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response to so-called ‘natural disasters’ – the
suffering visited upon human populations by
such extreme geophysical phenomena as
floods, earthquakes and hurricanes (see also
environmental hazard). These events re-
main core concerns. The prominence of
physical forces as causes or triggers of
human suffering points to the need for
input from both the human and natural
sciences, which would seem to present
special opportunities for the discipline of
geography, with its constitutive concern
with both social and physical processes.
However, the various twists and turns in the
development of hazard research thus far
should caution against any sense that the
field offers a straightforward or self-evident
bridge between the study of the social and
thenatural,withingeographyormoregen-
erally. This is all the more so considering
that the study of hazards increasingly con-
cerns itself with more obviously human-
induced harms, such as technological acci-
dents,war,terrorismand socialviolence.
Withinhuman geography, the crystallizing
of a concern with hazards is usually traced to
the mid-twentieth century work on floods in
the USA by Gilbert White. In what became
known as the human ecology tradition,
White and his collaborators sought to provide
an alternative to theenvironmental deter-
minismof the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, by exploring the range of ways
in which individuals orcommunitiescould
construe and respond to hazards in their en-
vironment. However, later critics found the
human ecology approach overly managerialist
or technocratic – too concerned with adjust-
ment oradaptation of human populations
to hazards, and not concerned enough with
the social processes that rendered people
vulnerable to hazards (Pelling, 2001; Mustafa,
2005).
The late 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of a
perspective on hazards that viewed vulnerabil-
ity as having at least as much to do with the
conditions of everyday social life as with the
specific physical events on which the human
ecologists focused. This turn was signalled by
the work of Amartya Sen (1981) and Kenneth
Hewitt (1983), and further developed by input
from the tradition ofpolitical economy. Ad-
dressing issues at both local and globalscales,
the political–economic perspective draws at-
tention to the ways in which socio-economic
marginalization and powerlessness leaves
some people living and working in conditions
of vulnerability to hazard that the more privil-eged sectors of society are able to avoid. As
Emel and Peet sum up: ‘the geography of
social relations thus determines the occur-
rence and extent of natural disasters’ (1989,
p. 68). Researchers and activists have also
sought to reveal how dominantdiscourses
serve to frame hazard as a physical problem
amenable to technocratic or managerial solu-
tions, rather than one that calls for changes in
the social structure.
By reconstituting hazard as a facet of every-
day existence rather than as the exception to
normality, the political–economic perspective
has helped resituate hazard research in the
broader stream of critical social theory (see
Blaikie, Cannon, Davis and Wisner, 1994;
Emel and Peet, 1989). Its ‘denaturalizing’ of
natural disasters has facilitated the extension
of interest in hazard beyond events with a
geophysical or biological trigger, to encompass
technological accidents and other human-
induced threats. Among other things, this
paves the way for a convergence of hazard
research with environmentalist discourses
and theories ofrisk society. The growing
integration of the study of natural disasters
with the study of environmental problems
manifests itself in a shared concern withsus-
tainability, including the processes by which
different social groups struggle for sustainable
livelihoods and places of habitation (see
environmentalism;social justice). Pursuing
these leads, researchers of the political–
economic camp tend to encourage a participa-
tory approach to hazard mitigation, based on
the recognition that successfully diminishing
vulnerability and increasing resilience in the
face of a volatile world requires input from
the bottom up (Mustafa, 2005).
However, care must be taken so that em-
phasis on thesocial constructionof hazard
does not overshadow the significance of those
aspects of the physical world or ‘cosmos’ that
cannot be reduced to the measure of the
human. As James Mitchell reminds us, ‘nat-
ural hazards ... represent an ‘‘other’’ that can
bemodifiedbyhumans but is not ultimately
reducible to a human construction in either
the material sense or the mental one’ (1999,
p. 2). Moreover, the downplaying of the ex-
ceptionality of the hazard, whatever its trigger
may be, can also detract attention from the
very things that are most disturbing and pro-
vocative about those events that impact ‘disas-
trously’ on human life. As the philosopher
Maurice Blanchot pointed out, the literal
meaning of the term ‘disaster’ is the loss of
one’s star (1995, p. 2). The disaster causes usGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_H Final Proof page 324 1.4.2009 3:18pmHAZARD