Hazards Vulnerability and Environmental Justice

Susan L. Cutter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136564277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Assurance

From Hurricane Katrina and the south Asian tsunami to human-induced atrocities, terrorist attacks and the looming effects of climate change, the world is assailed by both natural and unnatural hazards and disasters. These expose not only human vulnerability - particularly that of the poorest, who are least able to respond and adapt - but also the profound worldwide environmental injustices that result from the geographical distribution of risks, hazards and disasters.

This collection of essays, from one of the most renowned and experienced experts, provides a timely assessment of these critical themes. Presenting the top selections from Susan L. Cutter's thirty years of scholarship on hazards, vulnerability and environmental justice, the volume tackles issues such as nuclear and toxic hazards, risk assessment, communication and planning, and societal responses. Cutter maps out the terrain and draws out the salient themes with a fresh, powerful introduction written in the wake of her work in the aftermath of Katrina.

This essential collection is ideal for professionals, researchers, academics and students working on hazards, risk, disasters and environmental justice across a range of disciplines.

Part I

Old, New and Familiar Hazards

1

The Changing Landscape of Fear

Susan L. Cutter, Douglas B. Richardson
and Thomas J. Wilbanks

In the days following 11 September 2001, all geographers felt a sense of loss – people we knew perished, and along with everyone else we experienced discomfort in our own lives and a diminished level of confidence that the world will be a safe and secure place for our children and grandchildren. Many of us who are geographers felt an urge and a need to see if we could find ways to apply our knowledge and expertise to make the world more secure. A number of our colleagues assisted immediately by sharing specific geographical knowledge (such as Jack Shroder's expert knowledge on the caves in Afghanistan) or more generally by assisting rescue and relief efforts through our technical expertise in geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (such as Hunter College's Center for the Analysis and Research of Spatial Information and various geographers at federal agencies and in the private sector). Still others sought to enhance the nation's research capacity in the geographical dimensions of terrorism (the Association of American Geographers’ Geographical Dimensions of Terrorism project). Many of us have given considerable thought to how our science and practice might be useful in both the short and longer terms. One result is the set of contributions to this book.

But, we fail in our social responsibility if we spend our time thinking of geography as the end. Geography is not the end; it is one of many means to the end. Our concern should be with issues and needs that transcend any one discipline. As we address issues of terrorism, utility without quality is unprofessional, but quality without utility is self-indulgent. Our challenge is to focus not on geography's general importance but on the central issues in addressing terrorism as a new reality in our lives in the United States (although, unfortunately, not a new issue in too many other parts of our world).

The 11 September 2001 events have prompted both immediate and longer-term concerns about the geographical dimensions of terrorism. Potential questions on the very nature of these types of threats, how the public perceives them, individual and societal willingness to reduce vulnerability to such threats, and ultimately our ability to manage their consequences require concerted research on the part of the geographical community, among others. Geographers are well positioned to ad dress some of the initial questions regarding emergency management and response and some of the spatial impacts of the immediate consequences, but the research community is not sufficiently mobilized and networked internally or externally to develop a longer, sustained, and theoretically informed research agenda on the geographical dimensions of terrorism. As noted more than a decade ago, ‘issues of nuclear war and deterrence [and now terrorism] are inherently geographical, yet our disciplinary literature is either silent on the subject or poorly focused’ (Cutter, 1988, p132). Recent events provide an opportunity and a context for charting a new path to bring geographical knowledge and skills to the forefront in solving this pressing international problem.

Promoting Landscapes of Fear

Terrorists (and terrorism) seek to exploit the everyday – things that people do, places that they visit, the routines of daily living, and the functioning of institutions. Terrorism is an adaptive threat which changes its target, timing and mode of delivery as circumstances are altered. The seeming randomness of terrorist attacks (either the work of organized groups or renegade individuals) in both time and space increases public anxiety concerning terrorism. At the most fundamental level, 11 September 2001 was an attack on the two most prominent symbols of US financial and military power: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (Smith, 2002; Harvey, 2002). The events represented symbolic victories of chaos over order and normality (Alexander, 2002), disruptions in and the undermining of global financial markets (Harvey, 2002), a nationalization of terror (Smith, 2002) and the creation of fear and uncertainty among the public, precisely the desired outcome by the perpetrators. In generating this psychological landscape of fear, people's activity patterns were and are being altered, with widespread social, political, and economic effects. The reduction in air travel by consumers in the weeks and months following 11 September 2001 was but one among many examples.

What are the Fundamental Issues of Terrorism?

