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Disasters in the Twenty-First Century: Modern Destruction and Future Instruction

Sociologists are becoming increasingly aware of the changing nature of risk in late modernity and the shifting landscape of the sociological study of disasters. This increased “consciousness of catastrophe” is directly related to the empirical fact that the number of “natural” and “technological” disasters have increased substantially over the past 30 years. In the past eight years, some 422 disaster declarations have been issued in the United States alone – etching disasters as an important part of contemporary American experience (Bogues 2008). The number of people and communities affected by this most recent spate of catastrophic events reflects a global intensification of death and destruction that invites analytical and empirical application of a critical sociological imagination. While affecting society as a whole, these “focusing events,” or “destabilizing events,” have also had an impact on scholarly enterprises, shifting the attention of sociologists from more traditional areas of professional inquiry to the expansion and application of innovative concepts and methods to the study of disasters (Birkland 1997; Picou and Marshall 2007). This paradigm shift means that disaster research is being actively re-imagined throughout the broader discipline. Disasters have always threatened human communities. Indeed, the myths and folklore documenting the devastation of such events are legend (Rosenberg 1997). Nonetheless, the last quarter of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century seem to have offered more than their fair share: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, Hurricane Andrew, 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the Sichuan earthquake and Hurricane Ike. These exemplars of modern destruction have all become global mass media spectacles dramatically delivered to living rooms throughout the world. Leading disaster researchers have revised their conceptualizations of disasters to include ideas about the “social amplification of disasters and crisis” and the existence of “transsystem social ruptures.” (Quarantelli et al. 2006) The former reflects traditional disasters, such as heat waves and blackouts that are amplified by population density, and the latter, low probability/high consequence events such as asteroid strikes and global nuclear war (Quarantelli et al. 2006). Future global catastrophes also threaten the human community as the pandemic spread of diseases and the inevitable daily threat of terrorism pose risks for the future.