“Natural Disaster(s)”: Going Back to the Roots of Misleading Terminology. Insights from Culturomics

Abstract

MOTIVATIONS The noun disaster (1590s) comes from the French désastre (1560s), from the Italian disastro, which derives from dis(ill) and astro (star), literally “ill-starred”; the term astro results from the Latin astrum, which in turn arises from the Greek astron (Harper, 2001). The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR, formerly UNISDR) defines a disaster as “a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts” (UNDRR, 2020). Furthermore, according to the World Bank “unnatural disasters are deaths and damages that result from human acts of omission and commission” (World Bank–United Nations, 2010). These statements clarify that disasters are the result of a complex interaction between hazardous events (e.g., earthquakes) and the vulnerability of the social system, due to human choices. Therefore, the adjective “natural” misrepresents the formal meaning of “disaster.” The unnatural character of disasters has been dealt with at least since the mideighteenth century after the great 1755 Lisbon earthquake and downward through the discussion of the scientific community that began in the 1930s through the 1970s, and is still active today (Ball, 1975; Gaillard et al., 2007; Gould et al., 2016). Nonetheless, the expression “natural disasters” is still used by politicians, media, international organizations, and scientists posing possible concrete implications, such as lowering the sense of human responsibility (Chmutina and von Meding, 2019) and influencing people to believe that (“natural”) disasters are ineluctable. That might adversely affect disaster preparedness. However, online initiatives and campaigns try to discourage the use of this expression (“#NoNaturalDisasters” web or Twitter campaigns). Additionally, the UNISDR banned the terminology from official communications in 2018 (Chmutina and von Meding, 2019). Is it possible to infer when and how this (improper) lexicon developed? To try to answer this question, we asked for help from culturomics, a form of computational lexicology that studies human culture and human behavior based on the analysis of large digital data sets resulting from the collection, digitization, and indexing of a huge amount of words contained in printed works. We used the Ngram Viewer search engine, the free lexicometric tool developed by a team at Google Books (Michel et al., 2010).