The ambiguity of environmental disasters
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The ambiguity of environmental disasters Peter R. Mulvihill 1 Accepted: 19 November 2020 # AESS 2020
Abstract Terminology pertaining to environmental and disaster management has long been subject to wide interpretation and vague definition. The term environmental disaster tends to be particularly ambiguous. Environmental disasters are often framed primarily in terms of their social and economic effects rather than their ecological impacts. The ambiguity of environmental disasters may be attributed largely to the general peripherality of environmental values. Evolving trajectories in disaster studies, including social constructivism and the vulnerability paradigm, do little to mitigate this ambiguity. A more meaningful and nuanced understanding of environmental disasters is needed and would include more explicit consideration of ecological impacts. Keywords Disaster categories . Disaster terminology . Environmental disasters . Ecological disasters . Environmental terminology
Environmental disasters and ambiguous disaster categories As adverse impacts of development accumulate, the risk of environmental disasters escalates. However, the term itself— “environmental disaster”—remains ambiguous, in practice defined inconsistently and subjectively, or more often, not defined at all. It may signify a wide spectrum of phenomena, for example, accidents, trends, stresses, risks, or climate-/ weather-related catastrophes. The term may encompass cases that range from gradual to sudden onset, from cases that may be attributed to more “natural” or more anthropogenic causes, and from smaller to larger scale. The scope of the category is broad, whether or not cases happen to be particularly environmental or even particularly disastrous. This article has three aims: to explore reasons why “environmental disaster” tends to be an ambiguous term, to discuss implications of this ambiguity, and to discuss criteria that may be useful in defining environmental disasters more meaningfully. Many cases have been described as environmental disasters, including, for example, toxic contamination at Love
* Peter R. Mulvihill [email protected] 1
Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Ontario M2P 2H2 Toronto, Canada
Canal, mercury poisoning in Minamata, the Bhopal gas leak, the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, shrinking of the Aral Sea, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Irish Potato Famine, the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster, or global climate change. Many other terms may be used to describe or categorize cases such as these, including but not limited to technological, anthropogenic, ecological, socio-ecological, toxic, chronic, manufactured, socially constructed, engineering, and industrial disasters. Most of these terms are complementary or interchangeable, even though, strictly speaking, none have precisely the same meaning. In practice, a great deal may be implied and assumed rather than specified. Any disaster that unfolds
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