I would like to thank Lorna Stinchfield, Carol Vogel and Annabelle Lucas for
typing the first draft of this book from my notes, and Roland Sarti for reviewing
part of the text.
I dedicate this book to Joyce M. Alexander and Eric E. Alexander on the occasion
of their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
NO
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1. “It is fun to mess around a bit, when there is enough time to do so” (Horace,
Odes).
TO
BE
C
David Alexander
San Casciano in Val di Pesa, Italy
June 2000
OP
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is an impossible goal, although it remains an alluring one: the “philosopher’s
stone” of the nascent discipline of “disasterology”.
One reason for the failure to unify is the increasing divergence between the
developed and developing worlds, and obviously not merely in terms of the
strongly differential impact of disasters. The industrialized countries are rich
in technological capital, whereas the developing nations abound in human
resources. There is an increasing sense of distance between the two. As a result,
the few cultural bridges that might facilitate the transfer of technology for
mitigation are being gradually destroyed by exploitation, forced militarization,
economic manipulation and widening income gaps. Except where there is a
strong sense of kinship, there tends to be an unwillingness to learn from other
societies. Yet many fundamental principles are universal: for example, disaster
mitigation must go hand in hand with socio-economic development in any soci-
ety, rich or poor. Equity concerns are ubiquitous, even though the proposed
solutions tend not to be.
My intention in this book is not to produce a systematic account of disasters,
or another distillation of the current literature, but to give the reader a personal
view. It is all too easily forgotten that disaster studies should be a marriage of
learning and experience, the latter as practical as possible. Too much abstraction
is dangerous – it obfuscates rather than illuminates the situation. My aim here
is to confront some of the awkward realities of disaster as directly as possible
without resorting to the dry, abstract debate that characterizes so many learned
discourses on the subject of catastrophe, or to the miserable trail of unconnected
anecdotes that constitutes the main alternative approach. My solution is to use
an alternation of principles and examples, using the latter as occasion to com-
ment on what general factors they illuminate. If this bares some prejudices and
predilections, then so be it:
dulce est desipere in loco.
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PREFACE
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