Towards a Taxonomy of Disasters

Taxonomy is the process of classifying things or concepts and is usually backed by principles. The study of disasters is a 'lateral discipline' that, to varying degrees embraces at least 42 other disciplines and professions (Alexander 2013). One result of having so many disciplinary perspectives is virtually to preclude consensus on the definition and classification of disasters and the concepts that go with them. NOr is it easy to find a set of common principles to underpin the classification. Hence, disaster studies has resisted taxonomy and perhaps is not amenable to any robust form of classification. However, the purpose of this note is to clarify, or at least explore, some of the issues. One of these is how we break down disasters into categories for the purpose of classifying them. Another is now we define the limits of the study of disasters.

Disaster is fundamentally a social phenomenon. While not independent of the magnitude of physical forces involved, it is not linearly related to them because it depends on the nature and size of the vulnerabilities that the physical forces act upon. Tierney (2008) provided a functional semantic classification of the size of extreme events (revised by Alexander 2016, p. ) and this might give us some basis for distinguishing phenomena by the magnitude of their impacts.

Early classifications of disasters tended to dwell upon the kinds of physical forces involved, and relate them to the geosphere, biospehere, hydrosphere and atmosphere (Tank 1976). The gradual dissemination of social studies prompted the addition of the noösphere (Vernadsky 1945). By the 1990s, the emergence of civil protection from the matrix of civil defence (Alexander 2002) had broadened the scope to the extent that there was a need for a more functional set of categories. I suggest the following five:-

(a) Natural disasters, caused by extreme natural events. Floods, storms and earthquakes dominate the picture, with the ever-present possibility of very large eruptions or extra-terrestrial impacts.

(b) Technological disasters, caused by malfunction or unintended consequences of technology. Included are toxic spills, transportation crashes and the effects of human error.

(c) Social disasters, including crowd crushes, riots and strikes among the providers of critical infrastructure.

(d) Intentional disasters, comprising all forms of terrorism and sabotage.

(e) Compound and composite disasters, in which the causes involve a mixture of any of the above. 'Na-techs' (natural-technological disasters) appear in this category (Krausmann et al. 2019). Some other indications of how categories (a) to (d) are linked are given in the following figure.

There is currently a move to extirpate the term 'natural disasters' on the grounds that disasters by definition are not natural events (UNDRR 2019, p. 165). This reflects a gradual distancing from the concept of disasters as 'acts of God', which began in the mid-1800s and has continued ever since. My viewpoint on this is that 'natural disasters' was only ever used as a convenience term intended to distinguish phenomena with a trigger in the natural environment from those with a technological origin (Alexander 1993). A more up-to-date rationale might state that "there is nothing more natural than human propensity to cause disasters."

It should be noted that sub-fields of disaster studies may require their own classifications. For example, business continuity management has a slightly different set of priorities which induces it to change the emphasis among triggering factors (Elliott et al. 2010). The health sciences also have a different perspective (Myrtle et al. 2005).

The next question is where to draw the boundaries in the study of disasters and practice of disaster risk reduction. By convention, conflict, warfare and disease epidemics are excluded. Pandemics are included because many of the effects of a pandemic are likely to be socio-economic in nature. There is also a link between pandemics and the 'intentional disaster' of bioterrorism (Trufanov et al. 2010).

Currently, there is renewed interest in the relationship between conflict and disasters, or, if the reader prefers, conflict and other forms of disaster (e.g. Field 2018). Like disease outbreaks, conflict is a disaster in its own right. Why, then, do we not include it in disaster studies per se? The principal answer is that we would be biting off more than we can chew. The need to include military strategy and the strategic politics of defence in our studies would unbalance them. Another reason is that disaster response has undergone a long-drawn-out process of civilianisation. We do not wish to see it dragged back into the military sphere. A third reason concerns the need in the field to separate military (or "defence") missions from humanitarian ones carried out by military forces. In conclusion, the military ethos is not a suitable basis upon which to build modern disaster risk reduction, which is in no sense a devaluation of the existence of military forces, but is instead an observation on the separation of roles.

