Risk, Disaster, and Vulnerability: An Essay on Humanity and Environmental Catastrophe

By S. Ravi Rajan

Over the course of the past century, there has been a sustained reflective engagement about environmental risks, disasters, and human vulnerability in our modern industrial world. This inquiry has raised a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations that have destructive potential? Is it feasible to prevent large-scale catastrophes like the ones in Bhopal, Chernobyl, and Fukushima and smaller-scale disasters such as oil spills and gas leaks? How do environmental hazards affect social and political orders? S. Ravi Rajan expertly synthesizes decades of public policy and academic discourse on how societies measure and ultimately come to terms with risk, danger, and vulnerability and offers a fresh, humanistic perspective for grappling with the new global scale and interconnectedness of these threats.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520392649

S. Ravi Rajan

S. Ravi Rajan is Olga T. Griswold Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He also directs the Global Environmental Justice Observatory and hosts the Liminal Spaces podcast.  

Book preview

Risk, Disaster, and Vulnerability

Risk, Disaster, and Vulnerability

AN ESSAY ON HUMANITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE

S. Ravi Rajan

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2023 by S. Ravi Rajan

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-520-39262-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-39263-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-39264-9 (ebook)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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This book is dedicated to the victims and survivors of Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the many other industrial disasters of the twenty-first century.

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Setting the Stage

2. Risk

3. Disaster

4. Vulnerability

5. Looking Ahead

Bibliographic Essays

Index

Figures

1. The risk paradigm

2. A simplified diagram illustrating the risk paradigm

3. Risk knowledge, consent

4. The condition of post-normal science in risk management

Preface

On the night of December 2–3, 1984, a toxic gas leak from a pesticides factory owned by the Indian subsidiary of a US multinational, the Union Carbide Corporation, killed an estimated two to six thousand people in Bhopal, the historic capital city of the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India. Within a few fateful hours on a cold December night, Bhopal became a universal metaphor for catastrophe. An estimated half-million survivors and their progeny continue to suffer from exposure to the gas to this day.

I was barely out of my teens when Bhopal happened. Like many, I volunteered for a nonprofit organization assisting disaster survivors for two years. However, in my subsequent academic career, I largely avoided writing about the disaster. Given that academic artifacts inadvertently enable professional mobility, I could not escape the feeling that publishing about that horrific event would mean that I would, at least inadvertently, be capitalizing on a human tragedy. I therefore deliberately built my academic research around topics that have been more than an arm’s length from Bhopal. The few articles that I wrote were literally coerced out of me by professional colleagues.

Yet the disaster has haunted me almost every single day of my adult life, as it has many people who witnessed it. In response, I served with environmental nonprofit organizations that work to address the broader topics raised by the events of December 1984. I also sought to educate myself about risk, disaster, and vulnerability. I studied the journal literature in esoteric corners of fields initially foreign to me, including risk assessment and management, organizational sociology, disaster studies, and resilience and vulnerability studies, in disciplines ranging from the physical sciences and engineering to anthropology and geography. I realized in the process that the public understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with risky technologies mirrored wider ideological predilections. In contrast, the academic and policy literatures addressed a wide range of topics relating to the broader implications of Bhopal and sparked reflexive thought and action. As a humanist, I felt that these ideas needed to be rendered legible to lay audiences so that they can be understood, debated, and where appropriate, critiqued.

It is with these thoughts that I decided to write this book, which, in essence, aims to explain the philosophical implications that underlie the vast, complex, and disparate academic writings on the societal impact of environmental risk, disaster, and vulnerability to humanists, generalist policymakers, and members of the public. I hope that the book serves as a point of departure for readers coming to these topics with fresh eyes, and that readers engage and dispute the ideas presented in a manner that enables a more robust and critical public discourse on topics of global significance.

Santa Cruz

October 2022

Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to several influences. At the very outset, I am indebted to some extraordinary scholars and activists, including Dunu Roy, Sagar Dhara, Imrana Quadeer, Praful Bidwai, Dilip Simeon, Shekhar Singh, Jayanta Bandhopadhay, Sunny Narang, Madhulika Banerji, Rohan D’Souza, Archana Prasad, Shiv Viswanathan, Ashis Nandy, Veena Das, and JPS Uberoi, who in different ways helped me to make some sense of the world I found myself in during that dystopian year 1984, when the Bhopal gas disaster occurred alongside other tragic events in India, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere.

