The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen.

Good morning, thank you for inviteing me.

I am sorry that my voice isn't what it should be,

but many thanks to the friends in Erlangen who have arranged this for us.

As you see i've slightly changed the title.

Just let me introduce briefly where I'm going with this. Like many of you, my initial interests

in culture and disaster came from working in communities and environments very different

from the ones I grew up in and that represent such culture as I have. And so that was the

major impetus for this. However, for one reason or another, in the context of the disasters

and culture group, I decided to go back and look again at the culture of modern disaster

management, DRR as we might call it. In doing this, I found myself increasingly critical

and surprised about what was happening in the world around me. Again, like many of you,

I had been focused on DRR, disaster risk reduction, and the Hyogo framework and felt that from

the time of the, certainly the Yokohama conference in 1994, I think it was, we have a series

of meetings, series of publications, institutions and administrations developed around the DRR

concept. So it was with some surprise when I came to do the work for this that I realized

that that's not really what's happening in most of the world, that we are comparatively

marginal in terms of the funding, the research and especially the actions being taken around

disaster. My sense is that in many ways, disaster risk reduction is going in one direction and

the major developments are going in another direction. Perhaps you'll disagree, but that'll

be good. Again, thinking of DRR, especially in relationship to the Hyogo framework and

the publications of ISDR and so on, that this is about preventing or at least mitigating

disaster. Whereas the prevailing mainstream actions seem to me to now be under the umbrella

of homeland security and what I suggest is a fast growing security industrial complex.

And that that's as much cultural as it is practical, economic, political. I think that

the consequences of such developments are particularly evident in New Orleans, Haiti,

Fukushima. Of course, when you're doing any kind of cultural work, you first of all have

to interrogate yourself as to where you're coming from. You hope to learn about the other

culture or about cultural matters, but you have to position yourself in relation to that

so that you're aware of how you may be. So I'm obviously seeing all of this through the

lens of someone's whose major conclusions about disaster. I hope you can read these.

I'm not sure if you can. But essentially, most disasters and losses in them reflect

exposure, vulnerability and failed protections, which I attribute to political and social

conditions. I think most disasters in the disasters I look at, both ones I've done field

work in and scanning the reports of disasters, involve damages which are preventable. Not

all of them, but many of them are. And especially in questions of life and livelihoods are preventable,

but they're not prevented in these cases. And then we always forget which places are

safest. No one is absolutely safe. But which places are safest? I mean, Fred raised this

thing that disasters are indiscriminate, but actually if we look at the casualties and

damages and lost livelihoods in modern disasters, they're not indiscriminate. They're highly

socially discriminating. And the people who actually have the best chances of avoiding

disaster altogether, probably most people in this room, and of coming through a disaster

if it does happen where they are, are those who are in communities with reliable public

and private services on an ongoing basis. Access to information, good insurance coverage,

entitlements, political influence, and not big emergency measures. I'm not saying we

don't need big emergency measures. If we're not doing our job well, we do need them. But

I don't think that that is the direction we should go in.

However, as I say, investigating modern disaster culture in the West anyway, certainly in North

America, I come to the conclusion that Homeland Security and the security industrial complex

thinks in other terms.