When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to “natural disasters” or “acts of God.” But what if they’re neither? What if we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves? That’s the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first book to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a “perfect storm,” but a tragedy of our own making—and one that could become commonplace. The authors, one a longtime New Orleans resident, argue that breached levees and sloppy emergency response are just the most obvious examples of government failure. The true problem is more deeply rooted and insidious, and stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast. Based on the false promise of widespread prosperity, communities across the U.S. have embraced all brands of “economic development” at all costs. In Louisiana, that meant development interests turning wetlands into shipping lanes. By replacing a natural buffer against storm surges with a 75-mile long, obsolete canal that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they guided the hurricane into the heart of New Orleans and adjacent communities. The authors reveal why, despite their geographic differences, California and Missouri are building—quite literally—toward similar destruction. Too often, the U.S. “growth machine” generates wealth for a few and misery for many. Drawing lessons from the most expensive “natural” disaster in American history, Catastrophe in the Making shows why thoughtless development comes at a price we can ill afford.

In the tradition of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, a leading geoscientist argues that natural disasters too often push the modern world towards more extremes of inequality

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

Disasters are part of the modern condition, a source of physical anxiety and existential angst, and they are increasing in frequency, cost and severity. Drawing on both disaster research and social theory, this book offers a critical examination of their causes, consequences and future avoidance.

A “keenly observed and timely investigation” of how capitalism makes a fortune from disaster, poverty and catastrophe—“a potent weapon for shock resistors around the world” (Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine) Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. What emerges through Loewenstein’s re­porting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valuable commodity.

Turn on the news and it looks as if we live in a time and place unusually consumed by the specter of disaster. The events of 9/11 and the promise of future attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, and the inevitable consequences of environmental devastation all contribute to an atmosphere of imminent doom. But reading an account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, with its vivid evocation of buildings “crumbling as one might crush a biscuit,” we see that calamities—whether natural or man-made—have long had an impact on the American consciousness. Uncovering the history of Americans’ responses to disaster from their colonial past up to the present, Kevin Rozario reveals the vital role that calamity—and our abiding fascination with it—has played in the development of this nation. Beginning with the Puritan view of disaster as God’s instrument of correction, Rozario explores how catastrophic events frequently inspired positive reactions. He argues that they have shaped American life by providing an opportunity to take stock of our values and social institutions. Destruction leads naturally to rebuilding, and here we learn that disasters have been a boon to capitalism, and, paradoxically, indispensable to the construction of dominant American ideas of progress. As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s style; and how the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new postmodern culture of calamity. The Culture of Calamity will stand as the definitive diagnosis of the peculiarly American addiction to the spectacle of destruction.

Disastrous High-Tech Decision Making: From Disasters to Safety offers new insights for scholars studying management, decision making, cognition in the wild, and safety in the context of imperatives to continue operations. This book takes you inside the deliberations and action that have produced high-tech disasters in safetycritical enterprises. From primary data and analyses never before considered in scholarly assessments of the Challenger disaster, Frederick F. Lighthall, Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago, applies the insights of macroergonomics, social psychology, naturalistic decision making, and legal argumentation to this expanded set of documents and data. He argues that the Challenger case represents a prototype of decision making that arises whenever a possibly threatening change in operating conditions becomes evident. In this situation, inevitable in boundarypushing enterprises, four generic decision-making pitfalls await engineers and managers who must decide whether continuing to operate is safe or dangerous. These four decision-making vulnerabilities are also evident, Lighthall argues, in the decision situations of other high-tech disasters both similar (the Columbia shuttle) and dissimilar (Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster). In Part I of the book Lighthall traces decision participants’ chart-by-chart deliberations and argument about whether proceeding with the Challenger’s launch would be dangerous. Part II analyzes from contrasting perspectives the dynamics revealed in the narrative. Lighthall’s analysis ends by examining the demanding changes in outlook, knowledge disciplines, and learning processes required for safety to compete with the production imperatives of high-tech enterprises operating in unforgiving environments. This book is a must read both for students of management and of engineering who may find themselves working in these high-tech settings, and for managers and engineers who now work in these settings.