Disasters are not natural. Wehumanity and societycreate them and we can choose to prevent them.
Stating that natural disasters do not exist because humans cause disasters seems insanely provocative. We witness nature ravaging our lives all the time: from a city underwater after a storm roars off the Atlantic to rows of smouldering houses after a wildfire to the dust rising from the ruins after an earthquake.
How could we withstand the 250 mile per hour winds of a tornado, faster than Japan’s bullet trains, or the 2,200ºF temperature of lava, hotter than many potters’ kilns? How would we feel if an “expert” lectured to us that it was not nature’s fault, as we sifted through the few photos salvaged from the pile of debris that was once our home and our life?
Yet even when we cannot keep our infrastructure standing, we can stop people dying, we can protect our most valuable possessions, and we can learn to deal with devastation. The disaster lies not in the forces unleashed by nature, but in the deaths and injuries, the loss of irreplaceable homes and livelihoods, and the failure to support affected people, so that a short-term interruption becomes a long-term recovery nightmare.
Even the COVID-19 pandemic is not a natural disaster. We know that new viruses emerge and infect us all the time. We could have improved our monitoring for and response to emerging diseases, which meansat minimumnot silencing and intimidating health professionals who report that something might be happening. And, long before, we must build robust health systems and health coverage, so that countries can be confident of taking care of a sick population. Then follow the long-ago-shelved pandemic plans that would have told the world how to deal with the new coronavirus without it becoming a pandemic forcing so many of us into lockdown for weeks.
The tornado, the earthquake, the virus are not to blame for our decisions.
They are manifestations of nature that have occurred countless times over the aeons of Earth’s history. The disaster consists of our inability to deal with them as part of nature. We have the knowledge, ability, technology, and resources to build houses which are not ripped apart by 250 mile per hour winds. If we choose to, we can create a culture with warning and safe sheltering.
Lava at 2,200ºF and a tsunami higher than our building are harder to ride out. But we can shun places likely to be hit by them or we can create a culture that understands and accepts periodic destruction, again with warning and safe evacuation, to permit swift rebuilding afterwards. The baseline is that we have options regarding where we live, how we build, and how we get ourselves ready for living with nature.
Many of the choices we make currently permit death and devastation. They create the conditions for disasters, not nature.
For the environmental events and processes we can deal with by reducing vulnerability, which are most of them, we are the real causes of disasters, not nature. Inadvertently or deliberately, in knowledge or in ignorance, disasters emerge through human choices, actions, behavior, and values. Closing this chasm between what we know and actually using this knowledge is not easy.
Some people aim to change fundamentals, focusing on the big picture in order to overcome baseline causes of vulnerabilities. Discrimination, poverty, inequity, and incompetence feed into disasters.
Others prefer to work on smaller scales and less ambitious steps. They demonstrate more direct, more tangible, and more immediate positive impacts, which they hope, in the end, might scale up to wider, deeper changes. Examples are managing forests to permit small wildfires and retrofitting properties to withstand earthquakes, all while changing our behaviour so that we can withstand wildfires and earthquakes without harm.
One approach never precludes the other. We can practice both together, so that they complement rather than impede each other. After all, chronic human conditions of vulnerability that cause disasters are ever-present, and must be tackled, at all scales, especially over the long term. This means that disasters never manifest rapidly. Rather than an event, we should recognize that a disaster is a long-term process.
Some hazards release their forces and energies swiftly with little specific warning. While we know broadly where earthquakes could strike at any time, such as Haiti and Jamaica, we cannot yet predict that an earthquake will occur in a specific place at a specific time. We know broadly where hurricanes could strike, also including Haiti and Jamaica, and we can observe the progress of a specific hurricane, but we cannot predict beyond a few days in advance when and where a major storm might make landfall. We know that Haiti and Jamaica are vulnerable to earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, epidemics, and many other hazards because of their long-term social inequities and infrastructure inadequacies.
Consequently, in the same way that disasters are not natural, they are not unusual or extreme. They dramatically expose the vulnerabilities with which people live, and are typically forced by others to live, on a daily basis.
We can prevent ‘natural disasters’ and their human suffering, despite the presence of major environmental hazards, by reducing vulnerabilities. We must actively choose to do so.