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Professor Kroll-Smith Presents at Sociology Department Brown Bag Series

THE ANTHROPOCENTRIC ROOTS OF MAYHEM
A TALK BY PROFESSOR STEVE KROLL-SMITH

UNCG Sociology Department Brown Bag Series
FEBRUARY 2 @12:15

UNCG FACULTY CENTER

Disaster retreats, the anxieties remain, revealing their source in something other than the immediacy of calamity.  From the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, to the earthquake and firestorms in 1906 San Francisco, to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, to Superstorm Sandy seven years later, to the recent Hurricane Harvey inspired mayhem in Houston, and, the havoc Irma wreaked on Puerto Rico, a single narrative thread ties together America’s historic catastrophes. The noteworthy source of human misery in each of these disparate disasters was not the destructive agent, the atmospheric or geologic event. It was, rather, the work done in the name of disaster relief that created the most telling and lasting trauma. Drawing on work I recently completed on the 1906 San Francisco calamity and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I sketch out the broad outlines of market forces that inevitably work against humane and successful efforts at recovery. I’ll close with some brief comments on the anthropogenic roots of climate change and the unsettling idea that we humans are the only species on earth that can think our way into extinction.