Post from Ally Bing

Dr. Arthur Felts – Professor of Political Science
Dr. Norman Levine – Professor of Geology and Environmental Geosciences

Firstly, I didn’t realize all the potential natural disasters Charleston is privy to. Thanks to Dr. Levine for pointing them all out. Earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding? Yes. But one does not always consider potential threat of liquefaction, intrusion, storm surge, landslides, and forest fires.

So the point of this talk, I think, was to stress how important it is to talk about the consequences of a potential disaster upon communities, and how communities can improve their resiliency, protect against the future, and possibly use the event for positive change. What is resiliency? When I think of resiliency, I think of coastal seaweed, being pitched and tossed in heavy waves. It has both strength and flexibility. I think Dr. Felts’ idea of resiliency was a little different- I think the point he was trying to get across was that it’s not enough for an entity to simply have characteristics that will serve it in the time of the disaster—a community is resilient if it prepares in advance and discusses afterward (I think that’s what he meant!). Someone said that having a high amount of social capital—that is, community collaboration, responsibility, and networks—is the best way towards becoming resilient. That makes sense to me, both visually (I imagine the more social capital you have, the less gaps you have in your web- each meaningful connection is like a strong knot) and socially (the more care people have for each other and their homes, the better care they will take care of it).

In order to increase resiliency, Dr. Felts said that we must pick out what institutions and behaviors that will be unsustainable in the future. I’m still a little confused by the way he used the word “unsustainable,” since I thought that surely if an institution was going to be unsustainable in the future, that means it’s unsustainable now. That was just a matter of semantics, really, but I’ve been thinking a lot about what sustainability means to me and just wanted to be clear. Part of the definition has to do with a need to ensure future generations their due rights and resources; the idea that something is sustainable now but won’t be sustainable in the future violates that portion, because if was truly sustainable now, It would be the exact same thing that would be providing rights and resources to my descendants.

The idea that a severe weather event could bring about positive change, such as a hurricane tearing down an inefficient infrastructure that had been too expensive to mess with, struck me as very wise. We always think about “disasters” in a decidedly negative way (pretty sure there’s no positive connotation for “disaster”) and I personally associate them with fear and sadness. I’ve never thought of a tsunami as a resource, or a partner. I still feel uncomfortable doing so. But perhaps it would strengthen resiliency if we at least changed our perspective from resistant to understanding that these are an inevitable part of nature that should be expected, not pushed out of our mind until we’re forced to think about it.