Other phenomena that lie outside the remit of those who study disasters, but not far outside, are climate change and migration. There is no doubt that climatic warming and species collapse are very special kinds of disasters with long-term consequences that can scarcely be contemplated. Warming has already begun to have a substantial effect on the magnitude and frequency of meteorological hazards. Migration could conceivably be the result of major disasters, not merely of climate trends (as they affect the carrying capacity of areas of land) and of conflict, oppression and political hostility. However, again, there is a need to draw a line and thus to regard these as parallel or kindred phenomena, with which there is much interchange, but they are not within the fold of disaster risk reduction sensu stricto.

Finally, there is a very basic distinction between disasters, which are events that tend to be concentrated in space and time, and diffuse events such as road accidents. Paradoxically, there are countries, such as Iran, in which the death toll on the roads is far higher than that in major disasters. This should not be used as an excuse to reduce the priority of disaster risk reduction, but it does not mean that DRR should include basic quotidian road safety. The argument for not including minor accidents in disaster studies is surprisingly weak. For example, work by Marulana et al. (2010) showed that in Colombia the combined effect of 20,000 small destructive events was much greater than the socio-economic impact of five large disasters. Moreover, disasters such as drought can be neither concentrated in space nor abrupt in time, and in this respect they bear some resemblance to small accidents. However, spanning the continuum from major incidents to catastrophes, disasters are discrete events and are not diffused throughout society as are accidents. Of course, major accidents are disasters.

The following are some principles on which a taxonomy of disasters could be based.

1. We classify disasters in order to deal with "more manageable conceptual units."

2. Associating particular kinds of disaster with classes of event obviates the need to restate basic information every time we deal with such phenomena.

3. Classification focusses attention on the mechanism that starts off the disaster. As part of a progression of thought and analysis, attention can then proceed to the root causes and dynamic pressures.

4. In classifying disasters there is a distinction between neutral forces, human error or negligence, and human malevolence. This is useful to maintain and is inherent in the basis of the classification.

5. Disaster risk reduction policy is heavily influenced by the class of disaster involved. For example, counter-terrorism policy and policy against natural hazards can be quite different.

6. Taxonomy can start with basic distinctions (natural, technological, social, intentional and composite) and then proceed to further divisions and subdivisions.

Conflict, migration, minor accidents, epidemics, general health conditions and climate change are thus outside the perimeter of 'disaster risk reduction'. This does not diminish their importance or the strength of the links that they have with DRR. The rationale for excluding phenomena from the disasters field may be weak on logic, but it is essential if we are to give the field identity, cohesion and a firm theoretical basis.

References

Alexander, D.E. 1993. Natural Disasters. University College London Press, London, and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 632 pp.

Alexander, D. 2002. From civil defence to civil protection--and back again. Disaster Prevention and Management 11(3): 209-213.

Alexander, D.E. 2013. Approaches to emergency management teaching at the master’s level. Journal of Emergency Management 11(1): 59-72.

Elliott, D., E. Swartz and B. Herbane 2010. Business Continuity Management: A Crisis Management Approach (2nd edn). Routledge, London, 352 pp.

Field, J. 2018. Divided disasters: examining the impacts of the conflict-disaster nexus for distanced crises in the Philippines. Disasters 42(S2): S265-S286.

Krausmann, E., S. Girgin and A. Necci 2019. Natural hazard impacts on industry and critical infrastructure: natech risk drivers and risk management performance indicators. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Article 101163

Marulanda, M.C., O.D. Cardona and A.H. Barbat 2010. Revealing the socioeconomic impact of small disasters in Colombia using the DesInventar database. Disasters 34(2): 552-570.

Myrtle, R.C., S.F. Masri, R.L. Nigbor and J.P. Caffrey 2005. Classification and prioritization of essential systems in hospitals under extreme events. Earthquake Spectra 21(3): 779-802.

