Politicising ‘Natural’ Hazards

If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This old philosophical riddle is of interest to political ecology in a number of ways. It asks questions about perception, representation and reality. It makes us think about the possible constructed and/or produced nature of the world. And it challenges apolitical accounts of environmental events, such as natural disasters. Consider this rephrasing of the original question: If an island is flooded and no-one is around to experience it, has it ‘really’ flooded? Side-stepping some of the deeper philosophical questions pertaining to the perception-reality debate, this question challenges us to think of the real meaning of the term ‘flood’. If, by flood, we mean an event, caused by natural processes, whereby a section of land becomes inundated with water, then the answer to the above question is clearly yes. Yet, such a definition is then purely descriptive and would imply an apolitical, objective neutrality. This may be so, but then this definition is of relatively little concern to us. It only become of concern to us when this benign definition is transposed onto a human environment and clearly the idea of a natural hazard, such as flooding, requires the presence of people to be intelligible. This then becomes inherently political, as choices of where to build dwellings, factors contributing to flood hazards, and what kind of people are more at risk are by no means objective, neutral, apolitical, or entirely ‘natural’.

Mark Pelling, in his article ‘The political ecology of flood hazard in urban Guyana’ (1999), helps us see just why this is the case. The paper focuses on the production and maintenance of Guyana’s hazardous costal environment and interprets environmental hazard as a product of risk and human vulnerability and argues that vulnerability is ‘intimately connected with the continuing process of underdevelopment recorded throughout the world’. The geography demographics of present-day Guyana certainly lead to a high risk of flooding and the potential impacts of climate change-induced sea-level rise. For example, 90% of Guyana’s population live in the North Atlantic coastal plains, which lies at approximately sea-level and the soil is largely composed of clay deposits ‘producing a flat and easily water logged topography’ (Pelling 1999). However, Pelling shows that this scenario is not simply a case of the unfortunate location of a settlement exposed to nature’s wrath, but also historical produced and presently uneven in outcome. He explains how colonialism and mercantile capitalism helped shaped the present-day geography of coastal Guyana through the development of large coffee and cotton plantations, which required fertile costal soil. This necessitated the migration of a large numbers of people to the coast as well as requiring the clearing of mangrove forests and swamps, which hitherto had provided a natural flood barrier, to provide access to sea transport. In this sense, we can see how colonialism and mercantile capitalism transformed the ‘first nature’ of coastal Guyana and helped produced today’s ‘second nature’ (Peet, Robbins and Watts 2011, p. 29). The paper also explains how various political and economic forces following colonisation unevenly affected different ethnic groups; first the rural Indo-Guyanese under the socialist de-facto dictatorship and then the urban Afro-Guyanese under the period of neoliberalism and the implementation of SAPs.

Pelling’s historical analysis is supported by a field study of the contemporary geography of flood vulnerabilities in which he examines the varying levels of flood vulnerability among different social groups. It was found that a continuum of increasing vulnerability existed in terms of income and housing tenure. The most vulnerable groups were low income earners, renters and squatters, and female-headed households. The paper argues that poor households constantly have to ‘play off poverty and vulnerability, invariably ‘choosing’ to accept greater vulnerability in their battle against daily poverty’ (Pelling 1999).

In sum, the argument is not that natural processes that cause the inundation of segments of land do not ‘exist’, but that in the case of ‘natural hazards’ they exist in conjunction with political, economic, cultural and social forces (Neumann 2009). To call floods entirely natural merely masks the underlying forces that help explain their causes and negative effects. The upside of recognising the inherent political nature of many natural hazards is that it allows us to break from an otherwise restrictive environmental determinism and provides a space for individual, community and state agency and action.