Chapter one was obviously the first chapter of the book, but it was also the one chapter that caught my attention the most because it talked alot about whether or not the environment was becoming more and more hazardous and dangerous or it was the peeple making it seem as if it was far more dangerous than in the past. A very good example that the book gave was from the year 1972 when the united states evacuated more than 250,000 people and only 12 died. If you take that into consideration you can see that the environment and world is not becoming more dangerous, the people were just well prepared for mother nature. On the other hand though, in the year 1970 Bangladesh had the same thing happen to them but they lost a total of 225,000 people. This is a prime example of what we discussed in class; when you have forces of nature that go over areas that are densly populated, you can reduce casualties by having good warning systems, building designs, land use planning, evacuation routes, and just a general knowledge fo the community to be prepared and how to deal with hazards when they strike. The book talked about the main goal as being the effort to reduce losses at a small cost. After reading furthur I came into a paragraph of the book that stated since 1990, the earth population increased by nearly 4.8 billion people. With more and more people occuping the planet, people are finding new areas to live in and in higher, more densly populated areas. As the book put it so nicely, "the human race is exposing themselves to natural events." So that got me thinking more and more as to why people would situated their new home in a location that is prone to natural hazards and disasters. The book stated that people live in such areas because they want to gain benefits out of that location and terrain. When you mix all those people in a high prone disaster area than you are gong to get the combination of natural and social systems that interact to produce a hazard (Burton, Kates, & White, 1993).
When the book moved onto chapter two I noticed that I was already very familiar with the wording and understanding behind it for may reasons. The main reason being was that chapter two talked about hazards, responses to hazards and disasters, and the choices that people make before, during, and after the hazard occurrs. When I was reading chapter two and eventually working my way to chapter four, my mind brought me right back into the very first lab that we did where we simulated a flood, tsunami, off the coast of an island someplace; and how we had to set up burriers and make adjustments to te building structures and shores to prevent such a hazard turning into a disaster. When you discuss adjustments you can refer to both perception and awareness of opportunities to do them. A few adjustments that the book described was building a dam to house water during your drought season, or simply designing a house to resist a storm surge. I remember in the lab that we did, how you could even upgrade your hospitals and schools to better be prepared and educate the community on how to deal with such events (Burton, Kates, & White, 1993).
When I started reading down into the later chapters, eventually finishing the book after chapter nine, there was information dealing with national and internation policy and action along with natural extremes and social resilience. The last few chapters were quite boring because we did not touch too much on the topics in the book during class lecture and labs but it was an ok read. It just got really boring after a while (Burton, Kates, & White, 1993).
Altogether though the book in general looked at natural hazards that happen around the entire world; and does a very good job at giving numerous examples to help the reader see the overal picture, and it talks about how the natural hazards are extreme events in nature that are made even more dangerous by the people who occupy the area that the hazard is occuring in, hence turning the natural hazard into a natural disaster. As we discussed in class a hazard is a potental threat to humans and a risk is the probability of a hazard occuring, and a disaster is what happens when you are not prepared as a community to deal with a hazard occuring. The book also states that since there are more and more people occupying the land of the world that people are being more and more exposed to natural hazards, which is causing an increase in death making the world seem as if it is a more dangerous place than in the past (Burton, Kates, & White, 1993).
As a whole, the book was overal a pretty good read. It took me quite a while to read the book considering it was over 250 pages, and I definitely tapered out in the end because I was reading material that I was not quite familiar with; but on the other hand of that, reading the new material that we did not really discuss in class helped me out in understanding the overal concept of hazards and the environment, or how people have such an impact on whether a hazard turns into a disaster or not. The last few chapters were pretty boring when the book started talking about internation action. Other than the last two or three chapters though I was surprising interested in the material that was introduced to me in the book. Even the material that we already discussed in class was interesting to read about again because the book went into a little bit more detail than what we did in class. Overal tthough, the book was a very easy read; one thing inparticular that I really liked about the book was how the authors gave numerous examples when they started talking about disasters; such as the one I previously talked about between the death totals of the United States and Bangladesh in 1970 and 1972.
Bibliography
Burton, I., Kates, R. W., & White, G. F. (1993). The Environment As Hazard. The Guilford Press.
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