The Vulnerability of Science and the Science of Vulnerability

Abstract

The events of September 11th shocked the nation and painfully illustrated our vulnerability to international terrorist attacks. Despite some of the most sophisticated models, monitoring systems, and science in the world, officials were unable to anticipate and predict these cascading events. The collective scientific ability to geographically represent environmental threats, map exposures, and map consequences is relatively straightforward when the threats are recognized. But what happens when we cannot recognize threats or some of their unintended consequences? This article examines the twin issues of the inadequacies in our current modes of understanding (the vulnerability of science) and the need for more integrative approaches in understanding and responding to environmental hazards (vulnerability science).

Key Words:

• geographical understanding
• hazards
• September 11th
• vulnerability

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Brian Berry, Risa Palm, Billie Turner, and Tom Wilbanks for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Tom and Billie were especially critical and extremely helpful in clarifying some of the themes. As is evident in the text, I was fortunate to have excellent mentors along my academic journey and many strong influences that were too numerous to cite in the text. My students (past and present) provide a constant source of inspiration and interaction and stretch and enhance my knowledge base in innumerable ways. I cannot possibly thank them all publicly, but you know who you are! There are four individuals, however, who played important roles in my intellectual development and in my career who are unable to read this article and whom I shall remember with great fondness: William L. Thomas, Jeanne X. Kasperson, Jack Mwroka, and Jim Allen.

Notes

1. I am grateful to B. L. Turner II for his insistence that imaginable surprise is a better way of stating this and for pointing me towards the Schneider, Turner, and Morehouse Garriga (1998) contribution.

2. The principal investigators on behalf of the AAG included myself, Douglas B. Richardson, and Thomas J. Wilbanks. The project was supported through funding from the National Science Foundation's Geography and Regional Science Program (BCS-0200619).

3. I am indebted to Tom Wilbanks for suggesting the ideas in this paragraph.