Inventing Disaster

As Cynthia A. Kierner notes, Americans are tragically familiar with costly “disasters”—hurricanes, tornados, wild fires—that inflict community suffering and significant loss of life and property. Unlike calamitous mass shootings, which are strictly “societal maladies,” disasters, as here defined, are less “intentional or foreseeable” even if their underlying natural causes can be fueled by people (anthropogenic climate change) and their destructiveness magnified by them as well (building communities in disaster-prone areas) (p. 2). Modern disasters in the United States often not only attract national media and public sympathy but also trigger a tangible response. According to Kierner, voluntary and government response was engendered by several centuries of cultural development that she tracks through a series of calamities. Starting with tragedy in early Jamestown and ending with the great Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood of 1889, they illustrate a growing inclination, across the British Atlantic and then in the United States, for action prompted

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