Nature - autonomous learning

82 the ‘nature’ of geographyDe-emphasising the environment: unnatural hazardsand Third World political ecologyAs human geography was progressively de-naturalised, something similarbegan to happen in the disciplinary middle ground.The natural-hazardsresearch and teaching tradition inaugurated by Gilbert White came in forheavy criticism during the 1970s. A key publication was Interpretations ofCalamity (Hewitt 1983).This influential volume argued that natural hazardswere less ‘natural’ than meets the eye. Hewitt, the book’s editor, didn’t denythat floods, earthquakes and tsunamis were natural events. Rather, hequestioned the way the way the hazard–human-response link was studiedby geographers. By the 1970s more people than probably any point inhuman history were dying at the hands of natural hazards.Yet there wasno evidence that the physical environment was any more or less capriciousthan in earlier decades and centuries. The White tradition of researchwould’ve explained this increased mortality with reference to individuals’perceptions of their vulnerability. In terms of hazard mitigation, this traditionfocused (on the human side) on ‘correcting’ misperceptionsor zoning land so that people couldn’t occupy it, or else (on the physicalside) on engineering solutions to hazards (flood barriers, sandbags etc.).Hewitt, by contrast, argued that individuals’ choices of where to live andwhat to do are structured for them by the particular social position they occupy.Specifically, the poor often suffer the brunt of ‘natural hazards’ and Hewittargued that there was nothing natural about this. He called for a ‘social’approach to hazard analysis and mitigation that was less about the physicalthreats and more about who was made vulnerable to hazards and why.This sort of critical-hazards analysis was complemented by theemergence of ‘Third World political ecology’ from the early 1980s. Asthe name suggests, this ‘combine[d] the concerns of ecology and a broadlydefined political economy. Together, this encompasses the constantlyshifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also withinclasses and groups within society itself’ (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987:17). Despite the reference to land-based resources,Third World politicalecology (TWPE) was more interested in the social side of the dialecticreferred to from the start. In this it converged with Hewitt’s agenda forhazard study. However, unlike Hewitt and his ilk, political ecologists weremore interested in chronic environmental problems than the effectsof extreme geophysical events. Empirically,TWPE focused on poor, rural