There are a myriad of different ways to identify and examine terrorism issues. Some of these dimensions are quite conventional, others less so. In all cases, geographical understanding provides an essential aspect of the enquiry. There are a number of dimensions of the issues that seem reasonably clear. For instance, one conventional way of looking at the topic is to distinguish four central subject-matter challenges:

1 reducing threats, including a) reducing the reasons why people want to commit terrorist acts, thereby addressing root causes, and b) reducing the ability of potential terrorists to accomplish their aims, or deterrence;

2 detecting threats that have not been avoided, using sensors and signature detection to spot potential actions before they happen and interrupt them;

3 reducing vulnerabilities to threats, focusing on critical sectors and infrastructures, hopefully without sacrificing civil liberties and individual freedoms; and

4 improving responses to terrorism, emphasizing ‘consequence management’, and also attributing causation and learning from experience (for example, forensics applied to explosive materials and anthrax strains).

A different way of viewing terrorism is according to time horizons. Immediately after 11 September 2001, governmental leaders told us that the nation was now engaged in a new ‘war on terrorism’ that will last several years, and that our existing knowledge and technologies are needed for this war. Early estimates of the overall U.S. national effort are very large – in the range of $30 to $40 billion per year – including the formation of a new executive department, the Department of Homeland Security. Early priorities include securing national borders, supporting first responders mainly in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Justice, defending against bioterrorism, and applying information technologies to improve national security.

Beyond this, we know that better knowledge and practices should be put to use in the next half-decade or so, as we face a challenge that is more like a stubborn virus than a single serial killer. To address this type of need, attention often is placed on capabilities where progress can be made relatively quickly if resources are targeted carefully. Some of our GIS and GIScience tools are especially promising candidates for such enhancements, which have both positive and negative consequences (Monmonier 2002). The use of such technologies surely will help secure homelands, but at what price, the loss of personal freedoms or invasion of privacy?

There are other dimensions as well. For instance, one dimension concerns boundaries between free exchanges of information and limited ones, between classified work and unclassified work. Another differentiates between different types of threats: physical violence, chemical or biological agents, cyberterrorism, and the like. Still other themes are woven through the material that follows.

The Challenge Ahead

The greatest challenge to geographers and our colleagues in neighbouring fields of study is to stretch our minds beyond familiar research questions and specializations so as to be innovative, even ingenious, in producing new understandings that contribute to increased global security. Clearly, the most serious specific threats to security in the future will be actions that are difficult to imagine now: social concerns just beginning to bubble to the surface, technologies yet to be developed, biological agents that do not yet exist, terrorist practices that are beyond our imagination. A core challenge is to improve knowledge and institutional capacities that prepare us to deal with the unknown and the unexpected, with constant change calling for staying one step ahead instead of always being one step behind. When research requires, say, three years to produce results and another two years to communicate in print to prospective audiences, we need to be unusually prescient as we construct our research agendas related to terrorism issues, and we need to be very perceptive and skillful in convincing non-geographers that these longer-term research objectives are, in fact, truly important.

The topic of combating terrorism is not an easy one. It calls for us to stretch in directions that may be new and not altogether comfortable. It threatens to entangle us in policy agendas that many of us may consider insensitively conceived, even distasteful. It may endanger social cohesion in our own community of scholars. On the other hand, how can we turn our backs on a phenomenon that threatens political freedom, social cohesion far beyond our own cohorts, economic progress, environmental sustainability and many other values that we hold dear, including the future security of our own children and grand children?

More fundamentally, geographers are not concerned only with winning the war on terrorism in the next two years or deploying new capabilities in the next five or ten. We are concerned with working toward a secure century, restoring a widespread sense of security in the global society in the longer term without undermining basic freedoms. This is the domain of the research world; assuring a stream of new knowledge, understandings, and tools for the longer term, and looking for policies and practices that – if they could be conceived and used – would make a significant difference in the quality of life.

As we prepare to create this new knowledge and these understandings, what we are trying to do, in fact, is to create the new 21st-century utility – not a hardened infrastructure such as for power or water, but rather a geographical understanding and spatial infrastructure that helps the nation understand and respond to threats. The effort required to create this new utility to serve the nation has a historical analogy in the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The Appalachian region of the southeastern US had a long history of economic depression and was among those areas hardest hit by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The creation of the TVA, a multipurpose utility with an economic development mission, constructed dams for flood control and hydroelectr...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Risk, Society and Policy Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Pathways to Disaster
• Part I – Old, New and Familiar Hazards
• Part II – Vulnerability to Threats
• Part III – Societal Responses to Threats
• Part IV – Environmental Justice
• Part V – From Theory to Practice
• Index