The Death of “Natural Disasters”? A Commentary on Ilan Kelman’s Disaster by Choice

Abstract

When I first read Ilan Kelman’s Disaster by Choice, I got no further than a couple of sentences into the preface before a particular sentence gave me pause: “Stating that natural disasters do not exist because humans cause disasters seems insanely provocative” (emphasis added). It was not the claim that natural disasters do not exist that momentarily intervened in my reading, but rather the final phrase, which I will return to shortly. As an anthropologist that has studied disasters and crises for well over a decade, I am well aware of this reasoning and the discussions surrounding the problem with the language of “natural disasters”; while we can talk of natural hazards (floods, storms, earthquakes, etc.) that inevitably will occur due to the moving of the earth, wind, and water, disasters are caused only if such hazards intersect with patterns of vulnerability in societies. According to this logic, the term “natural disasters” is simply an error of linguistic convention, a phrase that should not exist in our language. However, as various scholars and commentators have pointed out, the problem with “natural disasters” goes well beyond semantics and linguistic conventions. Ksenia Chmutina and Jason von Meding have stated as such quite forcefully in an analysis of the persistence of the term “natural disaster” in scholarly discourse, claiming that:1