Naturalizing Disaster: Risk, Resilience, and Social Construction

[00:00:01]good evening I'd like to welcome everyone to the Center for International Studies and the program on the global environment Springs speakers series naturalizing disaster nature vulnerability and social history this is a three-part lecture series examining the dynamics between nature dislocation and communities in an increasingly vulnerable world this series will examine conceptions of hazzard policies and practices for mitigating disaster and environmental justice the talks will explore the political ecology drought flood earthquake and famine through different historical cultural and disciplinary contexts and our speakers will include scholars and practitioners who engage with disaster from an array of disciplinary and institutional perspectives drawing on historical and contemporary case studies each will consider distinct dimensions of the dynamic between these terms that we've just discussed all of the events will be here in classics 110 on Tuesday nights between five thirty and seven thirty and I hope that you'll be able to join us on Tuesday April 23rd for governing disaster policy and practice and Tuesday may 21st for disaster as inequality equity justice and rights tonight we begin with conceptualizing disaster producing nature and we are very pleased to be able to welcome Louise comfort percent professor of Public and International Affairs and director of the Center for disaster management at the university of pittsburgh and kathleen tyranny professor department of sociology and director of the National hazards Center at the Institute of behavioral sciences at the university of colorado at boulder i'll introduce both speakers briefly and then they will give their presentations in turn after which we'll have a brief question-and-answer period or a moderated discussion professor comfort as I've said is director Center for management disaster management and professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh she holds a BA in political science and philosophy from macalester college an MA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and a PhD in political science from Yale she's a fellow on National Academy of Public Administration an author or co-author of six books including designing resilience preparing for extreme events and mega crisis understanding the prospects nature characteristics and effects of cataclysmic events her primary research interests are in decision making under conditions of uncertainty and rapid change and the uses of information technology to develop decision support systems for managers operating under urgent conditions tonight she will speak about risk resilience and redesign extreme events and comparative perspective our second speaker professor tyranny is director of the natural hazard center as well as professor in the department of sociology and institute of behavioral sciences at colorado boulder she holds a BA in sociology from youngstown state university and an MA and PhD in sociology from the ohio state university she has served as a member of a number of national academies committees and panels on disaster research and climate change she is senior author of facing the unexpected emergency preparedness and response in the United States and co-editor of emergency management principles and practice for local government her current book project is entitled social foundations of risk and resilience her researching compasses a wide range of disasters including earthquakes in the US Japan and Haiti major hurricanes such as Hugo Andrew and Katrina various technological disasters and the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001 her talk is entitled constructing disaster science policy and politics please join me in welcoming professors comfort and tyranny to the University of Chicago thank you very much mark it is indeed my pleasure to be here and to see this beautiful campus with its wonderful old gothic buildings I especially like the gargoyles that I can see outside my window and I will take those memories back and maybe a photo or two on my phone it's a real pleasure to be here and especially to share with you what has become a sort of life long passion of mine which is looking at ways in which which we can reduce disasters before they occur and this the interaction between risk resilience and the capacity or possibility of redesign is really what I want to share with you tonight and so we're looking at extreme events and these are extreme events Chicago has had any number of them and one of the most difficult ones for Chicago I think was the heat wave where Chicago urban center you know with lots of black of asphalt and and in a very hot summer of where the heat you know reached extraordinary levels and people living in vulnerable neighborhoods did not dare to open their windows so many of the elderly actually suffocated and died you know due to heat these are the kinds of disasters that are really socially constructed there are also the kinds of disasters once they occur and we know they occur can be changed oh this makes a big difference I guess I should speak into the mic microphone so what I really want to look at are these extreme events and how can we respond to them they challenge decision makers in extraordinary ways my background is political science as Mark said so I'm very much interested in what should the government do and in fact the government has the quintessential responsibility for protecting its citizens in its community but the decision makers are always balancing risk versus uncertainty and the problem is there are different types of risk there is known risk and we can do something about that this is a risk we've seen before events that we've we've experienced and we can develop methods of dealing with things that we've seen before but there's also unknown risk conditions of which we are unaware but may occur but we don't know it and we don't know if or when or how they will occur and so this leads to uncertainty which is a combination of known risk but unknown probability of its occurring and if these different types of risk accumulate what we have is societal risk which plus a lack of awareness leads to a lack of capacity for collective action so in events like Katrina what we had was cumulative risk which led to lack of awareness by significant numbers of people some of them in responsible positions that resulted in a lack of capacity for collective action literally across the for governmental jurisdictions so if we our question is really managing risk how do we do this it means we need to build the collective awareness of what the risk is in order to create the capacity for action Herbert Simon Pittsburgh's very own guru you know we had a maxim where he said we can only create what we already understand so if we don't understand what the risk is we're not likely to take action to reduce it and this task is really extraordinarily difficult to achieve at the societal level in collective action so if we're looking at this process how do we actually reduce risk we're looking at an iterative causal process that includes first recognizing what the risk is second interpreting that risk in the actual context of a community what is it going to mean if the roads are blocked the bridges are out the electrical power is on and people can't get to work carry out their operations it also means once you know that how can you design a strategy of action a sequence