At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters 2d ed.

• Author: Martin, J. Quinn
• Position: REQUIRED READING - Book review

AT RISK: NATURAL HAZARDS, PEOPLE'S VULNERABILITY AND DISASTERS (SECOND EDITION) Piers Blaikie, Terry Cannon, Ian Davis and Ben Wisner (London: Routledge, 2004), 471 pages.

The cover of the second edition of At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters bears Katsushika Hokusai's powerful 1830 woodblock print "The Great Wave." The image of a wall of water about to crush a school of fishing boats captures the theoretical cornerstone of the book: extreme natural events--from volcanic eruptions to tsunamis--do not become "natural disasters" until a vulnerable group of people is affected. It is this vulnerability, and different communities' capacities to respond, that the book aims to address.

The first section of the book presents two theoretical models for examining disasters. The first, the "pressure and release model," maintains that a disaster is the intersection of two opposing forces, vulnerability and natural hazard. The authors write that this model "resembles a nutcracker, with increasing pressure on people arising from both their vulnerability and from the impact (and severity) of the hazard for those people." The second model, the "access model," is a magnified look at how vulnerability is initially generated by economic, social and political processes, and what...