I have also been greatly fortunate to have had some amazing teachers as a master’s, doctoral, and postdoctoral student at Delhi, Oxford, Berkeley, and Cornell Universities, respectively, and at the Max-Planck-Instit für Wissenshaftsgeschichte. Among them are R. K. Gupta, Robert Fox, Anna Guagnini, John Darwin, Barbara Harriss-White, Sheila Jasanoff, Peter Taylor, Michael Watts, Anthony Oliver Smith, Susanna Hoffman, Richard Norgaard, Kären Wigen, Michael Lewis, Lise Sedrez, José Augusto Padua, Leena Srivastava, Geoff Bowker, and Susan Leigh Star. These extraordinary scholars impressed me by demonstrating the power and significance of the academic path and trained me in the grammars of the disciplines that shaped my thinking, including analytic philosophy, modern history, social anthropology, geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies. In recent years I have profited a great deal by conversing with some of the key scholars and activists in the field of environmental justice as part of my Liminal Spaces podcast. I am especially indebted to David Pellow, whose works I have greatly profited from reading.

I have been particularly influenced by Hermino Martins, who introduced me to Continental European metaphysics, and gently nudged me, with humor and sustenance, to grapple with some eternal questions about ethics, reason, and the importance of the sacred. I am also grateful to the many wonderful scholars who I cite, who have de facto been teachers even though I have not had the good fortune of knowing them personally. I have also been fortunate to have had several generations of undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students as well as colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz; TERI University in New Delhi; and the National University of Singapore. All have listened, sparred, contested, and raised the stakes, and thereby enabled me to master the material at hand and hopefully offer a tangible and useful narrative. More immediately, this book owes greatly to encouragement and support from Stacy Eisenstark and Naja Pulliam Collins at the University of California Press, the excellent copyediting by Catherine Osborne, and David Peattie. I also acknowledge with great gratitude support from the National Science Foundation, the Aphorism Foundation, and the Reid Hoffman Foundation.

I am extremely grateful to the many wonderful nonprofit organizations with which I have been associated with, including Kalpavriksh, the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, the Pesticide Action Network of North America, the International Radio Project, and Greenpeace International. I am indebted to my wonderful friends, especially Reid Hoffman, Michelle Yee, Lorcan Kennan, Bharati Chatturvedi, Ajay Bisaria, and Judith Wilson. Last, but by no means least, I acknowledge, with tremendous gratitude, my immediate family—Radha Rajan, Priya, Om, and our two kitties, Vanilla and Jo, for their love and good cheer.

1

Setting the Stage

INTRODUCTION

Over the course of the past few decades, there has been sustained reflection about environmental risks, disasters, and vulnerability. Some commentators have remarked that humanity finds itself in a challenging new epoch called the technocene, characterized by complex technologies with accompanying hazards that can potentially harm human societies and their living environments on historically unprecedented scales. The dystopian threats of the technocene have precipitated a host of crucial questions. Just how safe is humanity in a world of toxic chemicals and industrial installations with destructive potential? To what extent is it feasible to contain chemical, nuclear, and other pollutants? Is it at all possible to prevent runaway disasters in highly complex industrial technoscapes?

Historically, such questions have been addressed from the vantage points of specific intellectual and ideological traditions. There have been religious perspectives ranging from fatalism to providence; cultural views that span denial of harm to extreme fear; and political doctrines that span caution and precaution, on one end of the spectrum, and a Panglossian risk-taking attitude, on the other. However, recognizing that risk, disaster, and vulnerability associated with industries such as chemical and nuclear are novel, historically unprecedented, and anthropogenic in origin, scholars and thought leaders have responded with a wide range of new ideas, explanatory frameworks, and calls to action. These include traditional risk analysis, variants of the precautionary principle, industrial sociology, and environmental justice. There have also been many studies of the role of bureaucracies and technocracies, and of the passions, interests, and economic and political entanglements between corporate and governmental entities.

