Water Resources People and Issues
A: There's nothing unique. It's a matter of convenience and manageability.
First of all, there is no natural hazard that is completely natural. Any kind
of hazard to society always involves some interaction among natural processes
and social processes or structure. You don't have a catastrophe from an
earthquake if people don't live in a place where they're vulnerable to
earthquakes. [The situation is] similar for floods and hurricane coast or
landslide areas. Even with lightning people have a choice of where they
locate and what kind of technology they adopt to make themselves more or
less vulnerable to lightning.
So all of the natural hazards have their social components, and, similarly,
most hazards which are primarily the result of human technology have some
natural components. One could think of some that don't have any. For
example, the hazard of an airplane blowing up without any relation to the
atmospheric conditions at the time. The effects of an explosion in a chemical
plant, however, may be greatly influenced by the prevailing weather.
The appropriate mode of analysis is, I would say, just the same. The reason
we started here to think only of natural hazards-we made this conscious
decision-was that the whole field of natural and technological hazards was
too big and complex to try to tackle all at once. We felt that we could do a
more effective job, both in analyzing research needs and in providing a
clearinghouse program, by limiting ourselves to an array of extreme events
that were primarily natural. We now have a cooperative discussion going on
with Clark University, which has been working on technological hazards, and
with the University of Pennsylvania, which has been working particularly on
the risks of industry, to promote exchange of ideas. FEMA has funded an
effort to try to put together a data base that includes all of these. Our position
here is that while this is a good idea, if we had tried to include all of them
eight years ago, we'd probably still be floundering around. Instead, we may
have made a fairly significant impact on the smaller sector.
Q: This may sound like a presumptuous question, but to what extent are you
using your skills as a geographer in your present work?
A: The approach that a number of us, including Robert Kates and Ian Burton,
have taken to natural hazards has been a distinctively geographic approach,
and it's one that others can share. In terms of the kinds of methods that are
applied, geography has probably had more to contribute than any other
discipline. Geographers are in space a little like historians are in time; they
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