the blog from Environment and Society
The Fire
On December 30th, 2021, the Marshall Fire broke out in suburban communities south-east of the idyllic city of Boulder, Colorado, located at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. Within hours, the fire burned roughly 1,000 homes down to their foundations. It was deemed an “urban fire storm” by climate scientist and Boulder local Daniel Swain.
Read More “Marshall Urban Firestorm: On the Paradox of Greening America’s Suburbia”
A disaster is said to be a social construct because its sudden occurrence disrupts the functioning of a society, causing human, material, economic, cultural and environmental losses that exceed the community’s ability to cope using its own resources. Thus, any natural hazard that leads to loss of human lives and property and damages the surrounding resources and non-human entities can be called a disaster (Wisner et al, 2014; Nadiruzzamam, 2016).
Historical evidence has shown that the region of Sundarbans has faced cyclones and their never-ending fury through time. The oldest recorded evidence is from 1582 AD, when a cyclone swept over Bakergunje, in Bangladesh’s Barishal district (part of Bangladesh Sundarbans), causing a loss of 200,000 lives, hectares of farmland, and many cattle. O’ Malley, in his Gazetteer of 24 Parganas (1914), asserts that there is “no safeguarding against the sudden fury of a cyclone, and its record shows that, though they occur at irregular intervals, these violent storms are far more destructive of life and property than either droughts or floods” (Biswas, 2020).
Read More “Resilience in post-disaster reconstruction: Local knowledge and practice in Sundarbans”
You will see results soon, and in three years, we will have solved this.
Joko Widodo, President of Indonesia[1]
The Indonesian president made this promise amid the fire and smoke haze disaster in September 2015. He was troubled by the fact that the 2015 fires severely impacted the nation’s environment, economy, and politics. Soon after, he established the Badan Restorasi Gambut (BRG, or Peatland Restoration Agency),[2] a new institution with the main purpose of restoring the degraded environment. After enforcing coercive approaches for decades, this moment was the very first time the Indonesian government took a formal, coherent, and scientific-driven approach to tackle fire-related problems. One striking maneuver of the BRG was the way it created thousands of infrastructures as part of its fire governance. These were the facilities BRG expects Indigenous communities like Ngaju people in Central Kalimantan to operate and maintain to achieve an ideal environmental future—to fulfill the promise of the government.
In June of 2017, as I prepared to leave Izmir, my friend Esra gave me, as a gift, two jars of sea salt mixed with herbs and finely ground sun-dried vegetables. Handmade labels indicated this was salt from the Gediz Delta (a large river delta on the Bay of Izmir) and that “Zeytinci” Fadime had prepared the mix. Esra herself, she told me, helped her friend Fadime abla, an experienced organic farmer who lives in one of the former Greek Orthodox villages at the edge of the Gediz Delta, not far from the city of Foça. The vegetables were from Fadime’s garden, and the salt from the delta’s saltpans, Çamaltı.
Read More “Salt, Seeds, and Flamingos: On the Politics of Infrastructural Ecology in Turkey”