There is no such thing as a natural disaster. This is the provocative statement that Professor of Disasters and Health Ilan Kelman makes with Disaster by Choice. The title pretty much sums it up: Earth can be a violent place alright, but our actions, or lack thereof, turn these hazards into catastrophes that cause unnecessary death, damage, and destruction. So, what are we to do?
Disaster by Choice: How Our Actions Turn Natural Hazards into Catastrophes, written by Ilan Kelman, published by Oxford University Press in February 2020 (hardback, 167 pages)
The book opens vividly with the 2010 Haiti earthquake that tore asunder the island and turned into a poorly managed humanitarian crisis when UN troops accidentally introduced a cholera epidemic (which is a bacterial infection, not a viral one, as Kelman writes here). Geologist Robert Yeats had called Haiti’s capital an example of an “earthquake time bomb” a week before disaster struck, and the city is just one of many catastrophes waiting to happen. Of all the natural disasters discussed in this book, earthquakes feel the most menacing to me, as they really strike out of nowhere. We know which areas are at risk, but despite decades of research, predicting them is still virtually impossible.
Kelman proceeds with examples of recent wildfires in Australia and the North Sea flood of 1953 to drive home his point that we make ourselves vulnerable to disasters. This leads into what I thought were two somewhat muddled chapters on vulnerability.
“Earth can be a violent place alright, but our actions, or lack thereof, turn these hazards into catastrophes that cause unnecessary death, damage, and destruction.”
The first of these starts by stating it cannot meet the challenge of documenting how vulnerability is created and perpetuated, but then takes a stab at it anyway. As such, this chapter asks how vulnerability to natural hazards is influenced by population number (it is, but the proportion of a population affected is also important), age (old people are at risk, but so are young people who are often overconfident), ideology (only vaguely defined, but Kelman points to e.g. voting behaviour that does not address social and economic disparities), sex (in some countries women are more vulnerable to floods as they receive no swimming lessons), and economics (poverty does not help, but affluent people also often choose to live in places prone to natural hazards). Oh, and there is mention of city layout and planning, building design, and building codes in here too.
The chapter that follows, which teases with the subtitle “Vulnerability by choice, but whose choice?”, continues in this vein. A strong start on the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak asks pointed questions as to why this epidemic was not suppressed quicker. Epidemics and pandemics are other examples of disasters of our own making. Quammen also made this point in Spillover: our encroachment on, and destruction of natural habitat exposes us to new diseases that can jump from animals to humans. But after that, I feel Kelman gets side-tracked in discussions on how migration and travelling increase vulnerability when people are unaware of local natural hazards, and how institutional choices on warning systems and shelter design can leave certain disabled groups particularly vulnerable.
“Why do so many people live in dangerous areas? For many people, it is actually a lack of choice.”
As Kelman mentions, these are all “essential pieces of the disaster jigsaw”, but he unfortunately does not really assemble them. And that is a shame, as I feel Kelman makes some excellent points of which I will highlight three.
One, why do so many people live in dangerous areas? For many people, it is actually a lack of choice. Poverty, institutional neglect, and, in many third-world countries, a long history of colonial exploitation all feed into this.
Two, writes Kelman, politics and power games often create and perpetuate systems that make people vulnerable to natural hazards. Those in power often have little interest in opposing e.g. lucrative property development in flood-prone areas or spending money to retrofit existing buildings to make them safer from wildfires or heatwaves.
And three, where money is spent, it is often not spent wisely. We tend to focus on reducing the hazard rather than reducing people’s vulnerability. Kelman makes this point by talking of the rather obscure area of earthquake modification, the pie-in-the-sky idea of trying to control tectonic shifts (reducing the hazard), rather than focusing on constructing earthquake-proof infrastructure (reducing the vulnerability). I feel his example of how we deal with floods would have been better here. To wit, we often build expensive defences that need continuous maintenance (reducing the hazard), whereas we should construct houses that can handle a flood or avoid such areas altogether (reducing the vulnerability).
“Where money is spent, it is often not spent wisely. We tend to focus on reducing the hazard rather than reducing people’s vulnerability.”