of steps that real people can take recognizing that different people will need to take different types of action at different locations and yet have that coordinated coherent approach to reduce that risk for the community so resilience is not something that any single person can do alone it means engaging others in collective action and then evaluating the impact integrating the information you gained from your prior action into the next step for a risk reduction and we do have people who very you know seriously try to develop plans for reducing desk disaster risk we of course have FEMA Federal Emergency Management Agency you know every state has a State Emergency Management Agency every city usually has an emergency management officer or office enzo will honestly try to reduce risk but the problem is those plans and I don't want to denigrate planning it's an important thing to do but it's based on known information and the irony is that past events often do not allow us to anticipate the cumulative interdependent process of change in the society the changes the balance of risk which also changes the set of actions that must be taken in order to reduce that risk so as a consequence societies confront extraordinary risks from unanticipated interdependencies and we're going to talk a bit later about Japan and the DOE hoco earthquakes which illustrate exactly that problem so the challenge that we face if we're really committed to reducing risk is how do we learn from the past in order to anticipate future risks what we have usually is an asymmetry of information in a very complex society and looking at it from a governmental framework we've got federal government state governments county governments city governments and the difficult in each of these governments have different types of information and different agencies within each level of government has different responsibilities so they search for and seek different types of information this results in an asymmetry of information for different people know different things about the risk and it results often in a lack of clear understanding of what the overall impact of risk is on the community and how to judge this this asymmetry of information then literally diminishes this collective capacity for action which requires a shared understanding a common understanding of what the risk is in a shared goal of reducing it so if we come to zillions and we're looking at risk resilience and redesign resilience means the capacity to learn and to adjust your existing actions at that time in that city in that location to the constraints that may have changed in the last five years six months two weeks in order to continue the basic operations of Business School you know cultural activities in a city so what I'd like to do is to look at two extreme events in comparative perspective and most of the time we think of disasters real disasters as occurring in developing countries but in fact we have this ironic situation where in developing countries there's the greatest loss of life but in developed countries there is the greatest cost of disaster and so what I'd like to do is to just take you briefly through the situation's the plans the initial conditions the actual consequences and the need for redesign in these two major events so if we look at the planning process in Haiti it was virtually non-existent there had been two previous earthquakes in haiti but about 200 years ago there were no building codes in haiti and don't know capacity you know it at the city level to implement them a very fragile government very limited economy and a profound lack of awareness of seismic risk and so consequently when the earthquake occurred there was a very limited capacity for collective action with in haiti so the consequences and i'm certain you're aware of this you followed it we had the earthquake it was imported prints the capital city a major population concentration January 12 and you know literally in just a bit over three years ago magnitude 7.0 not an especially major earthquake and given the other other earthquakes we have seen but it was 25 kilometers west of the main city of port-au-prince shallow earthquake only 13 kilometers so the impact on the built infrastructure was really severe buildings collapsed 1.5 million people homeless and astonishingly approximately eighty percent of the building buildings in the city were destroyed so here we have a situation of the impact of an earthquake end of society without resilience again 1.5 million people homeless 11 out of 12 governmental ministries collapsed as well as the presidential palace the photograph on the right is the ministry of public works which was supposed to you know be responsible for maintaining the infrastructure of the city the roads the buildings the electrical transmission stations and you see the condition it was in hmm what is interesting is what did the government do and here we have a photo roughly translated in hate in from French this is the effort by the National Police to rebuild a center for management in the city and the sobering part is if you look at it and it's hard to read but the bottom line says delay in execution two and a half months and this was this photograph was taken in March and so from March to another delay we have the government being unable to act however the bright spot in Haiti is that the people themselves were adaptive so they lost their houses they lost their a working space but they simply moved their business environmental activities out onto the street so literally what we see is an informal economy that you know preceded almost uninterruptedly earthquake and here we have the impact of the international community and we see the showers here are provided by France and the major contribution of aid was to Haiti the difficulty was connecting the international aid with organizations in Haiti to make it sustainable so if we look at what organizations were able to act in Haiti we did a Content analysis of newspapers and we used a regional newspaper Caribbean news online and this was to identify which organizations performed what functions in response to the community the sobering part and if this works is look at the distribution of organizations the small number of organizations total of 171 but literally nearly three-quarters of those organizations for international the regional organizations 18.8 or nineteen percent were from the Caribbean so it was Cuba Jamaica and never st. cute kids dominica you know these tiny little island nations that were responding helping out their sister in caribbean nation in haiti what is really sobering is look at the number of national organizations that were involved only 11 and here we have and this is a point i want to make what shows in the media reports was only one local organization however in contrast and i was there twice what we saw were emergent organizations in the neighborhoods with neighbors help neighbours and putting together small little groups to help people get through the day but the formal organizational response is reflected in this way so we did a network analysis to identify the network and you know again it's difficult for you to see but the red dots in it's both shapes and colors the red organizations are international and the blue organizations are regional so that's within the Caribbean interestingly the gray organizations are the national organizations and if you count them it's hard to see here's a gray one you're the