Disasters fast and slow: The temporality of hazards in environmental history

• Main Authors: WILLIAMSON, Fiona, COURTNEY, Chris
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: History; disasters; environment; Environmental Studies; Physical and Environmental Geography
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3568; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4826/viewcontent/article01.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.