The roots of sustainability science: a tribute to Gilbert F. White

Abstract

While the intellectual shoots of sustainability science are tangled and diverse, one of the most im-portant taproots surely springs from the pioneering work of geographer Gilbert F. White who passed away in October, 2006 at his Colorado home at the age of 94. From our present-day vantage point, it is difficult to fully grasp his prescience because the once-radical views he proffered regarding nonstruc-tural adaptation to hazards are now considered unex-ceptional in most quarters. This awareness, unfortu-nately, has not been easily translated into action. In many parts of the world, ineffectual policies and in-dividual impertinence have stymied change and the number of people living in harm's way has continued to spiral upward. White devoted his life to trying to break us of our habituated practices and their tragic consequences. Through teaching, writing, public service, and charitable undertakings, White began as early as the 1930s to challenge deep-seated ideas regarding hu-man control of the natural environment. One of his most important insights, formalized in his 1942 doc-toral dissertation, Human Adjustment to Floods, questioned the warrant of large-scale water diversion projects. Such an allegation was heretical, even mis-anthropic, at the time. After all, in the United States and elsewhere, massive land transformation programs were being implemented. The Tennessee Valley Au-thority, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bureau of Reclamation were ascendant and thousands of wide-eyed visitors came to tour the imposing facili-ties built under the aegis of these public bodies. This was a period of major levee construction along the Mississippi River and colossal dam development in the western states. White drew attention to the short-sightedness and ultimate futility of these efforts and simultaneously cultivated a wisdom that today but-tresses key tenets of sustainability—the obligation of current generations to the future, the need to adapt ourselves to the limits of biophysical systems, and the quest for right livelihood. An important thread in White's proto-sustainability research was how societies adapt to uncertainty generated by the changing frequency and scope of hazards such as flooding, drought, land deg-radation, and climate variability (see, in particular, Burton et al. 1993). Together with colleagues, he studied resilience to vulnerability and this work gave rise to a prominent school of risk analysis that has spread far beyond its original field of geography and infiltrated a diverse array of domains, including the sociology of risk (Cohen, 1996; Renn et al. 2001), decision sciences (Kleindorfer et al. 1993; Pigeon et al. 2003), environmental assessment (Flynn et al. 2001; Farrell & Jäger, 2006), and development stud-ies (Pelling, 2003; Bankoff et al. 2004).