• How To Plan A Disaster:Politics, Nature, and Hurricane Katrina
• Camden Burd (bio)

The Atlantic Hurricane season lasts only a few months. Spanning from early summer through autumn, the season is limited by varying environmental conditions. Winds crossing over the African continent move westward, passing over the seasonally warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean. As the water evaporates and rises into the atmosphere, it cools and condenses to form large clouds that continue to billow across the Atlantic basin. The combination of cold air at the top of clouds and the warm, humid air below creates an unstable cloud mass, in which the settling cold air descends only to be sucked up again in a swirling, thunderous storm. The vortex expands; wind speeds increase; torrential rains ensue. The hurricane is seemingly unstoppable—until it hits a landmass where the storm loses its warm, watery fuel.

Before its demise, however, a hurricane will often leave its mark. The torrential rain, whipping wind, and massive swells can remake an entire landscape in just a few hours. This seasonal pattern is something of a meteorological ritual for those who have built their lives amid the well-established pattern of the Atlantic hurricane season. They know—are convinced—that by the winter months, the equatorial waters will have cooled, bringing an end to the hurricane season and providing momentary respite from the storm's massive power.

The timeframe for a disaster, however, is different. There is a no such thing as a catastrophe season. No calendar can neatly mark the beginning and end of a calamity. This fact is made evident in Andy Horowitz's Katrina: A History, 1915–2015—a text that argues that in order to understand the history of a disaster, one must take into account a variety of factors including economic forces, political decisions, and social bias. "I begin the story of Katrina in 1915 in order to pursue a different idea," he notes, "that disasters come from within" (p. 3). Rather than focus his attention on the immediate impacts of one of the nation's most historically significant hurricanes, he takes readers back nearly a century before the storm crashed into the southern coast of Louisiana. This temporal sweep, he argues, helps us to reimagine disasters [End Page 304] as a culmination of various contingencies over a much longer period of time. "Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility" (p. 3). The history of Katrina is not a story of environmental anomaly or even an act of God, as some contemporary politicians argue. Instead, Horowitz demonstrates that the "disaster" that developed around Hurricane Katina was designed by a series of separate but interrelated economic and political decisions.

Horowitz divides the monograph into two sections, before and after Katrina. This architecture is meant to "emphasize that it is what happened before and after the levee failure after the levee failures that gave Katrina its significance" (p. 8). In the first section, the author finds the origins of the 2005 disaster in the political aftermath of a 1915 hurricane. After disastrous flooding and the failure of the nearby levees, politicians sought new ways to control floods. The Louisiana state legislature pursued the creation of spillways by destroying levees that, until the 1915 flood, were seen as the preferred method to control the river and open lands for economic development. The new flood lands, called "waste weirs," came under control of the state of Louisiana after levee boards bought out—or forced out—longtime residents who now lived in the spillways.

After a short-lived boom, the state's fur industry gave away to a new commodity that would define Louisiana for the remainder the 20th century—oil. The discovery of oil, however, created a conflict of environmental interests for Louisiana politicians. "The same marshes that had been designated waste weirs, suitable for sacrifice during times of flood, were now among the most coveted pieces...

• 如何规划灾难：政治、自然和卡特里娜飓风
• 卡姆登·伯德（生物）

大西洋飓风季节仅持续几个月。从初夏到秋季，这个季节受到不同环境条件的限制。穿越非洲大陆的风向西移动，经过大西洋季节性温暖的海水。随着水蒸发并上升到大气中，它会冷却并凝结成大云，这些云继续横扫大西洋盆地。云层顶部的冷空气与下方温暖潮湿的空气相结合，形成了不稳定的云团，在云团中，沉降的冷空气下降后又被旋涡、雷鸣般的风暴吸入。漩涡扩大；风速增加；暴雨接踵而至。飓风似乎势不可挡——直到它撞击陆地，在那里风暴失去温暖、潮湿的燃料。

然而，在它消亡之前，飓风通常会留下它的印记。暴雨、狂风和巨浪可以在短短几个小时内重塑整个景观。对于那些在大西洋飓风季节的成熟模式中建立自己的生活的人来说，这种季节性模式是一种气象仪式。他们知道——深信——到了冬季，赤道水域将变冷，飓风季节结束，并为风暴的巨大力量提供暂时的喘息机会。

然而，灾难发生的时间框架是不同的。没有像灾难季节这样的事情。没有日历可以清楚地标记灾难的开始和结束。这一事实在安迪·霍洛维茨 (Andy Horowitz) 的《卡特里娜飓风：历史，1915-2015》中得到了证明——一篇文章认为，为了理解灾难的历史，人们必须考虑各种因素，包括经济力量、政治决策和社会偏见。“我在 1915 年开始讲述卡特里娜飓风的故事是为了追求一个不同的想法，”他指出，“灾难来自内部”（第 3 页）。他没有将注意力集中在美国历史上最重要的飓风之一的直接影响上，而是将读者带回了风暴袭击路易斯安那州南部海岸前近一个世纪。他认为，这种时间的扫描有助于我们重新构想灾难[End Page 304]作为在很长一段时间内各种突发事件的高潮。“在历史中看到灾难，作为历史，表明我们生活的地方以及危及它们的灾难，都是国家政策、文化想象、经济秩序和环境可能性的产物”（第 3 页）。正如一些当代政治家所说，卡特里娜飓风的历史不是环境异常的故事，甚至不是上帝的作为。相反，霍洛维茨证明，围绕飓风卡蒂娜发展的“灾难”是由一系列独立但相互关联的经济和政治决策设计的。

霍洛维茨将专着分为卡特里娜飓风前后两部分。这种架构旨在“强调，正是在堤坝故障之后，堤坝故障前后发生的事情才赋予卡特里娜飓风以意义”（第 8 页）。在第一部分，作者在 1915 年飓风的政治后果中找到了 2005 年灾难的起源。在灾难性的洪水和附近的堤坝倒塌之后，政客们寻求新的方法来控制洪水。路易斯安那州立法机构通过摧毁堤坝来建造溢洪道，直到 1915 年洪水，这些堤坝被视为控制河流和开放土地以促进经济发展的首选方法。新的洪泛区，被称为“废堰”，

在经历了短暂的繁荣之后，该州的毛皮行业放弃了一种新的商品，这种商品将在 20 世纪的剩余时间里定义路易斯安那州的地位——石油。然而，石油的发现给路易斯安那州的政客们带来了环境利益的冲突。“曾经被指定为废弃堰的沼泽，适合在洪水时期作为牺牲品，现在是最令人垂涎​​的部分......