These strong points are offset by what I feel are some shortcomings. When I first read of this book, I thought “isn’t it simply a matter of more of us being in harm’s way as our population has grown?” Disaster by Choice is surprisingly thin on numbers and statistics, with Kelman relying mostly on anecdotal examples and theorising. The list of notes takes up a mere four pages, and the further reading list is just half a page. Surely, there is more known about the number of victims and economic damage over time?
Climate change also only gets a brief mention. Some have controversially argued that climate change does not increase disasters after everything else has been accounted for, whereas others think it does (e.g. the mass movements of water and melting of ice bringing about increased tectonic activity, see McGuire’s Waking the Giant). Kelman seems to side with the latter school of thought, though I was surprised to see no mention of McGuire’s ideas, especially as he wrote a glowing recommendation printed on the book’s dustjacket.
Furthermore, Kelman only briefly mentions human psychology on page 128, writing how for many the threat of natural hazards is far removed from day-to-day concerns. How effective are emergency drills and government advice about preparedness in the face of this? What is the right balance between complacency and doomsday-prepper-madness?
“Kelman only briefly mentions human psychology […] what is the right balance between complacency and doomsday-prepper-madness?”
Finally, he writes, it is ludicrous to claim that preparing for disasters is too expensive – just look at the world’s annual military budget. Clearly, many governments look at this trade-off between costs and benefits differently. But more importantly, what would Kelman have us do with that money? Examples of solutions are scattered throughout the book. These include personal choices (awareness and preparedness), education (should first-aid and basic rescue skills be part of our school curricula?), infrastructure (engineering hacks to make buildings better able to withstand fire, floods, or earthquakes), and urban layout (which can help or hinder mass evacuations). A final chapter bringing them together, reflecting on their cost-effectiveness, would have been welcome.
Although I personally thought the book was somewhat lacking in structure, Kelman is to be praised for boldly writing what many do not want to hear. At just over 150 pages, it is an easy, quick, but foremost thought-provoking read.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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“The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future“, written by David Wallace-Wells, published in Europe by Allen Lane in February 2019 (hardback, 310 pages)
The Uninhabitable Earth expands on the essay published in New York magazine in July 2017. The piece quickly attracted criticism from climate scientists for being rather cavalier with its facts. Amidst the many responses, a useful summary is the piece published by science education NGO Climate Feedback in which 17 prominent climate scientists evaluated the essay. To its credit, New York magazine was quick to publish an annotated edition.
The near future sketched in the first half of The Uninhabitable Earth is one of a planet tortured by epic wildfires, rising sea levels, megadroughts, famines, acidifying oceans, polluted air, and rising temperatures amidst which hundreds of millions of climate refugees wander a planet in the throes of collapsing economies and emerging conflicts. In short, Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.
He is not the first to sound a desperate alarm, and his book joins a budding subgenre that some critics disparagingly label “climate porn”. James Hansen, the well-known climate scientist who has chastised colleagues for not speaking up out of fear of being labeled alarmist, has done so before (see Storms of my Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity), while others have declared the fight over (see Too Late: How We Lost the Battle with Climate Change or Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed – and What It Means for Our Future). Some climate scientists are annoyed by what they perceive as scaremongering, arguing that frightening people will result in fatalism rather than galvanizing them. I guess people will respond in different ways, and recent climate protests suggest that his approach certainly works for some. Either way, Wallace-Wells does not mind being called alarmist, his (touché) defence is that he is alarmed, and you should be too.
“[…] Wallace-Wells would like you to know that, unless urgent action is undertaken to combat climate change, we are all royally fucked.”
Now, Wallace-Wells openly states he calls on predictions, on science that is in flux as new findings come to light. Even if he gets some of the details wrong, the overall pattern is pretty clear. As I have written elsewhere (see my reviews of The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions and The Oceans: A Deep History), the findings from palaeoclimatology leave little doubt as to what happens when you keep pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The author brings together many poignant observations. Global warming is not a moral and economic debt that has been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution – about half of all fossil fuels have been burned in only the last three decades. And our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy, allowing us to live in a temporary mirage of “endless and on-demand abundance for the world’s wealthy” (I told you he was poetic).
