Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
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Ann Larabee. Decade of Disaster. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. 195. ISBN: 0-252-06820-3.
<1> High-risk technologies cannot prevent, predict, or contain disasters while discourses about such disasters exhibit uncontrolled interpretive possibilities. There is no safe haven, no place that can be free of technological disasters, and such 'unnecessary' violence. What we can plan are escape routes and lifeboats that may rescue us occasionally and fail at other times. Paradoxically lifeboats, radars, containment measures, meters, backup systems cannot shelter all of us from technological risk. Is this the meaning of civilization and human progress? We need to question not merely high-risk technology and its engendered profit but the cultural future premised on such technological risk and the effective normative normalization of a risk society that sociologist Ulrich Beck theorized in his book Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
<2> As the age of limits, the 1980's witnessed the emergence of discourse on technological failure and the cultural work of surviving within such life worlds. What do release of methyl isocynate (MIC) at Bhopal, the Exxon Valdez spill, the meltdown at Chernobyl, the Challenger space shuttle's fiery crash, the failure of public health agencies to control the AIDS epidemic have in common? These five disasters that occurred in the eighties provide the context and framework of Larabee's book aptly titled Decade of Disaster. All the five disasters have unquestionably destabilized our implicit faith in the technologically mediated life-world and shattered any rosy picture of a global future. Neither of these can be categorized as natural and unavoidable, since they are indisputably caused by anthropogenic factors. Passionately researched, lucidly written, evocatively illustrated Decade of Disaster analyses the formation and silencing embedded in disaster narratives with the survivor's reconstruction of an indisputably altered everyday life world. Many people who suffered and survived these aforementioned disasters continue to struggle and demand justice: Bhopal for instance is not a distant memory but a living reality for us all in India.
<3> Selected disasters as the Bhopal, Exxon Valdez and so on become public and private forums of questioning a highly technological existence of contemporary world and the cultural future we are generating. Organized into five chapters, Larabee comments that her book is a kind of disaster archive, "complete with all the vagaries and gaps, displacements and compensations." In the introductory chapter, Larabee underscores the limits of stakeholder analysis by recognizing the multistabilities inherent in disaster narratives and the reconstruction of a personal and collective lifeworld. There isn't any official hegemonic truth but only "differing points of view, or multistabilities, grouped in a theatre of legal operations" (Larabee 2000: 7) which renegotiate relations, reconstruct the spectacle while survivors reconstruct their damaged lifeworld. Narratives of disaster function as narratives of restoration as the disasters are minutely examined and publicly debated to restore faith in a technological civilization. The introductory chapter is followed by five chapters each of which discusses one disaster in detail with the concluding chapter highlighting the varying strategies employed by survivors to remake their world and continued faith in technology.
<4> In the chapter entitled 'Lifeboat Ethics' Larabee follows a cultural studies perspective to highlight the similarities in the discussions and representation of technoculture's failure's as in the Challenger space-shuttle crash and the sinking of the invincible Titanic that traumatized people beyond any doubt. She argues how the narrative of the Challenger crash and discussions on the causes of this crash ignored the human bodies of the astronauts and reconstructed the disaster in order to restore belief in civilization and continued interest of manned space flight. The second chapter aptly titled Sacrophagus discusses the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown when radioactive waste leaked and impacted Europe and the former Soviet Union. This chapter discusses the urgent need to develop a technology of containment and efforts to formulate a communicative metanarrative of potential disaster to people in the distant future. The last man is a familiar figure in any nuclear discourse. Chernobyl is a leaky monument, unable to hold and contain nuclear waste in its womb, which has fuelled political and environmental critiques and anti-nuclear protests against building of nuclear systems. The effects of the Chernobyl meltdown were felt on a global scale, yet the efforts of the former Soviet Union to construct it as a Sacrophagus transformed it into a site of technological marvel and tourism. Radiation effects have resulted in the coining of the 'Chernobyl AIDS syndrome' and any zoning off of that area has not been successful in containing the after-effects of the meltdown or checking continued radiation leaks. Disasters can also generate tourism and guides and visitors normalize disaster-connected technology in everyday life as has happened at Chernobyl. As Larabee writes, "Chernobyl travel narratives often deploy the remaining inhabitants as the voice of brave resistance to this science..." (2000: 62). Does science justify such victims? Our concerns should centre not merely on the occurrence and discourses about such disasters, but something more critical. The circulating discourses do not question why these disasters happen in the first place, or if they are/were avoidable, but ironically present a cultural future where they can be managed rationally while mentally preparing workers to participate in complex technologies and such situations willingly.