great one we do see the government of Haiti there are only six that show up in this particular network analysis because we deleted the isolates and there is one lone local organization which is a small nonprofit that was organized by the police department in port-au-prince that was here the point I'm making is much of what was happening in haiti was happening under the radar and out of the visibility of both the international community and the media in haiti that was reporting this event so nonetheless what we find is emergent networks at the local level but limited ability to act at the national level uncoordinated response at the international level people were coming from all over just showing up with no real direction as to where they should go or what they should do and what I am pleased to say the good news is that now three years after the earthquake Haiti is slowly painfully beginning to address the problems of recovery the bad news is it's three years after the earthquake with still nearly 400,000 people living in tents and so this is a classic instance of the major need for redesign in the disaster risk reduction process now let's move to a different you know across a different ocean to Japan and in debt disaster planning in Japan we have a very different circumstance so this is advanced industrialized Japan well-educated earthquake engineers heavy investment in a disaster planning and preparedness especially since the Kobe earthquake in 1995 hmm but limited planning and awareness for tsunami risk it was actually a sub category under their earthquake preparedness and very restricted planning largely assigned to private engineering companies for nuclear risk so what we see is the asymmetry of information both among different levels of governmental jurisdiction and for the different types of disaster to which Japan is exposed and so in the actual event what we had were cascading disasters the earthquake that triggers a tsunami that knocks out a nuclear reaction that creates this Black Swan event which was beyond the imagination of the most careful planners in Japan and so what were the consequences we have escalating crippled disasters you know magnitude you know nine-point-oh earthquake that generated a massive tsunami that triggered this nuclear reactor breach the generators you know by the way were in the basement and the nuclear reactor of course was located on a hill and in Japan they think nothing in a mountainous country so they think nothing of cutting off the top of a hill if it may it easier to locate a disaster and in fact this was a deliberate engineering design feature because they needed to pump water from the ocean and they decided it was too expensive to pump the water all the way up to heal the hill if you put the nuclear reactor on top of the hill so as a money-saving efficiency measure they literally cut off the top of the hill to build the Fukushima Daiichi reactor and the consequences you know nearly 18,000 people dead and missing you know almost 130,000 buildings destroyed economic impact on the entire nation of Japan now if we come back to planning we see that Japan was very serious about planning made investments and really tried to do the right thing this is a sea wall built in the city of taro and I tarro is one of the small fishing town a major industry is fishing and it had experienced an earthquake in 1896 another earthquake in the 1930s and each time it had an earthquake the village of tyro decided we're going to do something about this we're not going to let this happen again so after the 1933 earthquake which was you know over 10 meters tall they are 10 meters high the good people of taro decided we're going to build the SI Wong we're going to protect ourselves from the sea because they wanted to Luke by the sea there fishing boats were there they benefit was from the sea so they built this enormous sea wall and through this photo you can see the tsunami that came through this opening so the sea wall was 10 meters high the tsunami was 15 meters high at this location the difficulty was the actions that were taken to build the seawall gave this false sense of security to the people who live behind the wall because the emergency managers the Japan Meteorological Society had picked up the motion of the earthquake very quickly and because it was that size of earthquake they immediately suspected there would be a tsunami but the initial tsunami forecast was for three meters high so when people heard that well our see Wallace ten meters high were safe so they basically you know went about their business thinking they were safe and of course 45 minutes later the major tsunami rolled in this was another action that was taken in planning of and this is in the small town of manami Sanriku and this town too was very serious about tsunami detection and earthquake risk reduction so they built this building this is the disaster management building for the town of San manami Sanriku and at the top of the building there was at the time that the earthquake occurred in the tsunami struck the emergency council for the town of Mon Ami Sanriku was meeting to discuss protection measures for the town and the woman who was in charge of communications was at the top of this building communicating to everyone watch out tsunami is coming tsunami is coming the tsunami came and swept them away some people escaped but she in fact lost her life and this of course is a classic photograph almost any city that has a tsunami has a photograph like this certainly in Indonesia as well but you see this is an ocean-going ship that was washed up on land and it shows the power of the tsunami oops now if we look at the distribution of organizations and here I'm taking just one organization the nuclear network which is a you know in many cases was the most serious net the least developed but the hazard that had the most severe consequences for Japan but if we look at the distribution it's almost the opposite eighty three quarters of the organizations were international and only eleven were national and here in Japan we have a relatively small international contingent but the largest elton segment was the national organizations but if we move down here we have a relatively small only ten point eleven percent were prefectural and very small four percent we're municipal and the 21 organizations local organizations were local nonprofit organizations farmers organisations fishing groups so we have a relatively small a response Network but the largest player the largest actor were the national organizations and this is the nuclear network for Japan and what is interesting is that you see all of these disconnected organizations on the periphery and we see a small writer tightly connected group here and then we see separate groups this is a business group this is a hospital group and overall what we have is a literally a disconnected uncoordinated organization that was unable to respond adequately to this disaster so if we look at these two events very different in terms of economic resources capacity educated people that could advise governments on disaster we do see that networks of response actions emerged in both countries at the local level despite the difference in economic capacity and in technical training and technical infrastructure we also see interestingly in both countries very slow response at the prefectural our national levels and why should this be so and we see it back sorry the lack of coordination among these