“[…] our epoch could very well be a blip on the timeline, the result of a gigantic one-off injection of fossil fuel into our economy”
The Uninhabitable Earth is not a book of solutions though, and Wallace-Wells spends a good part of the second half of the book railing against what he thinks will not work. Against the hallucinatory fantasies of Silicon Valley who hope to escape into a virtual reality, uploading their consciousness into computers. Against as-of-yet hypothetical technofixes such as carbon capture and storage or negative emissions technology. Against ecological nihilism by burned-out environmentalists such as Paul Kingsnorth (see Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist). If you want practical advice, you are better off reading There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years.
The Dutchman in me can appreciate his in-your-face polemic style. This is why I am surprised he overlooks one vital aspect: overpopulation. As soon as this topic comes up, Wallace-Wells seems blindsided. Part of him is excited for his daughter and the world she will inhabit, one which will be “doing battle with a genuinely existential threat”. This seems mildly perverse given the litany of terrors he lays out in this book. And those who abstain from having children over their concerns for a world ravaged by climate change “demonstrate a strain of strange ascetic pride”.
“For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission.”
One problem I have with this line of argumentation, that our lifestyle and economy are wrecking the planet, is that it ignores numbers. Yes, our ancestors were not despoiling the planet, but I would argue it was not for want of trying, but for want of numbers. Now, I have no data to back this assertion up with, so I am going out on a limb here, but how much damage do you think a population of 7 billion stone age hunter-gatherers would have inflicted on the planet? Or 7 billion people trying their hand at farming some ten thousand years ago? I would not at all be surprised that if you work out the numbers, the reason our ancestors did not bring about climate change has more to do with their lack of numbers than with a lack of impact of their lifestyle.
And Wallace-Wells comes so close when he observes that most emissions have only happened in the last three decades. Could it be that the doubling of our world population has something to do with this? For a book that prides itself on its fierce frankness, not addressing overpopulation feels like a serious omission. It is a thorny topic (see my review of Should We Control World Population?), but if you want to talk solutions, addressing it should be a vital part of a multi-pronged approach he envisions to avoid the bleak future sketched here.
The Uninhabitable Earth is lyrical and stirring, but also controversial and not without its flaws. Is taking the predictions of climate change impacts to their logical extremes a valuable exercise? I am left feeling conflicted. I can sympathise with the urge to want to grab people by the scruff of the neck, but whether it ultimately is constructive is something I am not fully convinced of.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. This review has been slightly edited since its publication to emphasize that I consider the author frank rather than alarmist.
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“Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations“, written by Anthony J. McMichael and edited by Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir, published by Oxford University Press in February 2017 (hardback, 370 pages)
Anthony J. McMichael was an epidemiologist associated with various renowned academic institutes during his life and advised the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the link between climate change and health (see this obituary for a fuller description of his many achievements and contributions). With the manuscript for this book accepted for publication, he suddenly passed away in September 2014. Alistair Woodward and Cameron Muir took up the torch and saw the book through to publication.
There is obviously increasing concern what future climate change will have in store for humanity and the planet at large. And there is no shortage of dire predictions of more frequent extreme weather events, sea level rise, impact on agriculture, and the risk of disrupted food production accompanied by conflict and unrest. This is not mere idle speculation or hypothetical model forecasting, says McMichael. Our past is littered with episodes where natural climatic changes caused all sorts of misery. The key to understanding what might come next lies in an understanding of our past.
“Our past is littered with episodes where natural climatic changes caused crop failures, famines, warfare and the demise of civilizations.”
The first few chapters give the reader all the relevant background knowledge needed. McMichael introduces the various mechanisms that cause longer and shorter-term climate fluctuations, from Milankovitch cycles to decadal oscillations such as El Niño. The result, as I mentioned in my review of The Oceans: A Deep History, is a fiendishly complex system of feedback loops. He gives an overview of the various direct and indirect health impacts that climate change can have, and provides a short history of the rise of humans and the beginning of agriculture (see also my review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States). McMichael speaks of the Faustian bargain we unwittingly made by transitioning from nomadism to farming. Palaeopathology has documented how our health suffered due to our change in diet (see Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death, or my review of Evolution’s Bite: A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins), but this new sedentary lifestyle also made us more vulnerable to climatic changes.