<5> The third chapter examines the political discourses of protests by radioactive bodies that survived the nuclear holocaust (hibakusha) and the AIDS epidemic. To be a hibakusha meant a complete transformation of identity, a public marking with the death sign of the Atomic Bomb. Citing cultural representations circulating in a number of films such as the 'The Day After', and 'And the Band Played On', 'Cyborg' Larabee connects radioactive bodies to AIDS victims to highlight the martial language deployed in both areas. The discovery and recognition of the AIDS landscape transformed the human body into 'diseased meat' and bodies constantly bargaining with death for more time. Protests by survivors of the nuclear holocaust, and radioactive victims and representations of them provide an alternative perspective and a corollary to the idea of technological apocalypse that has been furthered by AIDS activism.
<6> The fourth and fifth chapter discuss the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Bhopal gas tragedy, the greatest industrial disaster of all times. The discourse and films inspired by the Exxon oil spill presents themselves in an oppositional framework of technology and nature with marine Joseph Hazelwood's drinking becoming the focus of cause of the disaster: a drunk driver of an unsafe vehicle invading pristine 'female' wilderness preying on innocent birds and fishes. Media representations compared Alaska to a beautiful woman and representative of unspoilt wilderness that was abused by rapacious Oil Company, Exxon; the bodies of the animals were depicted graphically in contrast to the graphically silenced human bodies of other technological disasters. The cleanup of this Valdez oil spill is discursively connected with environmentalists efforts and women's laudatory efforts: Valdez bird sanctuary vet Jessica Potter, ecologist Page Spencer, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, and other workers of bird and otter rescue centres in Alaska. Can such oil spills be cleaned up ever? Many such spills were consciously engineered recently during the Gulf War and the Iraq war as well: can these be justified?
<7> The release of 40 tones of Methyl Isocynate MIC in December 1984 transformed Bhopal a city in central India into a gas chamber of painful death. Bhopal's victims have become sites for analysis of technological death. This 'accidental' release of poisonous MIC caused what is regarded the world's biggest industrial disaster. Bhopal bears witness to unchecked corporate greed, and the inhuman exploitation of the resources and people of the developing world. It exemplifies double standards towards humans living in the Third World. Bhopal embodies the ultimate toxic body releasing and recycling poisons to and from an innocent Earth victimized by rapacious corporate greed of American multinational Union Carbide (later amalgamated into DOW chemicals). Indelibly bearing the imprint of corporate greed, industrial negligence, apathetic government, failures of national, and international justice mechanisms, the dead of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the survivors of the Bhopal suffering from the Bhopal gas syndrome shake our faith in systems, structures, scientific and medical institutions, redress procedures, and ideology of industrial progress. The otters of the Exxon Valdez spill secured more compensation than the hapless victims and survivors Bhopal gas tragedy. The people who died in the Bhopal gas tragedy were luckier than the people who live in Bhopal today, ingest toxins everyday, battling with the Bhopal gas syndrome, and continuing to fight for justice - nationally and internationally - for themselves and others. As Larabee states while concluding this chapter: Bhopal demands a public recounting.
<8> Can disasters become fertile and meaning generating events? Larabee comments, "the cultural imagination of disaster in the United States demands that catastrophic events not only be survived, but also be productive" (Larabee 2000: 147). Institutions and individuals invest superhuman efforts towards rebuilding and launching a defence of machines, methods, and procedures to stabilize belief in themselves and these structures while downsizing and explaining these disasters as fatal human errors. Public monuments of these disasters seek to reassure that danger can be contained and survived. Despite powerful interests seeking to contain discourses and people actions, resistance can never be contained and any critique silenced, "survivors often found themselves negotiating new understandings of their own bodies and their environments, learning the language of science and medicine and preserving prior cultural knowledge's to create hybrid means of survival. To gain a voice in a spectacle that would have rather have kept them silent...survivors used alternative modes of discourse...(Larabee 2000: 147). Decades of Disaster is an archive reiterating limits of technological and technocratic control, "...an archive of disaster discourse from the 1980s, continues a conversation about the meaning of these events, which have not been resolved, completely silenced, or safely buried. The technological life-world is still a dangerous place, even in our ordinary interactions with devices, machines and systems" (Larabee 2000: 148-9). The creation of any disaster archive also formalizes collective memory while archiving trauma and survival.
<9> Lucidly written, visually rich, resourcefully drawing on films, visual representations, newspaper reports, and personal accounts, this engaging volume evocatively captures the contested discourses and resistance offered by civil society to five major disasters that occurred in the eighties. Larabee book is a noteworthy compendium and a motivating contribution to the emergent field of Ecocriticism, Environmental History and Environmental Sociology. I encourage others to incorporate this book in relevant courses. I successfully used some chapters of this volume to teach an undergraduate course on 'Environment, Development, and Society' complemented by screening of relevant films such as "And the Band Played On." Student discussions and presentations on War and Development, Bhopal tragedy, and much-needed framework of corporate responsibility and civil governance, have generated an ongoing archive of discussions of other possible '(un)planned' disasters in the contemporary context.
Vibha Arora
Indian Institute of Technology
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