What is meant by crisis landscapes?

Our urban and rural landscapes are in a state of constant flux, they are never static. Disturbances occur all the time, some expected and some unexpected. The environment always responds to these changes, how, is dependent on scale of space and time (Bell 1999).

However humankind is now in an unprecedented and extraordinary position. There has never been a time in human history that our life-sustaining environment on earth has rapidly changed in one generation. Most of the changes are attributed to human activities through less ecologically balanced economic and technological activities that can potentially raise conflicts through physical, biological and social interactions (International Centre of Interdisciplinary and Advanced Research 2011).

Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, torrential rainfall, droughts, food shortages, melting polar caps, degraded soil quality, rising fuel prices, unemployment, riots, political upheaval and bankrupt countries. The new millennium has so far been epitomized by changes in economic life, global industries, advancements in and accessibility to technology and the increase in natural disasters. 

Gilding (2011) has demonstrated clear arguments to show that the economy has clearly outgrown the earth’s limits. Two major indicators of this being that ‘resource constraints have been forcing prices up and ecosystem changes were accelerating at a scale suggesting that systemic shifts and tipping points were underway’.

There have been further indications and warnings of the force of human induced ecological and geological changes for many decades now stating that unless we change the way we live and use the resources within them, the impacts of man would result in a crash –economically, socially, physically and environmentally (Girardet 2008).

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man’s attitude towards nature is today critically important because we have now acquired a fateful power to destroy nature. But man is part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson (1962)

We are at a turning point. The multitude and magnitude of disasters affecting the world today is hard to go unnoticed and both our anthropocentric and biocentric environments have to respond in new and more dynamic ways. One of the terms given to landscapes that have been affected by a natural or human induced disaster is crisis landscapes. This chapter intends to define what is meant by crisis landscapes for the purpose of this study.

Definition of crisis

According to the majority of dictionary definitions the word crisis can be identified as meaning a crucial or decisive moment or situation, at a point of time, of great danger or difficulty. The word crisis is apparently derived from the Greek meaning 'turning point', and should strictly refer to a moment rather than a continuing process, so that uses such as a prolonged economic crisis are strictly speaking self-contradictory (Fowlers modern English dictionary 2012). However, while many crises are started from rapid onset events, there are conditions that still lead to a crisis but have less clear start and end points. While there is less clarity of these points in time it doesn’t mean it isn’t a crisis (Glantz 1994).

The Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management see a crisis as a situation of complex systems, such as family, economic, societal and environmental systems, and ‘when the system functions badly an immediate decision is necessary to stop further disintegration of the system, but the causes of the dysfunction are not necessarily known’. Venette (2003) argues that ‘crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained’ backing up Seegar, Sellnow and Ulmer’s (1998) theory that of their four defining characteristics of a crisis, one is the need for change.

Crisis linked to opportunity
Whilst there is much debate over its true meaning many people believe that the Chinese ideogram for crisis is made up of two character symbols, one that translates as danger and the other that translates as opportunity. An opportunity is a situation, which makes it possible to do something that you want to do, or the possibility of doing something (Cambridge dictionary).

Mair, (2009) a professor in Chinese literature, has ridiculed the translation stating that a crisis ‘is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck! Any would-be guru who advocates opportunism in the face of crisis should be run out of town on a rail, for his / her advice will only compound the danger of the crisis’. He believes it is ‘muddled thinking’ that lures people into a false sense of security in believing that they can benefit from unstable situations.

However Bast (1999) believes that humans grow emotionally and spiritually from crises and in her experience doesn’t believe that just because we could benefit from a crisis we would welcome one. Humans may feel that the experience of a crisis can turned around into a positive outcome as it has caused them to stop and look at what really matters in a relatively short lifetime.

Although the debate into the actual true meaning of crisis continues, the notion that opportunity can present itself out of a crisis is widely accepted. Olshansky and Johnson’s (2008) research identified that the recovery from a crisis offers some intriguing opportunities for positive change. For the purpose of this dissertation crisis is to be defined as a turning point, a time when change has to occur, derived from an event that has either a sudden onset or a set gradual conditions.