Cultural History, Environmental History, Natural Disasters

This paper assesses the potential of software developed
by the research group of the Swiss Federal Institute for
Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) in order to
georeference and vectorise historical landscape photographs.
The use of this ‘Monoplotting’ Tool introduces a new
application for topographical photographs and opens up
the possibility of using such photographs for measuring
land-use change. This paper reviews the literature on the
use of historical photographs for landscape history. It
introduces the new software and then goes on to examine
how vectorised topographical photographs may help in the
measurement of land-use changes in the mountainous
landscape of Liguria and Trentino in the late nineteenth
and twentieth century.

Padilla Lozoya, Raymundo, 2021 «El huracán del «Día del Grito» de 1918 en Baja California Sur», en García-Acosta, Virginia y Raymundo Padilla Lozoya, Historia y memoria de los huracanes y otros episodios hidrometeorológicos extremos en México, cinco siglos: del año 5 pedernal a Janet, Universidad Veracruzana, Universidad de Colima y CIESAS, Veracruz, México, pp. 243-299.

El presente artículo fue elaborado metodológicamente como un análisis histórico de desastre. Para su elaboración se consultaron fuentes primarias en archivos civiles y parroquiales locales y regionales; y secundarias, como informes técnicos y bibliografía histórica. Los principales hallazgos del estudio del “sismo de la Encarnación” consisten en documentar y visibilizar el caso de un terremoto con el mayor número de fatalidades en la historia de México, ocurridas en un templo católico.1 También se aportan datos y reflexiones acerca de sus impactos mortales y materiales, y se presentan las respuestas religiosas ante la tragedia ocurrida en Zapotlán El Grande, Jalisco, el 25 de marzo de 1806. / This article was prepared methodologically as a historical analysis of disaster. For its preparation, primary sources were consulted at local and regional civil and parish archives; as well as secondary ones, such as technical reports and historical bibliography. The main findings of the study of the “earthquake of La Encarnación” consist in documenting and making visible the case of an earthquake with the highest number of fatalities in the history of Mexico, which occurred in a Catholic temple. Data and reflections on its mortal and material impacts are also provided, as well as religious responses to the tragedy that occurred in Zapotlán El Grande, Jalisco, on March 25, 1806.

El objeto de estudio de esta investigación son las prácticas históricas de alertamiento y protección socialmente construidas por los pobladores de San José del Cabo, Baja California Sur, ante los riesgos por ciclones tropicales.'
La premisa hipotética surge al considerar que los efectos recurrentes de los huracanes son agentes transformadores de la cultura observable en sociedades que padecen frecuentemente sus abundantes precipitaciones,
inundaciones, marejadas, afectaciones ecológicas y daños en infraestructura pública, por lo cual la población desarrolla ciertas prácticas que le permiten hacer frente. Se parte del supuesto de que el alertamiento y la protección son habilidades básicas para la sobrevivencia de los individuos, y son elementos de un complejo proceso adaptativo para enfrentar las inclemencias relacionadas con el medioambiente.

The Christmas Flood of 1717 was one of the largest and deadliest nature-induced disasters of the 18th century.  The storm surge that produced this coastal flood affected nearly the entire North Sea basin. It lay waste to entire sections of coastal dikes, washed away houses and livestock, and resulted in the deaths of over 13,000 people. These effects were not distributed equally across social and ecological borders. The vast majority of casualties were limited to a region stretching from the northern Dutch province of Groningen to the German Duchy of Schleswig. Even within these administrative border zones, counties showed significant disparity in the impacts of the flood. Similarly, the long-term consequences of the flood produced uneven results. Whereas Dutch Groningen quickly rebounded from the effects of the flood, the disaster had an enduring impact in counties along the German North Sea coast, particular in the coast marshes. 

Why were some communities more vulnerable to catastrophe and why did recovery arrive more quickly in some areas rather than others?  This paper compares the experiences of disaster and recovery in two regions: Groningen in the Netherlands and Ostfriesland in Germany. Straddling the Dollard Sea arm, these two regions shared environmental, technological, and cultural adaptations to flooding, but had notable differences in vulnerability. These differences were most clearly expressed in the long-term consequences of the flood. This paper argues that those vulnerabilities arose out of differing social, economic, and political conditions. Faced with a common environmental threat, the histories of disaster in these two regions created sharply divergent consequences.

Hurricane Katrina began as a tropical depression 175 miles southeast of Nassau on August 23, 2005. On August 26, as a Category 1 Hurricane, Katrina made landfall over southeast Florida. Once in the Gulf of Mexico, the atmosphere and high ocean temperatures fueled Katrina to a Category 5 and put her on a path toward Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. No-one was prepared for the Category 4 hurricane that was to make landfall in Southeast Louisiana, not once but twice on August 29, 2005. Two
days before landfall, the state of Louisiana began voluntary evacuations. With less than 24 hours until landfall, the Superdome and other hurricane evacuation centers began opening and receiving citizens. Mandatory evacuation did not begin until it was almost too late to evacuate. When the sun came up, on the morning of August 30, the officials began to see where they failed. This paper will review how Southeast Louisiana is no stranger to hurricanes yet was unprepared for numerous large-scale storms and how history, resiliency, and social science research can help prepare not only Louisiana but all other communities be prepared for the next large or small scale storm.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818116303307
Striking popular culture images of burnt landscapes, tidal waves and ice-bound cities have the potential to dramatically and emotively convey the dangers of climate change. Given that a significant number of people derive a substantial proportion of their information on the threat of climate change, or the “new human condition”, from popular culture works such as catastrophe movies, it is important that an investigation into the nature of the representations produced be embedded in the attempt to address the issue. What climate change-related messages may be encoded in popular films, television and novels, how are they being received, and what effects may they have? This article adopts the cultural studies perspective that popular culture gives us an important means by which to access the “structures of feeling” that characterise a society at a particular historic juncture: the views held and emotional states experienced by significant amounts of people as evident in disparate forms of cultural production. It further adopts the related viewpoint that popular culture has an effect upon the society in which it is consumed, as well as reflecting that society’s desires and concerns – although the nature of the effect may be difficult to quantify. From this position, the article puts forward a theory on the role of ecological catastrophe narratives in current popular culture, before going on to review existing critical work on ecologically-charged popular films and novels which attempts to assess their effects on their audiences. It also suggests areas for future research, such as the prevalent but little studied theme of natural and environmental disaster in late-Victorian science fiction writing. This latter area is of interest because it reveals the emergence of an ecological awareness or structure of feeling as early as the late-nineteenth century, and allows the relationship of this development to environmental policy making to be investigated because of the historical timeframe. Effectively communicating the threat of climate change and the need to address it, reframing the perspective from a detached and scientifically-articulated problem to one of a human condition – immediate and personal – is on one level a task of narrative, or story-telling, and cultural studies has an important role to play in this and in elucidating the challenges involved.