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Disaster by Choice: How our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes

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Two, writes Kelman, politics and power games often create and perpetuate systems that make people vulnerable to natural hazards. Those in power often have little interest in opposing e.g. lucrative property development in flood-prone areas or spending money to retrofit existing buildings to make them safer from wildfires or heatwaves.

An earthquake shatters Haiti and a hurricane slices through Texas. We hear that nature runs rampant, seeking to destroy us through these 'natural disasters'. Science recounts a different story, however: disasters are not the consequence of natural causes; they are the consequence of human The author argues resilience is an investment over time. He highlights, weak governance structures, over-exploitation, violence, poverty, marginalisation, corruption and poor infrastructure are some other vulnerabilities the Haitian quake and other disasters suffer, which extends the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change definition of vulnerability. Four concepts hold the book together, awareness of nature’s hazards, stories of vulnerability, vulnerability by choice, and making the change. Home owners can design and maintain their houses and land to reduce the chance of them catching alight during a bushfire. No guarantees ever exist of saving property, but we have seen the difference in Australia this year between those whose dwellings survived and those who sadly lost everything or who tragically perished while staying behind to defend. This can be both hard to accept and hard to unravel. A complex of factors shape disasters. They arise from the political processes dictating where and what we build, and from social circumstances which create and perpetuate poverty and discrimination. They develop from the social preference to blame nature for the damage wrought, when in fact events such as earthquakes and storms are entirely commonplace environmental processes. We feel the need to fight natural forces, to reclaim what we assume is ours, and to protect ourselves from what we perceive to be wrath from outside our communities. This attitude distracts us from the real causes of disasters: humanity's decisions, as societies and as individuals. It stops us accepting the real solutions to disasters: making better 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.Like the maxim attributed to a number of different sources including Albert Einstein that insanity is the act of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Kelman argues, we repeatedly fail to take measures that would prevent disasters. An] engaging book filled with rich examples and details of specific historical events Kelmans succinct and generally lucid account of the state of knowledge within the field, will likely be useful to a wide range of readers."

The baseline is that we have options regarding where we live, how we build, and how we get ourselves ready for living with nature," Kelman maintains. "Nature does not choose, but we do. We can choose to avoid disasters and that means disasters are not natural." 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. Throughout, his message is clear: there is no such thing as a natural disaster. The disaster lies in our inability to deal with the environment and with ourselves. This is an excellent little book that crystallises ideas about the influence and impact of human actions on natural catastrophes into a thoughtful and informative narrative, concluding – and rightly so – that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. A must-read book."

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The main message of this book is that disasters are not natural. Societies and humanity choose to create them. We can also, with insight, economic resources and political will, choose to prevent them [...] I hope that this book is widely read and its message heeded."

What makes a natural event — rising waters, a hurricane, a sudden slip of tectonic plates — a disaster? Human suffering — and Illan Kelman argues in Disaster by Choice that that suffering is usually self-inflicted. He posits that there’s nearly no such thing as a natural disaster, because virtually all disaster are a result of humans not making adequate preparations. He allows for some outliers, like ice ages, supervolcano eruptions, and asteroid impacts, but otherwise puts the onus of calamities squarely on our shoulders. A reader can understand Kelman’s belief, to a point: an ice storm that hits a city like Boston with the resources and knowledge to prepare for it will be perceived very differently than an ice storm that hits say, Houston. A tornado that destroys a neighborhood, though, is still disastrous even if 100% of the previous residents were ready for it and squirreled away in their basements. Most of the book consists of evaluations of various disasters, and the human-generated risk factors involved: we built on infill land, we put in levees and assume they won’t break, we pretend earthquakes only ever happen in California and never in New England, etc. Sometimes a certain degree of readiness, like the aforementioned levee, can make us sloppy in other respects: since the levees won’t break, we don’t need to assume our ground floors will flood….even though they stil can, from sources unrelated to hurricanes. Even if we live in hazardous areas, preparations can be made to make people living there far less vulnerable. There are actions that even those living in wildfire-prone zones can take to greatly mitigate their risk.Though there is undoubtedly an asymmetry between understanding of science and nature, science advances to fill our factor of ignorance. As knowledge and learnings to improve management of would-be disasters grows, and stories of vulnerability by choice are ever more widely known. That said, the author asks who is responsible for adding to vulnerability and preventing future disasters — which opens a myriad of complex and varied challenges with inequalities only adding to vulnerabilities. choices and decisions. we put ourselves in harm's way; we fail to take measures which we know would prevent disasters, no matter what the environment does. This perfectly crafted and well written book [...] is long overdue, much needed and greatly welcomed." Over time, Indigenous practices adapted the ecosystems to support plant species that could survive low-intensity bushfires, actually using fire to propagate. Fire was part of land use and land management, integrated into human needs among other environmental adjustments, although we do not really know how many fire disasters the Indigenous Australians might have caused nor how many of them perished in the flames. As Kelman mentions, these are all “essential pieces of the disaster jigsaw”, but he unfortunately does not really assemble them. And that is a shame, as I feel Kelman makes some excellent points of which I will highlight three.

The book starts really well with a gripping description of the Haiti earthquake and its aftermath. Kelman makes a good job of telling the story and using it to powerful effect. He goes on to effectively describe some of the possible natural hazards that can lead to disasters, this time focusing his story on the mundane-seeming protection of Canvey Island from the Thames and on Australian bushfires (in a book written before 2019's devastating fires). We see how a combination of economics, politics and the human ability to not think to clearly about the future encourages a repeated failure to learn the lessons of past events.At the heart of Ilan Kelman's book is a striking claim - 'natural' disasters don't really exist. Instead, it's suggested, there are natural hazards and we choose by our actions (or often inactions) whether or not to turn these into disasters.

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