different scales of operation that enabled neither society to develop a coherent response to risk and so if we look at this we see in actual practice the consequences of asymmetric information processes that enable people to take action and when they're not there you know especially at the national level which is hard it's difficult it's complex people don't act and this was sobering in Haiti it was even more sobering in Japan it illustrates fundamentally the need in my judgment to build a coherent knowledge common sense a term from Elinor Ostrom where people it's an interactive platform where people can exchange search for exchange synthesize information to build a common understanding of risk that will enable them to act so this global capacity for resilient action that we're looking for in environmental programs and to reduce disaster risk requires this adaptive iterative learning model and the coda to this talk is really we've got a chance things aren't that terrible except we've got a lot of work to do new technologies have now altered the capacity for building resilience through collective action and the greatest resource in either community Haiti or Japan and in any community in the US and around the world is the capacity human capacity to learn our challenge is designing these learning environments that enhance collective learning about risk that enables people to take action and builds the resilience we're seeking now the silvering part is the responsibility for building this resilience goes to those who understand so I've already been introduced but my name is Kathleen Tierney I'm a professor in the Department of Sociology and instituted behavioral science at the University of Colorado and I'm the director of the natural hazard center I just want to take a minute to talk about the hazard center we are a center that's part of the Institute behavioral science were funded by the National Science Foundation and by a group of agencies that have something to do with disasters in their mission for example the US Geological Survey Noah FEMA those kinds of agencies and one of the tasks that we do at the hazard center is to try to build bridges between those who are studying hazards and disasters particularly from the social science point of view and the general public but more particularly practitioners and policymakers decision-makers so we have a in our Center we have a fairly large information vision component and you can find us at ww colorado edu / hazards in addition to our information providing role we also conduct research on various disaster related topics with funding from agencies like the national science foundation and in some cases private foundations or other agencies so that's a little bit of an introduction to what we do at the hazard center and I hope those of you who are taking the course or courses here we'll find our materials useful what I'm going to be talking about here is something quite different from what Louise was just speaking about using empirical research to look at responses to disasters in different countries I want to talk about the social construction of disaster and i'm not talking about the social production of disasters although i'll touch upon that but rather constructing ideas about disasters and i'm going to show how classic studies in the field of disaster research influenced the way the disasters are socially constructed both in the real world and in the scientific community and when i talk about social construction or social constructionism i'm talking about the ways in which social interaction and discourse and institutions and communication reified particular concepts or ways of thinking about disaster so that they seem natural and inevitable and what I'm going to try to do is give you some provocations that suggest alternative or a variety of ways of constructing disaster and i'm going to talk about the interplay among social and scientific and public policy constructions of disasters of different types I think that it's really very appropriate to be having a series on disasters here at the U mercy of Chicago because of the University of Chicago significance in the development of the social scientific study of disasters Gilbert white who is a geographer is one of the iconic figures in the field of disaster research he got his PhD here at the University of Chicago he did his doctoral dissertation on floods and he famously argued in that dissertation that floods are acts of God but flood losses are primarily acts of man by which he was arguing at that time in 1942 that it is we members of society and decision makers that produce disasters this is an insight that has often been ignored but that is talked about a lot recently in recent times after he got his degree Gilbert white went on to hold several different positions including the presidency of haverford college to which he was appointed when he was 35 years old and then he returned to the university of chicago in 1956 and he stayed here as he came as chair of the department of geography and he stayed here until nineteen sixty-nine whereupon he moved to the university of colorado and among other things founded the center that I direct the natural hazard center which was established in 1976 and a few years a few decades actually know a few years after Gilbert white completed his dissertation and it was published the National Opinion Research Center here at the University of Chicago was literally present at the creation of social scientific study organized social scientific study of disasters the field disaster research actually arose out of Cold War concerns about nuclear war and we're talking about the period in the late 1940s when the United States discovered that it wasn't the only country on the planet that had the atomic bomb that the Soviet Union also had a bomb and the cold war was initiated one of the big concerns that cold war planners had that nuclear war planners had at that time had to do with how the public would react in the event of a nuclear war and nuclear exchange for example would there be mass panic would members of the public after bombs were dropped on them become so demoralized that they wouldn't be able to participate in the reconstruction of society after nuclear war would there be massive mental health problems among populations that were affected by nuclear bombs and so entities within the Defense Department started to think that maybe disasters could be used as a proxy for nuclear war and so they approached the National Opinion Research Center n 0 RC and several other universities around the country to ask them if they wanted to do field work in disasters to actually look at what people how people were responding you know we who are in academia today tend to think that it's very difficult to get research grants and it's highly competitive we have to go around begging for money but in this case the military came to n.o RC begging for them to take money in order to do disaster research so a noir c subsequently put out a report and I think 1954 that was called human reactions to disaster situations it was a 960 page compendium of the field work that n 0 RC research teams had done in disasters in the US and a key member of those early n 0 RC field studies was al Corran tally known as henry corn telly and he is one of the founders of the sociological field of disaster research his master's thesis which was done as a part of this n 0 RC work was on the topic of panic and it's still a classic