No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster
I’ve just had such an interesting conversation with Ilan Kelman, Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL. We met at Earth’s Canvas, an event for geologists and artists at the Geological Society last year, and he handed me his card after my talk on Pop Music and Geology. “If you ever want to write songs about disasters,” he said. And I thought, what a strange thing to write songs about.
Moving house, I came across his card tucked in a pocket of a handbag, and I decided to reach out. Today I met him on the UCL campus and we talked about disasters, floods, the Covid 19 pandemic, attachment to land and identity, rebuilding and relocating, volcanic eruptions, Aberdeen and Deeside, the oil industry and its effect on Aberdeen, the wider reaches of the fossil fuel industry and Piper Alpha, coastlines and wildfires, Antarctica and public health.
I’ve been on an investigative kick recently… I’m starting to become curious again around Earth Sciences: a potential project, but not knowing what it might be. After I released my geology album, I thought I was going to move on to a different topic, with music being the main through-line in my work. But now I’m realising that I don’t feel done with geology, or earth science. I feel like the album just scratched the surface. It asked the first question.
Now I want to ask the next question.
When I sat down with Ilan, I asked him: “what is the one thing related to your research that you wish the wider public knew?” and he said, “there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster.’ There is just nature.”
Talking to him reframed my idea of what a volcanic eruption or a flood is. Is it a natural disaster, or is it just a natural process which happens to cause disaster for humans or other living species?
Volcanoes erupt and the soil around them is enriched. Cliffs tumble into the water, injecting new material into ecosystems. Wildfires help forests to clear out waste and fertilise the land.
We talked a lot about floods in the UK, and he is currently working on a project centered on Britain’s coastlines. “The next 10,000 years” was a phrase which came up a couple of times in conversation. What would it be like to focus on the next 10,000 years?
Flooding instantly makes me think of Ballater and Braemar— Royal Deeside— where recent floods have changed the shapes of my home river, the river Dee. I feel a lot of affinity for and ownership over this part of land, at the gate of the Cairngorms. My grandparents used to live out in Braemar, and we would make the journey from Aberdeen to the village at least three times a year. The A90 follows the river Dee. You see silver flashes of it along the journey. The bends of the river end up dictating the shape of the road.
There is a castle which sits at the edge of a riverbank, very close to Ballater. Built in the 16th century, it’s called Abergeldie Castle. I never really noticed it on our drives to Braemar, but in recent years I have, because the flooding in Deeside has eroded the riverbank so much, it actually almost cuts underneath the castle itself. Abergeldie is one of the many little landmarks on the journey between Aberdeen and Braemar, and, like all of these landmarks, it will one day disappear. Maybe it will be a crumbled ruin in the river in 20 years’ time.
Our conversation this morning made me realise that we have to be okay with things changing. The landscape owes us nothing, it cannot protect us. And should we mourn its changes? Is any natural process truly destructive, as in, no-coming-back-from-this destructive? Or will it just be different?
We need to learn to accept change and be prepared to move, rebuild. Buy a house with the capability of accepting floods, or rebuild off of a potential flood plain.
Why are we so attached to the way things are? And the structures which we live in? My one theory was that we have become much more dependent on our individual houses in the last few decades. The internet has made working from home, almost everything-from-home possible. I’ve had to move a lot as a kid because of family, and then I’ve moved a lot around Scotland and away to Canada and even just within London I’ve lived in 8 different houses. I am not attached to a house. But I am attached to a landscape: Deeside.
Ilan presented me with a potential project title:
“Scales of change for Scottish identity and memory”
Scotland is slowly uplifting after being pushed down by ice sheets from the Pleistocene. It’s literally bouncing back up, albeit very slowly. How does that slow change measure up against the faster changes: the flooding? The landslides? I once researched the Storegga slides, the largest known submarine landslides which occurred off the Norwegian continental shelf about 6,000 years ago. What other major natural events (which people may consider as ‘disasters’) have occurred which have changed the face of Aberdeen and the surrounding area? What does it mean for the future and our attachment to the places we live?
Questions I am asking
what do we owe landscapes, and what do landscapes owe us?
why are we so afraid of our landscapes changing?
is there evidence of the Storegga landslides in Aberdeenshire?
how has the river Dee changed over my lifetime, and what will it look like in 10,000 years?
I also touched on my desire to do research in Antarctica. It feels like the wildest dream, but I’ve had it ever since I found out that ‘musician in residence’ for a summer in Antarctica was an actual honest-to-God role one could have. We have the beginnings of a plan for it.
There are things to be discovered!
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currently: writing in a cafe I used to work in back in 2016 click here to to reply via email
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