The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)-an effort to provide government-backed insurance protection to Americans living in fl ood-prone areas-was championed by Lyndon B. Johnson and established by Congress through the passage of the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968. 1 Private fl ood insurers had retreated from the market following the great 1927 Mississippi River fl ood; serious attempts to create a fl ood insurance program only began again in the 1950s, with actions by both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that eventually stalled. 2 Th e impetus to pass the NFIP fi nally came in reaction to the escalating costs of ad hoc post-disaster relief legislation, triggered initially by the Alaska earthquake of 1964, and followed by severe fl ooding and damage from Hurricane Betsy in 1965, America's fi rst billion-dollar hurricane. 3 Th e NFIP was implemented in the midst of a remarkable population shift to hurricane-vulnerable states and coastal counties. For example, since 1950 Florida's astounding 579 percent growth rate was the highest in the nation, raising it from twentieth to fourth in population. Texas grew at a rate of 226 percent, moving its population rank to second in the nation. Other hurricanehazard states like Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Virginia were among the fastest-growing states in the nation. 4 As of 2010, 39 percent of Americans lived in coastal shoreline counties, a remarkable increase of almost 40 percent since 1970-with population densities six times greater in shoreline counties than inland counties. 5
For a long time the historiographies of engineering and technology focused on technological intensification and progress across society, the economy, and government. Little specific attention was reserved in these narratives for risk, disaster, failure, and blame. However, more recently a vibrant, interdisciplinary synthesis of science and technology-focused disaster research has emerged in the form of a definable Disaster-STS, a subfield with close connections to engineering studies. This revisionist project inserts the contingencies of risk and the prevalence of disaster into the more traditional episodes of modern American technology history, such as urban industrialization and systems development, the rise of technical professions, postwar nuclear and other highrisk systems, and the history of postwar metropolitan growth. By expanding our view to include risk and disaster we explain the emergence of key engineering tools such as risk and cost-benefit analysis -and we chart the rise and elaboration of previously obscured technical artifacts like standards, codes, and techniques of risk management fostered by engineers working in risky environments. We come to a fuller understanding of failure as a "designed in" aspect of systems building. We note the push and pull of societal expectations of technological safety. Disasters have also created unique spaces of technical inquiry -post-disaster studies, investigations, and hearings-which have also strongly influenced codes of ethics, liability calculations, engineering education, and professionalization more generally. Engineering Studies and Disaster: "We Will Recover and This Will Happen Again"In the months following Hurricane Katrina, with much of New Orleans a ruin, Washington was abuzz with investigative hearings. There were political scalps to collect, first and foremost that of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) chief Michael Brown, whose preening and pouting as the disaster unfolded were almost as universally derided as President Bush's assessment of "Brownie" as doing a "heck of a job." And with the failure of the nation's largest flood protection system replaying over and over on cable television engineers were anxiously busy as well. A major post-disaster investigation conducted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) ultimately concluded that a large portion of the destruction from Hurricane Katrina was caused not only by the storm itself . . . but also by the storm's exposure of engineering and engineering-related policy failures . . . a combination of unfortunate choices and decisions, made over many years, at almost all levels of responsibility. 1 *
With a new ‘technosphere’ concept, Peter Haff offers a provocative reconceptualization of technology in Anthropocene, not as derivative consequence of human activity, but as a new ‘quasi-autonomous’ sphere of the environment that conditions human survival within the Earth System. Paying attention to the expansion of the orbital satellites in outer space, this paper suggests that technosphere analysis needs to conceptualize specific histories of the planetary-scale technology while considering how these technologies provide the epistemological basis and limitations for the technosphere. Satellites enhance the capacity of the technosphere as a system and provide systemic knowledge that is the basis for the meaning of the technosphere concept. Yet, this expansion is rooted in the contingencies of earthly geopolitics and the continual breakdown of technology – in this instance as a space debris layer formed in orbit around Earth that endangers the technosphere itself.
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