in the disaster literature not much has been added to our understanding of panic sense this time believe it or not and his article on panic which I think was called the nature and conditions of panic was published in the American Journal of sociology in 1954 another University of Chicago institution ajs so the roots roots here at the University go very deep the work of the National Opinion Research Center and other quick response disaster research groups is very relevant for not only for the development of social science research on disasters in the US but also for the ways in which disasters had been constructed within the scientific community socially constructed and the way that there they've been understood for quite a while I think until fairly recently this early researched this classic research constructed disasters as discrete events that were in the words of Charles Fritz another pioneer in the field of disaster research concentrated in time and space disruptions of the social order that took place over a relatively compressed period of time that could be divided in two phases the warning period the impact period the immediate post impact early recovery period and the longer term recovery period so disasters were seen as sudden events that were not all that usual that were intermittent that were highly disruptive when they occurred they were seen as limited time events and having origins that were external to the societies in which they occurred and this is how many people still view disasters as originating out of nature or out of failures of technology however yeah this is more or less a traditional view of disaster with and you'll see this even today in many books about disasters that there are three interacting systems that are involved in disasters the natural systems that produce them the Earth's system and the atmospheric system for example and these natural systems impinge upon social systems and on the built environment and the interaction of those external forces on the built environment and social systems is what constitutes disaster so external forces impinging on our built environment and the social order however as long as 30 years ago there were competing constructions of disaster that were advanced in the literature for example a book came out in 1983 that was edited by a geographer by the name of Kenneth Hewitt which was called interpretations of calamity from the viewpoint of social ecology and this book interpretations of calamity really put out a series of critiques of conventional disaster research which the author's called the disaster archipelago the separation of disaster from the societies in which it arises and interpretations of calamity argued that disaster shouldn't be thought of as discrete events involving social forces that were external to society itself or as unusual events but rather as common ongoing and typical of the ways in which societies organize themselves the perspective advanced in interpretations of calamity looked something like this that there are broad social economic political and historical processes that are ongoing and that affect natural systems social systems and the built environment and that rather than being the cause of disasters natural occurrences like hurricanes or tornadoes are merely triggers for disaster when in fact risk has been building up over time as a function of decisions that are made within society so rather than being discrete events disasters can be thought of as the consequences of processes like globalization at the macro level and at the mezzo and micro level decision processes in political and economic forces that shape human settlements that shape urban forms and that shape the institutions that manage risk but the classical view of disasters as discrete events still reigns in policy circles and I'll talk about this a little bit later a a second social construction that I'll talk about and that we might want you to think about a little bit is a set of constructions that distinguishes natural and technological disasters from one another so some disasters are seen as originating in nature while others like chemical plant explosions and nuclear accidents originated because of out of control technologies and within my discipline of sociology there's a very robust research tradition that says that while natural disasters result in the emergence of therapeutic communities that is when natural disasters occur people come together and they're supportive of one another collective action is is seen pro-social behavior predominates altruism is a very important component of the response to natural disasters but on the other hand when technological disasters occur the result is corrosive communities blaming of the entities or the parties that were thought to be responsible for disaster uncertainty about the impacts of disaster uncertainty about for example the long-term threats posed by toxic hazards by nuclear hazards and the environmental sociologist the late environmental sociologists william freudenberg coined the term recreant c to describe the feelings that people get in technological disasters when institutions and organizations that they trusted to protect them fail to protect them so the loss of trust the community conflicts that occur often in toxic exposures are are highlighted in this literature to make it seem almost as if there are two different kinds of disaster one created by nature when created by human beings that have two inevitable outcomes there is a lot of research that does tend to show that certain types of toxic hazards lead to corrosive communities there is also research that shows that people can live on top of toxic waste dumps and not really care all that much about it so there's a lot of difference in the literature there but my ear shoe here in my alternative construction that I would like to put up is that in making distinctions between natural and technological disasters and constructing them as having different kinds of effects social scientists are overlooking the fact that Gilbert white was pointing out to us about floods in the 1940s which is that all disasters are of human creation ok not just the ones that have technology involved and I think in many ways this gerrymandering of risk has led to a situation where it's difficult to develop general theories of disaster because we have this gerrymandering of hazards so if we didn't have this gerrymandering we might be able to theorize at a higher level about the causes of disasters now here in the United States the natural technological distinction is also mirrored to some degree in public policy itself there are different laws and different plans covering so-called natural disasters from those that cover nuclear emergencies and many types of technological disasters such as oil spills so the Stafford Act is the law that governs the provision of services to victims of natural disasters and many technological disasters on the other hand the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 governs the compensation of victims of oil spills scene is different and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency has powers over nuclear type disasters so what this means is that victims of disasters are treated differently depending on the so-called disaster agent that caused their losses and under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 the party responsible for the oil spill is the party that compensates victims under the Stafford Act