Why the Gulf Coast Is Uniquely Vulnerable to Disasters

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the nation has once again seen a Gulf Coast city flooded, its residents in peril. A new book of essays, due to be published next January, Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South, provides important social context for the many “natural” disasters that have plagued the region for 200 years.

The book’s editor, Cindy Ermus, a professor at the University of Lethbridge, argues in her introduction that the Gulf South shares underlying characteristics that connect its disasters across time and space.

“The Gulf South, and the Gulf Coast in particular, is bound together by much more than geography or the shared experience of risk and vulnerability to wind, water, erosion, and biological exchanges,” she writes. “More fundamentally, the environment has helped define the region’s identity and largely determined its history, its social fabric, and its economy.”

The cities of the Gulf Coast exist where they do because the ocean and rivers provide economic opportunities and scenic landscapes. But those same waters threaten to undermine the growing cities' safety during storms. Ermus cites the geographer Kent Mathewson, who maintained that the “workings