In the last few decades, entirely new research traditions have consequently been formulated, adding nuance and, in many cases, reframing questions. Among these are vulnerability theory in anthropology and geography; the sociology of illness and the environment in public health research; organizational theory applied to understanding the ideology of disasters; a multifaceted inquiry called Science and Technology Studies (STS); and a field called development studies which, among other things, explores the tradeoffs and collateral damage related to industrial progress. There have also been vigorous debates about the relationship between the technocene and politics; reflexivity in civic thought and political discourse; science, technology, and democracy; the role of the media; and big data and the manipulation of thought. Underlying all these concerns are questions about the politics and political economies of risk acceptance and propagation; the role of economic systems; and human rights and accountability.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

These intellectual adventures have, however, tended to be enmeshed in disciplinary genres, and as in the classic fable of the blind person and the elephant, most scholarly communities are captivated by one or another feature or theme. In the process, they have often ignored the synergies and complexities that can be explored through broader transdisciplinary conversations, leaving room for creative osmosis. Moreover, their jargon renders them inaccessible to a general audience, thereby shutting the public out of an important debate about the choices that face them. The purpose of this book is to address these gaps. By elucidating and synthesizing disparate literatures and points of view, it enables scholars and citizens not versed in the extant literature on risk, disaster, and vulnerability to understand the social and theoretical import of these works, and their implications for global and planetary ideologies, institutions, and arrangements.

The sources for this book include documents produced by governmental regulatory agencies, nonprofit advocacy organizations, investigative journalists, and the works of academics from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions, including the physical and biological sciences, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences. I have also read many philosophical works that engage, critique, and reflect on some of these works, and on the wider human condition in the technocene. Moreover, I have, during the past decade and a half, discussed some of the central ideas with scholars and practitioners in these fields. The book you are reading now therefore aims to serve as an intellectual witness to some of the big ideas and debates, an attempt to organize historically disparate literatures in a dialogue of ideas, render technical discussions in simple language, and therefore enable ordinary citizens to understand and reflect on what might otherwise seem esoteric concepts.

I draw on three broad types of genres of research and practice, each speaking to one theoretical term in the title of this essay. The first of these stems from a simply phrased question—how safe is safe enough? This question springs from the recognition that industrial toxins in the environment have, in one form or another, wreaked havoc on the lives and livelihoods of people all over the world. For example, air and water pollution have had significant public health consequences. There have been dramatic instances when sections of rivers have literally caught fire. Many pollutants bioaccumulate, with traces of chemical toxins found far away from where particular polluting industries are physically located. For example, freshwater lakes have seen aquatic ecosystems devastated due to pollution from distant sources, and traces of toxic chemicals have been found in mountains, rivers, oceans, and even in the ice at the poles. The traditions of research and analysis that have addressed the problem of toxins and pollution have sought answers to the question of the human and environmental health implications of the increased presence of chemical toxins in the environment. More recently, uncomfortable questions about the distributive effects of environmental risks, and especially the question of the relationship between pollution, poverty, and social justice have also been raised, giving birth to a new field that calls itself environmental justice.

The second research tradition addressed in this book is concerned with the idea that technology can go out of control and adversely damage human communities, societies, and even nation states. The concept picked up steam in the aftermath of the Bhopal and Chernobyl disasters. Although iconic, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and more recently Fukushima are only a few lowlights of a sequence of industrial disasters the world over. Some are relatively small in scale, killing a few people and maiming others, but others, such as disasters at chemical plants in Flixborough, United Kingdom, and Seveso, Italy, to take but a couple of examples, have had significant impacts. There have also been planetary consequences due to the release of toxic chemicals, as evidenced by phenomena such as acid rain.

The third thread of this book seeks to map and understand the social, cultural, economic, and political vulnerabilities associated with the chemical industry, and more broadly, high-risk technological systems. It raises the question of who is most vulnerable and why. It seeks to understand the political economies that define vulnerabilities, and specifically, the roles played by chemical and fossil fuel corporations and their enablers, and the media and public relations industries. Moreover, looking into the future, these genres of research ask a crucial series of questions relating to the adequacy of expertise and infrastructure to mitigate deleterious impacts when and where they occur. They also compel us to ponder the policy, public, and civic discourses about the meaning of progress, development, and the teleology of the general good, and consider the implications of the technocene for democracy, rights, and accountability.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The purpose of this book is to explicate the humanistic import of the literatures on risk, disaster, and vulnerability for an audience consisting of people who are not experts in these domains. Its best methodological anchor is therefore the academic subfield called environmental humanities. This emerging genre encompasses literature, intellectual history, philosophy, and history, among others. Like many scholars in this field, I have found the work of Raymond Williams to be very useful. Williams suggested that the world of thought can be understood by interrogating its prominent words and exploring their interlocking, contrarian, contradictory, and contested meanings.

Accordingly, I have organized the book as a series of short essays, each exploring