Contemporary Sociology - American Sociological Association

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660 Symposium nearly half the destruction of the wetlands, making coastal settlements more vulnerable. That we know; it is well established. Even without MRGO and the Industrial Canal, New Orleans was still vulnerable because of the unimpeded dragging and drilling and underwater pipelines and steady small-scale oil spills, and the channeling of the Mississippi. But the hypodermic needle for the vast destruction of New Orleans was local business. This is important, because it is so hard to mitigate and cope with this source of failure. We have not invested in mechanisms to control the local growth machines because so much of power is local. FEMA is not funded enough to map carefully even most of the flood zones that need mapping. And even when they do, they do not have the power to enforce zoning restrictions on new construction. When it recently tried to do this in the Midwest the local uproar was overpowering. Everyone affected would see their property values and their investments decline sharply. It is easy to see why our Growth Machine Politics and the Social Production of Risk If you do not happen to be a disaster researcher or know the history of disaster research, you might not realize how unusual Catastrophe in the Making is. Disaster research has been a sociological specialty since the late-1940s, but the field has faced several challenges, particularly on a theoretical level. One challenge stems from the fact that the original funders of disaster research, which were primarily military and civil defense institutions at the federal level, were not particularly interested in theory. Rather, they were interested in solid empirical research about social and organizational responses during disasters that could provide practical insights into how people might behave should the United States become involved in an extreme nuclear confrontation or all-out nuclear war. This focus in turn led to another problematic outcome, Contemporary Sociology 39, 6 House of Representatives is reluctant to enrage local business and home owners, even if the 100-year flood comes every 15 years, as the book points out for the St. Louis area. Big business is powerful at the national and regional levels, and it counts. Coal and oil interests can defeat, delay, or at least gravely weaken legislation on greenhouse gases. Their well-funded denier program has been quite successful in maximizing the appeal of short-term interests. I work at that level. But I cannot find a single big business that was responsible for the unnecessarily high level of destruction from Katrina. The Corps of Engineers is a possible candidate, but without the local business and industry leaders of New Orleans, it would not have dug the ditch that ditched New Orleans. I wish the last chapter had fewer grand generalizations, and instead followed the Molotch and Logan lead and used this spectacular case to speculate on the sources of power in our nation. KATHLEEN TIERNEY University of Colorado, Boulder tierneyk@colorado.edu Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow, by William R. Freudenburg, Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai Erikson. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2009. 209pp. $26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781597266826. which is that researchers conceptualized and studied disasters primarily as events— as occurrences that were, in the words of the pioneering researcher Charles Fritz, ‘‘concentrated in time and space.’’ Put another way, early social science researchers thought about disasters in more or less the way the general public did: as events that have a beginning, middle, and end, with the ‘‘beginning’’ of the disaster being the time
when the disaster ‘‘agent’’—the flood, earthquake, hurricane, fire, or other threat— appears on the scene and begins to threaten human communities. Most research has focused on such topics as responses to predisaster warnings; patterns of social behavior during the period following disaster impact; organizational adaptation and improvisation during disasters; and the disaster response activities of specific types of organizations and institutions. There has also been an emphasis on developing empirical generalizations and insights on the basis of the study of specific disasters, which subsequently developed in an incremental fashion into a body of empirical findings. This is not to claim that the field has been atheoretical. Disaster research was shaped initially by the sociological theory that was prominent at the time of its development, which was functionalism or systems theory—an influence that can still be seen in current scholarship. However, as the influence of functionalism declined, no overarching theoretical perspective has replaced it. As I discuss elsewhere (Tierney 2010), current disaster research boasts a wealth of middlerange theory and an even greater wealth of empirical findings, but no unifying theoretical paradigm tying the field together. The field also took a very long time to incorporate broader sociological perspectives on social inequalities and disparities, such as those associated with race, class, gender, and differences in access to political power. These topics were not incorporated into disaster scholarship in a meaningful way until the mid-1990s (on gender, for example, see Fothergill 1996; Enarson and Morrow 1998; Enarson, Fothergill, and Peek 2007). Since that time, race, class, gender and their intersectionality have been taken into account in a great deal of the work that is being done. In contrast, despite its importance for the study of disasters, political power still receives little emphasis. Catastrophe in the Making is in many ways the antidote for these ills. It was not written to answer the questions that federal agencies want answered. Quite the contrary, it asks and answers questions that many agencies would like to ignore. The book is not about what people, organizations, or institutions did during a disaster, but rather about Symposium 661 a lengthy series of historical processes, decisions, and practices—and indeed ideologies concerning nature, technology, and their management—that produced the catastrophe that was Katrina. Additionally, the book makes political power central to an understanding of disasters, their impacts, and their outcomes. But most important, it provides a framework and set of concepts that explain the process of risk buildup, showing in the process how disasters are socially produced. That framework is political economy/political ecology, and the book’s key concepts include the idea of cities as growth machines and rent-seeking, or efforts to extract profits from land-use, infrastructure, and ‘‘development’’ projects for the benefit of elites. At the same time, the outcome of growth machine politics is the spread of downstream risks to others, including future generations. And in an especially nice twist, the book shows how, at least in the case of New Orleans, but no doubt also true in many other cases, the promised benefits from such activities (in this case, the massive boondoggle that was the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MR- GO) never actually materialized. The ideas in the book are not entirely new in the field of sociological disaster research. Other studies have been guided by similar theoretical assumptions. For example, Hurricane Andrew: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Sociology of Disaster (Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin 1997) explicitly argued for a sociopolitical ecology approach to the study of disaster, even though many of the chapters in that book did not make the best use of that framework. The Northridge Earthquake (Bolin and Stanford 1998) analyzed the post-disaster recovery experiences of four different communities affected by that earthquake, taking into account those communities’ positions in the political economy of Greater Los Angeles, including their distinctive histories and political ties with regional elites. More than two decades ago (Tierney 1989), I argued that to understand the seeming inability of local communities to enact hazard mitigation measures, such as improved building codes, earthquake retrofit ordinances, and land-use planning measures that can reduce losses from future disasters, we need to focus on how Contemporary Sociology 39, 6
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