Fire and Flood Extreme Events and Social Change Past, Present, Future

How extreme events, paradoxically, sow the seeds of positive response—and create opportunities for becoming adaptive to place.


Throughout history humans have dealt with extreme events. Sometimes adaptively, coping with them, even thriving with them, reading the signals. Sometimes disastrously, repeatedly, ignoring the signals. Now extreme events and disasters are increasing in frequency and severity, and the signals are difficult to read. In Fire and Flood, Thomas Princen argues that the most useful signals may be those coming from fires and floods. And not just today’s fires and floods but those of the past too. This book looks to these past events as well as present-day ones to imagine—and to construct—a regenerative future.

As much as some observers of the global ecological predicament would like to see extreme events as mere confirmation of climate change, their significance is much more. To see that requires in-depth investigation of disaster response, including long-term societal response, going beyond the harm and destruction, beyond the cries for better prevention and protection. And beyond the simplistic formula that, with awareness of extreme events, the world will finally “combat” climate change. Princen’s objective is to read extreme events as signals, as indicators of how adaptive or maladaptive are a human population’s patterns of extraction, consumption, settlement, transport or, more generally, of how sustainable and just is a society’s material provisioning system, its economy. It is to sketch a plan for living with fire and flood, for becoming adaptive to place.

Thomas Princen is a faculty member at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Among his books are The Logic of Sufficiency, Treading Softly, Confronting Consumption, Ending the Fossil Fuel Era, and The Localization Reader, all MIT Press.