In this issue of RCC Perspectives, Christian Pfister examines disaster memory and risk culture. In contrast to the memory of war, the memory of natural disaster is markedly short-lived in a globalized world, yet such memory should be preserved in order to minimize the impact of similar disasters in the future.
Content
Examines the weather records of Thomas Thistlewood, a large property and slave-owner in eighteenth-century Jamaica.
This illustrated history recounts how, for the past three hundred years, hurricanes have altered lives and landscapes along the Georgia-South Carolina seaboard.
Wolf Read, a 2009 graduate student in the Department of Forest Sciences at UBC, talks about his research on the complicated nature of windstorms in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
This graphic book uses cartoon illustrations to present scientific facts alongside a broad range of actions that we can take against climate change.
Sherry Johnson, Carson Fellow from January 2010 until July 2010, talks about her research on the history of disasters and climatology and the related environmental, social, and political changes.
If climate change mitigation through political agreement has no hope of succeeding, does it make sense to tinker with the climate?
Lawrence Culver, Carson Center fellow from June to December 2010, speaks about his research project “Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America.”
This paper examines the relationship between prevailing weather systems and colonialism in the context of Spanish possessions in the Pacific from Magellan till the end of the nineteenth century.
This paper traces the history of human-environment interactions in the Pacific Islands during the last millennium, focusing on three main periods: the Little Climatic Optimum, the Little Ice Age, and, in greatest detail, the transition around AD 1300 between the two.
