Insights from the Past: Disaster Research and the Second Environmental Crisis

We are living in a time of accumulating hazards that form a universal risk milieu: a concentration of potential dangers across natural, technical, and social systems. Intensifying urbanization, climate change, aging infrastructure, and global economic difficulties combine to create a complex of perplexing hazards for which scientific discovery and policy guidance are both needed and elusive. Yet an earlier environmental crisis occurred in the United States in the 1960s: a realization of threats to the natural environment that were publicized in iconic works such as Silent Spring and that inaugurated a movement of activists, musicians, actors, public officials, and legislators to enact wideranging laws and regulations to lessen environmental pollution. In less than a decade, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency were created to tackle toxic challenges to health and wellbeing. This was a time of both rapid policy innovation and moral transformation regarding human interaction with the environment. In this paper, we consider how the experiences of that earlier era can inform needed change now.