Leadership in Disaster: Learning for a Future with Global Climate Change

The study looks into whether technological development inadvertently constructed new vulnerabilities to nature's forces, thereby manufacturing a natural disaster. As this extreme weather may foreshadow what will occur with global warming, Murphy's interviews also explore the politics, economics, ethics, and cultural predispositions underlying climate change, investigating how modern societies create both risks they assume are acceptable and the burden of managing them. An innovative comparison with Amish communities, where the same extreme weather had trivial consequences, is instructive for avoiding future socio-environmental calamities.

Leadership in Disaster is a major contribution to the analysis of vulnerability, resilience, and the challenge of confronting environmental problems, such as global climate change, and a valuable resource for scholars and general readers seeking to learn more about how extreme weather disasters can be managed.

Raymond Murphy is emeritus professor of sociology, University of Ottawa, president of the Environment and Society Research Committee of the International Sociological Association, and the author of numerous books, including Social Closure and Rationality