Natural Disasters, Cultural Responses: Case Studies toward a Global Environmental History (review)

What would a proper global environmental history be? It would probably be more than a series of case studies from disparate regions around the world. The editors of this collection valiantly suggest that one strategy for responding to the catastrophes that have afflicted humankind in times past and everywhere is to query the very meaning of the two terms natural and disaster. Much of the human race has certainly moved beyond thinking of such catastrophes as supernatural, the wages of sin, though this conviction dies hard. At any rate, the displacement of the supernatural by natural explanations in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment societies has nonetheless left analysts with an inadequate understanding of disasters. Recent work of the sort in this collection suggests that naturalistic explanations of catastrophes almost always fail to take human beings' degradation—or at least their radical manipulation of the environment, as well as their ineptitude in responding to the catastrophic events—sufficiently into account. Even studies in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that gestured toward the human factor did so hamfistedly, preferring to lay blame on bad capitalists and bad colonial masters than to delve deeply into the genuinely complex processes of disaster making.

A catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, as the various essays never tire of pointing out, is not in itself a disaster. A disaster is more than a singular occurrence (high waters, high waves, high winds, earth tremors, no rain, or the like); it entails an impact on human populations directly and immediately by death, injury, disease, loss of homes, and reduction of food supply (leading to malnutrition and even starvation) and indirectly by changes in social habits—relocation of communities for recovery, adjustments in agricultural practices, and changes in the relationship between the territorial state and local jurisdictions, among others. To the extent that the various articles in this collection attempt to understand such events in this wide context, and to show that this is the proper context to understand such events, they constitute a truly global history.

The range of environments, physical and temporal, that are treated is impressive. Occasionally, the findings are revelatory. What preindustrial Finland endured whenever there was a significant summer frost is mindboggling. No single event (summer frost, flooding, or drought) and its consequences in Finland was as severe as the Great Irish Famine and its aftermath during the 1840s and 1850s, but the Baltic country suffered ninety-six crop failures from 1500 to 1899, exacerbated by oppressive political conditions and further compounded by poor to nonexistent networks of transportation and communication. To give another illustration, the failure of the last imperial dynasty in China to modify its policies in the face of "Heaven-sent disasters" was a fundamental factor in the eclipse of traditional rule and the transition to the republican experiment in the early twentieth century.

Occasionally, the findings are befuddling. Otfried Weintritt's chapter about the cultural and technological responses to the floods of Baghdad throughout history reveals that the stereotype of Islamic fatalism ("Allah has commanded it") had little or no effect on the population. The author hedges bets, however, intimating that the sources that he consulted may be of a type simply to ignore widespread supernatural explanations for the disasters. A footnote suggests, however, that Islamic fatalism's practical impact is minor; Weintritt asserts that "even the numerous earthquakes of the Islamic world barely triggered any kind of theological reflections," apocalyptical or otherwise, let alone affected behavior during the disasters (182, n. 69).

Surprisingly, the article that follows Weintritt's, Anna Akasoy's interpretation of earthquakes in medieval Islamic texts, concludes with almost polar-opposite words: These seismic events were, are, and "will always be interpreted according to the Koranic paradigms of divine punishment or warning and as omens of the Day of Judgment" (192). These authors, the former working in Germany and the latter in England, should talk to each other. The...