Only in recent times have serious historical studies been published about floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storm tides, forest-fires, and other natural disasters and their effects on human life.
Istvan Praet, Carson Fellow from July to December 2011, talks about the perception of catastrophes among the Chachi, the Amerindian inhabitants of Esmeraldas, a lowland region on the Pacific coast.
Donatella de Rita, Carson Fellow from April 2012 until June 2012, speaks about her research project on urban development and the associated hazard in volcanic areas, as well as on geoarcheology.
On 8 November 1935, Mexico’s president, Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), established the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl National Park, the first of nearly forty national parks he would create within the next few years. By 1940, Mexico had more parks than any other country in the world.
In 2004, the government of Indonesia declared Mount Merapi to be the nation’s thirty-ninth national park. However, since the mountain is a key feature of the sacred landscape of central Java, the creation of Merapi National Park was greeted with widespread protests from the villagers and farmers.
This article describes an ongoing environmental disaster in Indonesia, where a mud volcano has been inundating an ever-increasing area.
A visual poem (in English and Hawaiian) that pays tribute to Maunakea, a mountain on the island of Hawai`i.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose attempt to dwell with the kinds of writing and thinking practices that we have been developing in their research in Hawai’i over the past seven years. Their aim is to develop “lively ethographies”: a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos.
The Tangiwai disaster of 1953, New Zealand’s worst railway accident, is an environmental disaster with an enduring legacy.
The authors put forward the idea of “speculative geology” to explain the violence inherent in volcanism, drawing on three volcanic episodes and the more recent unexpected striking of magma in Iceland’s Krafla volcanic caldera.
