The Data of Disasters

“There’s no such thing as a natural disaster.” Geographer Neil Smith stated this plainly as the title of his short but important journal article from 2006. ¹ Writing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the resultant humanitarian crisis it caused in New Orleans, Smith was highlighting a belief long-held by geographers; natural disasters are not the result of independent and uncontrollable natural events, but are instead a failure of human-designed systems—infrastructural, political, organizational, and social. “The contours of a disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies,” he continued, “is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.” ² Indeed, a natural disaster is an indication that society in general has failed to remember precisely why humans first lived collectively and chose to share resources—that is, to manage risk inherent in the natural environment. There have always been extreme weather events with which societies have had to contend. The degree to which these events result in a disaster, however, is a matter of design. It is in our contemporary moment that such events become most tightly articulated with the complex technological networks and social processes that we have collectively designed and these either mitigate or exacerbate the effects of the extreme event.