The centrepiece of the book is his synthesis of some 11,000 years of environmental history. Starting with early civilizations in or near the Nile Valley, he walks us through the civilizations of the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, and, in the Indus Valley, the Harappans. For most of these, the lack of written records means that we have pieced together their history from archaeological and palaeoclimatological data. We have a far more detailed picture of the rise and fall of Roman, Mayan, and Anasazi civilizations, and, later, of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300-1850), the eruption of Mount Tambora, and the Irish potato blight. Throughout, McMichael summarises how droughts, floods, or changing temperatures are linked to famines, the spread of diseases, warfare, mass migrations (whether as climate refugees or as groups hell-bent on conquest), and, ultimately, the fate of empires.
“McMichael speaks of the Faustian bargain we unwittingly made by transitioning from nomadism to farming.”
Now, there is a vast literature on the link between climate and human history, so this book necessarily takes a bird’s eye view. Next to the academic literature, you could build a small library with more popular books from the likes of Jared Diamond (see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive) and especially Brian Fagan (see The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, and Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations). Early eras are covered in, for example, Climate Change in Prehistory: The End of the Reign of Chaos, but there are also excellent books on Roman civilization (see my review of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire), the Little Ice Age (see The Little Ice Age and my review of Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age Transformed the West and Shaped the Present), and the impact of the Tambora eruption (see Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Tambora and the Year without a Summer: How a Volcano Plunged the World into Crisis).
What sets this book apart is the synthesis of this vast and fascinating topic, making it a good starting point, and its explicit link to health and disease. Off the top of my head, the only other book that does something similar is Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey, but McMichael’s background as an epidemiologist and his work for the IPCC position him very well to tell this story.
One of the things I liked was the author’s caution throughout the book. So, when he mentions the possible impact on our very early history of the Toba eruption (see my review of When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano) or the question whether the Black Death in 16th-Century Europe was actually caused by bubonic plague (see for example Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer or Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations), he gives a brief overview of why these ideas are considered controversial. When, in the final chapters, it comes to forecasts and lessons for the future, he is similarly moderate. Never before has our population reached such large numbers, and to see comparable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide we have to go back tens of millions of years in palaeoclimatological records. So, without downplaying the important lessons that history holds for the future, in some ways the future is not like the past.
“even though I am familiar with [this topic], the way it is brought together and puts time into perspective still gave me near-vertigo.”
The dumb thing is, even though I am familiar with all the individual pieces McMichael lays out here, the way it is brought together and puts time into perspective still gave me near-vertigo. Clearly, no empire ever looked much ahead or entertained the idea of their demise until it was almost upon them. McMichael highlights how evolution, always aiming to help organisms survive the now, has left us poorly equipped to plan for the longer-term. While the full story of most civilizations has spun itself out over many centuries, our “Great Acceleration” and the growth of the world’s population from 1.5 to 7+ billion people took just decades (see my review of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945).
Even if, for the sake of argument, human-induced climate change was not on the menu, have we, through our technological advances, created a robust society able to weather climate fluctuations far into the future? Or have we mindlessly expanded to the maximum carrying capacity allowed by our environment? I think we all know the answer to that (see also my review of Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want it Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future). It is a tall order to look at the totality of the picture revealed here and remain as optimistic as the author – though his mindset does not take away from the urgency of his message.
The only minor quibble I have with this book is that some of the sourced illustrations were designed with colour in mind and have here been reproduced in greyscale, limiting their usefulness. That notwithstanding, Climate Change and the Health of Nations is a fascinating and thorough synthesis that shows how history holds many valuable lessons for those willing to listen. The book is also a fitting testament to McMichael’s long career, and Woodward and Muir, as well as the publisher, are to be commended for making sure this book saw the light of day.
Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.
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