Wednesday, February 25, 2009
The Different Kinds of Disasters
Our class discussion on Tuesday got me thinking about disasters and how we view them. It’s interesting that the disasters chosen for each group was flooding, blizzard, virus and economic crisis I believe. The most recent disasters that the world has seen are such things as tsunami, terrorist attack, plane crashes and other events, things that do not happen every day but have proven to be capable of striking when society least expects. It is interesting to me that the disasters we all choose are things fairly unlikely to occur anytime in the near future. Though global warming has shown us all that extreme weather may occur in the future, we can all be fairly certain an ice age or heat wave will not suddenly occur tomorrow. A plane crash? I don’t know. I definitely am a little uneasy every time I board a plane, unable to keep that little fear of engine failure or something along those lines from entering my mind. Perhaps when one is asked to examine and unfold the details of a disaster, it is easier to choose one that needn’t cause any alarm for the time being.
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Yeah I definitely don't recommend watching Final Destination before boarding a plane...
ReplyDeletebut anyway...
Interesting observation. (Excluding the economic crisis) part of me believes that these disasters were chosen because they are the extreme calamities we see in movies, and therefore easier to imagine and even easier to invent solutions for without becoming a little attached, as we would have been if we had discussed disasters that have ailed us in the past decade. Although, it would have been a lot more interesting to hear what suggestions the class would have made if we had chosen events that are more realistic and more likely to occur.
I totally agreed with you. I think a problem with many societies is that they are not adequately prepared for the plausible disasters that then later occur. Why is that? It is perhaps because of the same reason for why you speculated that the groups in class chose remote and unfamiliar disasters. No one wants to actually imagine something that could (or is in fact more likely) to really happen. What is at cost by saving ourselves the "short term" fears? Does humanity in general feel that if we say something, for instance express fear and concern over a possible disaster, that the cosmos will then take it as an order that it must grant?
ReplyDeleteI agree entirely with the idea that nobody wants to admit certain disasters are more likely to occur than others. On that note, I think we naturally make the leap to insane natural disasters because other choices seem less disastrous. I, for one, did not think of the economic disaster as a that much of a disaster at all. By this I mean that the economy fluctuates so much into disaster-esque states that it seems like it there would be instant crashing of the economy that we would not foresee. To me the economic situation is more like the slow death; tragic nonetheless but totally foreseeable and, thus, not as much of a "disaster" as a sad situation. Just thinking.
ReplyDeletei'm curious whether you folks think of katrina as a "likely" disaster or not? it seems like the litmus test, doesn't it: given chronic underfunding of material protection for the city, you could totally see that the levees would give way. but the hurricane itself was beyond what anyone had expected, and in that sense was unforeseeable.
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