stress. Natural hazards may be acknowledged to include a continuum of damages from ordinary wear and tear by sun or wind, to major catastrophes. Hazards are taken as natural events that destabilise or violate ordinary life and relations to the habitat. Natural hazards, like disease, poverty, even death, become simply the unfinished business of our endeavours. The scientific ingredient that most helps to maintain the dominant view is the thoroughly respectable notion of Uncertainty and related ideas. The common concerns and competence of human geography, human ecology and anthropology are of intrinsic interest to the understanding of hazard, rather than fortuitous matters arising only, and in special ways, when there is the impact of natural extremes or their threat.