it's the federal government the comp rhyme airily that compensates victims so in the 2010 BP oil spill for example that was an oil pollution act of 1990 event not a Stafford act event which meant that there were different compensation schemes for people they had to wait longer and the compensation of people who suffered losses in the BP disaster will be tied up for years if not decades in litigation very different from a Stafford Act event it also meant that disaster managers in the Gulf where that in communities that were affected in states that were affected by the BP oil spill who were more familiar with federal disaster relief regimes knew very little about what was going on in in terms of helping victims and providing them with compensation so things become issues become very fraught in certain kinds of disasters where in other kinds of disasters they're not and equally important laws like the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 associate the concept of a responsible party with disasters involving technology and with specific subcategory of those types of events and this policy approach fails to acknowledge that there are parties that are responsible for quote unquote natural disasters as well such as developers and the political leaders that push for development behind weak levees that are likely to fail at some time in the future or the same kind of groups that approve large-scale building projects in high hazard areas as we saw recently in terms of the losses in superstorm sandy so what I'm asking what I'm prompting you to think about is what would it be like if we were constructing responsible parties socially constructing who is responsible for the losses that occur in natural disasters in the same way that we construct BP is the responsible party in an oil spill constructions of the causality of disasters the impacts of disasters and blame for disasters have evolved over time and they're continuing to evolve the in 1755 for example i was asking mark if he was an expert on the lisbon earthquake earlier there was a huge earthquake and tsunami and fire that essentially destroyed lisbon portugal in that year and you might say oh lisbon so what at that time lisbon was i believe the fourth largest city in the world and portugal was a global power we were seeing the beginning of the global world system at that time so it was no small matter and this occurred I have 1955 there instead of 1755 excuse me we should change that right away this occurred as you know at a time when enlightenment thinking was superseding religious interpretations of nature and of society and there was a real debate going on among enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau about the causes of the earthquake and naturally the church the Catholic Church believed that there was religious agency involved that this was actually God's doing and many of the Enlightenment philosopher said no it has to do with the way that we that we construct our urban forms right that this is a matter for for us to think about in terms of the way that we build and in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake there was a debate about what should be done and it was thought that perhaps there needed to be penances or there needed to be a lot of Prayer there needed to be a lot of sacrifice because obviously people were evil and that's why this had happened to Lisbon the mark but the Marquis de Pombal who was appointed by the King to deal with the earthquake when he was asked what was to be done he said feed the hungry and bury the dead and palm ball really initiated the modern study of earthquakes and he developed a reconstruction plan for for Lisbon that involved buildings on a scale that you see here now this architecture still remains and wide streets so that if buildings if bricks would collapse off buildings they wouldn't block the streets so that emergency workers could get through and people could be rescued and you know pombe lean architecture is is studied and revered around the world but it represents the embodiment of the idea that human beings are responsible for losses in disasters and that there are things that we can do about them talking about that time one researcher who wrote an article in 2005 he was talking about Voltaire and Rousseau and the conversations that they had about the Lisbon earthquake and he said Rousseau called attention to something that was not properly recognized until much later the fact that social and behavioral patterns have a large impact on the occurrence of catastrophes we see here the first tentative steps toward a sociological theory of masters and the modern concept of vulnerability with the associated notion of the state's responsibility in the prevention of such occurrences so Lisbon you could say was kind of a turning point and our definitions of causes of disaster and blame and responsibility continue to evolve in 2009 there was a significant earthquake in lakyla Italy it killed over 300 people and in October of last year six scientists and one emergency management official were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison because they failed to appropriately warn the population now this caused a tremendous amount of outrage within the scientific community because earthquakes can't be predicted but there was a lot of seismic activity that was happening in the lead-up to the larger earthquake that occurred in lakyla and it was argued in court that scientists misled the public in terms of their risk communication that they even told the public not to worry too much about a coming earthquake because actually these small or smaller earthquakes that they were feeling we're taking the pressure off so a large earthquake would be less likely and of course that is inaccurate most large earthquakes occur in the context of earthquake swarms so convicted of manslaughter for failing to communicate risk does this represent a new framing or a new social construction of responsibility for disaster and finally I'll leave you with a question and then hopefully we can have a discussion when we begin to recognize more and more the extent to which climate change is implicated in disasters will climate-related calamities be constructed man-made and will we say that fossil fuel companies in their contribution to global climate change are designated responsible parties legally liable for disaster losses how will our constructions of disaster evolve along with our understanding of them I throw that out to you okay I very much like to thank Louise and Kathleen for framing the questions that occupy this series so nicely and I'd like to ask them to come up to the front so that we can take questions and engage in a discussion okay who'd like to start well that's a really tough question and it's really difficult to do and so Elinor Ostrom worked on this idea and she really was developing her little knowledge Commons pretty much in small communities in developing countries with face-to-face communication so the real challenge to us is how do we do this in a country of 300 million people and even more how do we do it on a global scale with six billion people and this is why I'm so interested in using information technology and why I've been fascinated by the increasing use of you know social media to exchange information now I don't think that medium has been tapped very effectively but it's being used all over the world I have a colleague who is a visiting scholar at my Center for disaster