This book evolved from a collaborative research project between the
University of Manitoba, Canada and Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh,
which commenced in 1984 to study the problems of river channel
migration, rural population displacement and land relocation in
Bangladesh. The study was sponsored by the International Development
Research Center (IDRC), based in Ottawa, Canada. It was through this
project that I started my journey into disaster research more than
thirteen years ago with basically an applied problem of massive
magnitude in Bangladesh. I spent two- and-a half-years, in two stages,
in Bangladesh's riparian villages to collect the empirical data for this
study. Then the growing disaster discourse throughout the 1980s,
especially its conceptual and theoretical areas, drew me in further,
gluing my interest to these issues. In the 1990s, during my research and
teaching at Brandon University, Canada, I realized that, despite the
large body of literature on natural disasters, there was no work that
synthesized the approaches to nature-triggered disasters in a
comprehensive form, with sufficient empirical substantiation. In
addition, despite the great deal of attention given to disasters in
Bangladesh, I found no detailed reference book on the topic. Natural
hazards and disasters, in my view, should be studied under a holistic
framework encompassing the natural environment, society and individuals.
Overreaction to the limitations of technocratic-scientific
approaches-the control and prevention of physical events through
specialized knowledge and skills-has resulted in a call for "taking the
naturalness out of natural disasters.
