Disasters and Their Impact

Not all environments are serene. Almost all have embedded disastrous events. When disasters occur, they are all encompassing events, sweeping across every aspect of human life. Defined in this chapter are disaster, hazard, risk, and the four parts that actually make up an “environment” are parsed. Cultural factors affecting disasters are then explored: adaptation, perception, place attachment, land use, concepts of sacred, and more. New approaches to environment and disaster are then explored, socio-cultural change, cultural revelation, amalgams of crises, implicit as well as explicit hazards, probability versus possibility, vulnerability versus precarity, and climate change.