Disaster Made Manifest: The Federal Role in US Natural Disasters

Natural catastrophes occur worldwide, yet the United States suffers a striking number and variety of natural disasters. These environmental phenomena intersect with human society, human environments, and human choices. In the United States, a society and political system occupying a disaster-prone continent repeatedly made choices exacerbating natural disasters. This chapter illuminates the federal role in worsening natural disasters. The US experiences unusually high vulnerability to natural catastrophes because at key moments the federal government repeatedly made choices that exposed Americans to natural hazards and catastrophes, a pattern that predates the nation’s founding. National leaders and institutions were preoccupied with gaining more territory and profiting from the development of new land. This chapter thus focuses on two overriding concerns of the US federal state: land and climate. It then examines key examples of environmental risk and natural disaster, primarily aridity, wildfire, severe weather events including hurricanes and tornadoes, and the policies and infrastructure the government implemented to manage, mitigate, or sometimes even conceal these hazards. Government science institutions and knowledge grew, but state-generated science was sometimes stifled for the sake of expansion and profit. Chronologically, federal attitudes toward natural disasters and environmental risk can be divided into two parts. From its creation through the nineteenth century, the federal government often minimized potential environmental risks. By the early twentieth century, the federal government, along with local governments and business interests, shifted to actively managing, and sometimes minimizing, actual disasters and hazards, and subsidizing risk. Greatly simplified, the natural catastrophe and disaster risk history of the United States can be divided into two phases: encouraging bad choices and grappling with the consequences of bad choices.