management from China he got for the first time ever the full download of data from Weibo which is China's Twitter on a major event a high-speed train crash that the government had suppressed the Ministry of Railways had not told anybody about but people in the community saw it started communicating to one another started chain exchanging methods started asking questions one of the first times ever that Chinese citizens were felt free to question their government without being punished in some kind of way so it's relatively new I think it's unstructured I think there are strong and this is the hard part and Kathleen touched on it a bit and her talk is there our intense interest in keeping control of different types of actions and different types of investments and it's hard for us to understand and some people would rather see New Orleans flood then pay the money to rebuild the levees and these are the actions that can be generated and changed if we have a viable interactive you know sort of technical infrastructure that enables the social communication that people do in their living rooms but we have to do you know across hundreds millions billions of people to protect our planet well yes I I think that you know questions it's it's an interesting question how do you create a knowledge Commons if people are creating it it's in the process of being created and at lunch today I was mentioning a project at my university that's being conducted in led by people in computer science it's a project called Project epic epic stands for empowering people with information in crises and they're actually studying the the use of social media in disasters and crises and the way that that people are using social media to to share information to offer support to correct rumors the first project that they did on that was a was during the Virginia Tech shooting and they looked at the way that social communication like Facebook was being used in in that incident and actually found that that the social media correctly identified the students that had been killed in Virginia Tech before the university did and that it was a very self correcting system rumors were corrected immediately if there if someone tried to report about someone who might be killed that was corrected immediately so we we see this happening we see these communication networks emerging one of the problems is that official disaster responders official disaster management agencies don't know what to do with this you know they just they don't know what to do with this effervescence in the public that is problem focused and locally focused I do think it's interesting that every single disaster management agency now has a facebook page and they all have Twitter accounts and they all say FEMA included follow me on Twitter that's because Craig Fugate the administrator of FEMA tweets himself you can get him on Twitter so he's very savvy about social media well I think and I'm not the only one that thinks this there are other people that argue it to that scientists or physical scientists are often not the best communicators and don't aren't familiar with fundamental principles of public risk communication whether they're guilty of manslaughter because they're incompetent I'm not sure but I think and and they're on the other hand or many scientists that don't want to communicate with the public at all even when they know stuff that the public needs to know they say I'm a scientist not an advocate I'm a scientist not a politician actually you're pointing out one of the weaknesses in this concept of knowledge come you're not speak into the microphone one of the weaknesses in this concept of the knowledge Commons that Elinor Ostrom had been criticized for when she was first proposing it for small communities and it does rely on I don't want to use the term wisdom of the crowds but it does rely on the self-correcting capacity of the people who are using it so there are two points if you have a you know well informed experienced group that are participating in the knowledge Commons you're likely to get a quicker more informed you know result from it and the second point is you are likely to get that anyway but it's going to take time to do that so in thinking about and this is a key question so how do we set one up is it possible actually to set one up hmm several proposals have been made and in my disaster in my Center for disaster management we're actually working on one of this where you have different since different decisions are made by people who have different levels of authority and respond ability that you set up different levels of a knowledge Commons and you're building literally an epistemic community that can provide advice on problems of different levels of you know scales of difficulty and so on this actually runs counter to Elinor Ostrom zai dia because she was a firm believer in you know it's the person who asks the odd question who's way out on the periphery who often triggers the Cascade of reasoning that changes people's minds but you know clearly these issues you need to be taken into consideration my own you know approach which I you know mentioned in in my talk is that it has to be an iterative causal process that indeed you take a position and you say this is what we think now given the knowledge that we have and you take action on it given the knowledge that you know but you let everybody know that our knowledge is incomplete and this process is continuing and then you take an action feedback comes back from that you correct it to iterate it you redesign it so it's an ongoing process of you know review act redesign and eventually we get to a more informed process is it perfect no is it better than what we have now probably is it easy no you well I'm I'm really glad that you're here is a biology major and you know I raised the lakyla case specifically because I thought it would be provocative and I also mentioned that scientific and engineering associations around the world have sent letters to the court and there has been a lot of commentary a lot of talk about this particular case and with many scientists saying hey I'm never going to say anything if somebody can turn around I'm not going to talk to the public anymore if this is the sort of thing that can happen and you can probably go back and look on National Public Radio around the time of these convictions they interviewed Tom Jordan who's the director of the Southern California earthquake Center and you know he pointed out that yes indeed we cannot predict earthquakes and that and that you know there was some probability of a bigger earthquake happening but it was a relatively small probability at the same time Tom Jordan said mistakes were made right in the communication of risks so so I think this opens up a nice conversation on the responsibility of scientists in terms of their communication with the public and it might open up a conversation about how crazy the Italian courts are you know there's an automatic appeal for all convictions we know that from the amanda knox murder case right she got her conviction appealed and she was freed but then they can come back again and re prosecute you which they're doing with amanda knox we don't have double jeopardy in this country so this is a case that's going to go on and I think it's worth watching a lot of the material on lakyla is in Italian I think enough and and so we don't have full access to everything that went on unless we can read in speak