The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern Ameica by Scott Gabriel Knowles (review)

This is a difficult book to evaluate, not least since itmay be two books in one. Framing his contribution with a somewhat over-predictable discussion of 9/11, Scott Knowles begins with an excellent analysis of what we think we are dealing with when we talk about a disaster. He strikes precisely the right note, comparing and intermingling the languages of the past with those used by early-twenty-first-century specialists in risk assessment. This part of the book will be required reading for anyone interested in the field, or working on a still-elusive topic—the multiple origins of an obsessive preoccupation with risk and safety in the contemporary economically developed world.

Having cleared the conceptual ground, Knowles provides a pioneering synthesis of the processes by which urban-industrial America gradually became less prone to mass death by fire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This takes up more than half the book and focuses on three major themes. First, Knowles highlights the role played by nascent disaster research in breaking down what we now call disciplinary academic boundaries. Second, he provides a penetrating analysis of how tensions between a wide range of governmental bodies led to the establishment of specialist risk-reducing agencies. Finally, there is an excellent survey of the extent to which disasters take us to the very heart of the splendors and miseries of urban industrialism. This Mumford-like theme makes for compelling reading, as we move from disaster to disaster during what the author justifiably calls the Conflagration Era (1860-1940).

The comparative dimension is less secure. Knowles dwells briefly on what he calls the European "precautionary principle."However, the gap between "prudent" Britons, Italians, and Germans and devil-may-care Americans is less wide than he assumes. British commitment to local self-government repeatedly stymied centralizing risk-reduction agendas between the later nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War. Italian planning authorities have failed to commit themselves to the protection of poverty-stricken communities from devastation by earthquake. Perhaps only the Germans and Scandinavians have consistently adhered to "prudence" in areas of national life that other countries, including the United States, have allowed to go their own sweet, unregulated way.

The chapters on the period since 1945 are less satisfactory. With minimal prefatory linkage, the spotlight moves to war, cold war, and the total-risk society. Leaving aside the problem of thematic continuity, these issues are too big and theoretically complex to be dealt with in fewer than two hundred pages. Knowles focuses on what he calls the "Civil Defense Era" (1940-80) and the "All Hazards Era" (1960-present). At first glance, the argument is convincing. But the pace is rushed and definitional problems, well covered in the first part of the study, receive only cursory attention. Every writer in the field knows that very few disasters can be usefully categorized as wholly "natural." However, some are decidedly less natural than others. An atomic bomb both did and didn't "destroy" Hiroshima in 1945 (p. 161). As many historians have documented in massive detail, military wheeling and dealing, presidential and congressional realpolitik, and public opinion proved decisive. Wartime catastrophe—and by extension, the nuclear standoff that triggered national obsession with civil defense—may bear a distant relationship to antifire agendas and actions in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. But this could only be convincingly demonstrated within the context of a more fully developed conceptual and theoretical framework than is provided here.

The author knows just about everything there is to know about fire and fire-related disasters. In an ideal publishing world, the material over-hurriedly presented in the second half of an excellent study would have appeared as a companion volume taking the narrative—and quite possibly a different kind of narrative—from 1945 to the near present.