ABSTRACT
The first quotation above is from Frank Savage, former Governor of the British colony of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) appointee, facing detailed cross-examination before the International Development Committee of the House of Commons concerning the handling of the eruption of Mount Chance which has been ongoing since 1995. At this stage in the proceedings, Savage was trying to explain why it was that post-Hurricane Hugo development work had completely ignored a report by Wadge and Isaacs (1988) which warned of potential eruption and warned against extending development work in areas which they considered to be ‘at risk’ such as the capital Plymouth, wasting millions of pounds following the eruption of the volcano and subsequent destruction of Plymouth with its new jetty, hospital, library and Government Headquarters in 1997 (see Skinner 2003). The second quotation is from Anthony Oliver-Smith (1999a: 28; see also 1986), an anthropologist who has used his study of the 1970 Peruvian earthquake to assert that ‘[d]isasters occur in societies. They do not occur in nature’. For Oliver-Smith, a disaster should be read for its longevity and causation in that it is the result of human maladaptation to an environment; it is a ‘convergent catastrophe’ in the words of Moseley (1999). A volcano, for example, such as that on Montserrat, is a ‘trigger’ to a disaster (see Zaman 1999: 192); a flood in Bangladesh is precipitated by a colonial legacy of land ownership which had forced the population to the coast (Zaman
1999: 194); an earthquake is a ‘cultural artifact’ (Doughty 1999: 235), a ‘classquake’ (Oliver-Smith 1999b: 75) often several hundred years in the making. The 1970 7.7 Richter scale earthquake in Peru – often referred to as one of the largest natural disasters in the Western hemisphere – directly killed 70,000 people, injured another 140,000, destroyed 160,000 buildings, made homeless a further 500,000, entombed entire cities such as Yungay, and radically altered the environment of the north central Andes. Taking a political ecology approach to this disaster, Oliver-Smith analyses it as long time in the making, a disaster stemming from patterns altered and re-set ever since colonial conquest fostered urbanization in the valleys, and encouraged the change of building materials from thatch to stone. These non-indigenous adaptations – centralized settlement patterns and inappropriate environmental building materials and techniques – inadvertently caused, produced and induced disaster.