Italian but it's a very interesting case on the construction of blame for disaster I would like to add to that and it's also a difference in national laws and national policies because in this country the person who makes the decision and who communicates to the people is not the scientist directly it's the Emergency Management or the public official or the sum of the person who has legal responsibility for taking that decision now the scientists may speak to him they may give him this information a lot of times in public policy I chief because I think they don't listen enough to the scientists but it is the construction of law in the US that the emergency managers and the public officials who have legal responsibility for protecting the people in their communities in their jurisdictions make the decisions now this raises the question would they be held responsible for making a wrong decision in fact they are if you look at Ray Nagin or if you look at Michael Brown who got dumped you know right away and Ray Nagin finally later they reelected him to my surprise immediately after the election in in California there's a law involving earthquake prediction that releases from liability public officials that make predictions so you're not liable for either you know making a wrong prediction or failing to warn but there are political consequences of course over and above and that's one of the reasons why we like public officials to make those kinds of communications so that we can hold them accountable that's a classic question and gallons of ink haven't spilled on it and reams of paper have been used on it and it is a question the hard part is every generation has to decide it for itself and every society tries to decide it for itself the real problem that we're all facing is it's a global problem you know pollution doesn't stop at borders what happens in China effects you know India Russia the US etc what happens in the u.s. affects all the countries in the world we don't know how to design and constrain these kinds of actions and our legal systems you know as Kathleen illustrated with the lakyla case in Italy are all assuming national responsibility as if climate change you know could be contained by each separate nation that is really our challenge huge issues of equity and distributive justice there which you've raised you this again is a really critical question of how do you actually implement one practically one of the interesting things that you can do and are there any computer scientists in the crowd the big buzzword in computer science now is big data and computers are becoming ever faster and ever more adept literally programmed of course at analyzing data so one of the ways again it's not foolproof but one of the ways is a much more rapid correction of these kinds of you know assertions or hypotheses if you might say and the key thing for a knowledge Commons in a technical world and this is a very different concept of a knowledge comments from Elinor Ostrom you know small group in a village in India and that is you use all of the resources of Technology Google is now literally digitizing trying to digitize the goal is to digitize every print manuscript in the world so you can search it you know very quickly and you can check and validate this so the key principle of a knowledge Commons is really the principle to update and correct you know mistakes and and errors and it does recognize that there are going to be different views in different experts who are going to look at different situations differently because there still is going to be a lot of uncertainty we're not going to know exactly what's going to happen when nor explain all of these interdependencies the best we can do and I will settle for this because I think it's a big step forward is using computers you can begin to track the interdependencies of at least the major actors and the major actions so so but it's a this this Shaymin is talking to the volcano we have a clash of knowledge systems here well I think no oh I understand and there are gonna be people who believe the Shaymin but you know quite honestly they're probably going to be other people that say you know this sounds are really kind of specious and i'm going to start taught asking other people you know you believe the shaymin or do you believe the scientist from una who is sitting there or the anthropologist from the university of chicago who's been watching this volcano who may also talk to the spirit of the volcano I think there are two points that I want to make there's a significant difference between a global Commons and a global knowledge base a knowledge base is just a collection of information that with luck is categorized in some way that anyone can search but it's in you know it is not interactive a global Commons is genuinely interactive what nothing but there that's comments it's not the kind of face-to-face interaction that Elinor Ostrom was talking about that carries an emotional impact that allows people to both put out a position and be corrected and what is really distinctive and this we don't know how to do you know town hall meetings maybe uh but it's a key component of bringing in the emotional interaction that gets people to pay attention to a particular issue and there's a significant difference in the interaction of this concept of global of a knowledge Commons from a standard digitized knowledge base that people can post things on in asynchronous time and where you have different people that are reading things at different times and you don't have that interactive exchange that is what both Elinor Ostrom and actually Herbert Simon also identified as what makes people shift their action well Louise I I you know I might have to side with the questioner here you know because because I I don't think you can reason or persuade people out of positions that they were never reasoned into in the first place these are these are associated with people's political affiliations their worldviews well and their position in the social structure oh I quite agree you know climate denial is right oh I quite well understood in that respect quite agree there are ideological positions people who are not going to change their minds and but we're not concerned about that what we are concerned about is is building a global consensus among at least a substantial majority of the people that they are changing their behavior they're changing their actions and I'd like to use just a couple of examples to show we've been able to do this in 20 years literally the pattern of smoking has stopped in the United States and that wasn't done you know some laws were there some policy but it was an awful lot of public education by Surgeon General warnings etc etc seatbelts are another example where laws were passed but it's now a basic accepted norm you get into a car and if you don't buckle up your your seatbelt you know somebody's going to tell you to somebody's going to tell you to and it's not just because the seat belt itself has a mechanical you know deep on it that keeps beeping you know incessantly until you do it's the norm that has changed and most people change their behavior that's what we're looking for in a knowledge Commons and to change behavior in a responsible way to manage our environment yeah I'd like to invite all of you to continue the conversation and the discussion of risk over the reception in the back of the room and please join me in thanking our guests this evening you you