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Law, Policy, and the Social Construction of Disaster
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 December 2019
Extract
Emerging in the English language during the 1590s, the etymological origins of the word “disaster” are found in désastre from Middle French (1560s) and disastro from Italian, meaning “ill-starred,” with “dis-,” a pejorative and “astro” meaning “star” or “planet”—from the Latin astrum and from the Greek ástron. The notion was of “an unfavorable aspect of a star or planet,” a “malevolent astral influence,” or a “calamity blamed on an unfavorable position of a planet.”
- Type
- The Critical Contribution of Law Toward Global Efforts to Mitigate Disaster Risk
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 2019 by The American Society of International Law
Footnotes
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The Ploughshare Group LLP. This essay was adapted from Michael Cooper, Seven Dimensions of Disaster: The Sendai Framework and the Social Construction of Catastrophe, inThe Cambridge Handbook on Disaster Risk Reduction and International Law 17 (Katja Samuel, Marie Aronsson-Storrier & Kirsten Bookmiller eds., 2019).
References
1 Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary, at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/disaster. See also The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 271 (C.T. Onions et al. eds., reprt. 1976).
2 Kenneth Hewitt, Regions of Risk: A Geographical Introduction to Disasters 55 (1997).
3 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Sc. 1.
4 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, prologue.
5 Jean-Marie Robine, et al., Death Toll Exceeded 70,000 in Europe During the Summer of 2003, 331 Compte rendus: Biologies 171–78 (2008). See also Janet Larsen, Setting the Record Straight: More than 52,000 Europeans Died from Heat in Summer 2003, Earth Pol'y Inst. (July 28, 2006), at http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2006/update56 (estimating a lower total mortality rate).
6 Wiebke Lass et al., Avoiding the Avoidable: Towards a European Heat Waves Risk Governance, 2 Int. J. Disaster Risk Sci., at 1, 3 (2011).
7 See Hewitt, supra note 2, at 55.
8 Nick Obradovich, Robyn Migliorini, Sara C. Mednick & James H. Fowler, Nighttime Temperature and Human Sleep Loss in a Changing Climate, 3 Science Advances (May 26, 2017).
9 Magdalena Mis, Climate Change Threatens to Double Malaria Risk from African Dams, Say Researchers, Reuters (Sept. 4, 2016), at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-africa-malaria-dams/climate-change-threatens-to-double-malaria-risk-from-african-dams-say-researchers-idUSKCN11B02Y.
10 Zack Wichter, Too Hot for Takeoff: Air Travel Buffeted by a Capricious Climate, N.Y. Times, June 21, 2017, at A1.
11 Austin Surat & Javier Lezaun, Introduction: The Challenge of Crisis and Catastrophe in Law and Politics, in Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse 1, 7 (Austin Surat & Javier Lezaun eds., 2009).
12 The Office of Civil Defense (OCD), created by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941, was an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense from 1961–1964. OCD was renamed the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency on May 5, 1972 and subsequently abolished on July 20, 1979 by Executive Order 12148, which created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
13 E. L. Quarantelli, The Early History of the Disaster Research Centre, 2, available at https://www.drc.udel.edu/content-sub-site/Documents/DRC%20Early%20History.pdf.
14 Id.
15 Hewitt, supra note 2, at 18.
16 Id. at 19.
17 UN Int'l Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Links Between Disaster Risk Reduction, Development and Climate Change: A Briefing for Sweden's Commission on Climate Change and Development, at 1 (2008), available at https://www.unisdr.org/files/8383_pbdisasterriskreduction1.pdf.
18 Consider, for example, that four times as many women as men were drowned by the India Ocean Tsunami, in part because, for cultural reasons, women in the affected countries were never taught to swim or to climb a tree. See Rhona MacDonald, How Women Were Affected by the Tsunami: A Perspective from Oxfam, 2 PLoS Med. e178, 474 (June 2005), at http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020178.
19 Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, paras. 23–25,UN Doc. A/RES/69/283 (June 23, 2015). The Sendai Framework was adopted at the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan on March 18, 2015.