Contextualizing Disaster (Catastrophes in Context, 1) Paperback – September 1, 2016

The book offers a collection of papers about disasters of the 21st century all over the world. The introduction by Button and Schuller highlights the common themes of the following eight chapters on specific disasters. A central aspect of how disasters are portrayed and perceived is the often competing disaster narratives of news stories, aid agencies, government officials, and – if heard – those of the disaster survivors. Another common aspect of the disasters presented in this book is the historical context in which the disasters are embedded. Most pregnantly put in Roberto E. Barrios introduction to Chapter 6 “…disasters are not natural, unavoidable or discrete events. Disasters, instead, are processes that (a) extend in space and time beyond the perceived boundaries of an affected community, (b) are engendered through policies and everyday practices that enhance the destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, and (c) have effects that are inequitably distributed along socially produced race, class, and gender differentiations.” (p. 135). While most of the chapters are about technically natural disasters (typhoons in the Philippines (Chapter 2); earthquakes in Haiti (Ch. 3), Chile (Ch. 4), threefold catastrophe in Japan (Ch. 5).; hurricanes in Honduras and New Orleans (Ch. 6) and New York (Ch. 8); climate change related flooding and storms in Alaska and Tuvalu (Ch. 7)), the extent of their destruction as well as the following response regarding recovery and reconstruction are deeply rooted in decades if not centuries of political, social, economic and environmental historical developments. Through the globalization of all these areas the effects of and the influences on the repercussions of the disasters are not only local but global, or as termed in the book “glocal” or “translocal”. A reoccurring theme throughout these chapters is the rapid urbanization, driven by global neoliberal economic development, which increased local inequality and vulnerability to disasters, enabling the catastrophic dimensions the disasters took on. The chapters also include a troubling collection of the disasters after the disasters, meaning the disaster capitalism, which rigged and prolonged if not obliterated the reconstruction and recovery after these initial disasters, serving international aid agencies, politicians or city developers instead of the disaster survivors.Each chapter includes a short account of the author(s)’s background and achievements, followed by the notes and references as well as an extensive index, which underline the books value as a scientific resource. Reviewing the book from an environmental history perspective, the chapters by nature of the disasters embeddedness in mostly anthropologically shaped contexts, focus more on those than on the strictly environmental aspects and their regard varies from chapter to chapter, but nonetheless are, also by nature, always included. Generally, the book offers a rather discouraging view behind the scenes of what the media portrays of these disasters and the mostly lacking “epistemological flexibility”(p.150) mentioned by Barrios, which would be crucial in achieving sustainable, vulnerability-reducing instead of –prolonging reconstruction by taking the local historical, economic, political, social and environmental context into account.