Living With the Dangers of Sudden Environmental Change

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This award will enable the broader impacts of a seminal text that is the main output of a recent NSF-supported meeting of experts in October 2009. The objective of this book is to provide a new conceptual understanding of how human communities live with the dangers of sudden environmental change. The research team will utilize the deep time perspectives provided by their interdisciplinary approaches to provide a rich temporal context to the human experience of environmental hazards and impacts. The research team envisions the book as a seminal volume on these issues for use in a variety of college courses that stress interdisciplinary studies. The approach of the book is to provide eight separate case studies, each examining how one past human community has faced the impacts of environmental change. Different stories of resilience and vulnerability are told and as the book develops, key lessons for successful disaster management emerge. These case studies will be followed by two incisive overview chapters that develop policy implications and will directly inform disaster management strategies for Government and Non-Governmental Aid Agencies. The majority of specialist contributors to this book work in areas where many of the issues raised are directly relevant for modern day communities. Through existing collaborative partnerships the research team will distribute the book to indigenous leaders and local community activists so that there is a direct dialogue between the scientific and indigenous communities. NSF support to enable this dissemination of the book will enable people who are threatened by sudden environmental change to engage in ongoing debates while also engaging the people who plan future mitigation strategies to learn very important lessons from the past. In addition, the subvention of publication costs will allow the book to be accessible in soft back to students.