Tank, R.W. 1976. Focus on Environmental Geology. Oxford University Press, New York, 550 pp.

Trufanov, A., A. Rossodivita and M. Guidotti (eds) 2010. Pandemics and Bioterrorism: Transdisciplinary Information Sharing for Decision-Making Against Biological Threats. NATO Science for Peace and Security, Series E: Human and Societal Dynamics Vol. 62. IOS Press, Amsterdam, 240 pp.

UNDRR 2019. Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2019. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, 472 pp.

Vernadsky, V.I. 1945. The biosphere and the noosphere. American Scientist 35: 483-551.

The 2019 Global Assessment Report (GAR)

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction was born out of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 1990-2000. On 1 May 2019 it was renamed the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. UNDRR remains a relatively small  unit of the United Nations, but it has a truly world-wide reach. DRR is thus now truly mainstreamed at the global level.

UNDRR has a recurrent initiative for assessing the state of disaster preparedness around the world, and this results in a document, the Global Assessment Report (GAR), which is issued biennially to coincide with the UN's Global Platform on DRR. The 2019 report is accompanied by an executive summary called GAR Distilled. The GAR proper consists of 15 chapters in four sections: introductory, the Sendai Framework (SFDRR), its implementation (and interaction with sustainable development), and managing risk nationally and locally. The document is decanted from many different studies, some of which have been commissioned specially for it. These may be published separately in an academic journal. An example of this for the 2013 GAR can be found in Di Mauro (2014). This edition of the GAR is the first to report on the implementation of the Sendai Framework for DRR.

The 2019 GAR starts with a quotation from UN Secretary General António Guterres, who observes that in the modern world global challenges are more and more integrated and the responses are more and more fragmented. This is a powerful argument for joining forces and using a common agreed policy at the world-wide scale.

The GAR uses the 'pressure-and-release' model of Wisner et al, (2004) in an adapted form, consisting of: context. stressors, thresholds (nowadays known as 'tipping points' and impacts (which it terms 'systemic failure'). One great lesson that the modern world teaches us is that changes that we thought were gradual can be suddenly overwhelming. Perhaps we are unaware when the 'tipping points' are passed, and that is a dangerous situation to be in.

The GAR urges that international agreements (the Sendai Framework, the Sustainable Development Agenda, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the New Urban Agenda) be viewed collectively through the lens of systemic risk. It is clear that the world is still struggling to achieve the transition from a focus on responding to disaster impacts to one on reducing the risks associated with future impacts. The verdict on major risk is a resounding "sooner than expected", which, of course, reduces the time available to prepare. Initiatives need to coalesce around "risk informed sustainable development".

I have argued elsewhere (Alexander 2017) that the number of times the word 'should'  is used in an official document is an inverse indicator of its utility. The road to the nether regions is paved with things we should do (but for one reason or another have not done), and so a high 'should ratio' (the number of "shoulds" per page) is a proxy indicator for an ineffective instrument. The 'should ratios' of the GAR and GAR Distilled are 0.26 and 0.32, both below the alarm-signal threshold of 0.40. However, parts of the GAR bristle with "shoulds". Moreover, there are only two mentions of 'rights' and none of 'human rights'. The latter are very important to disaster risk reduction because they constrain or determine what can be done in the way of preparedness, action and reaction. UNISDR had a tendency to shy away from human rights issues, perhaps because it needed to remain engaged with countries that have a poor record in this respect.

The section of the GAR on 'challenges' is welcome, as the challenges are indeed legion. However, the two short paragraphs devoted to political challenges are extremely weak. It could be argued that political decision making is the greatest barrier of all to successful disaster risk reduction. We live in a world in which Terry Cannon's 'cure to damage ratio' is paramount. Globally, about a thousand times as much is spent on hydrocarbon exploration and extraction than on the mitigation of the climate change that results from burning fossil fuels (Mechler et al. 2019). Unofficial voices have suggested that the 'cure to damage ratio' for natural hazards is 1:43. In any case, there is no doubt that much more is spent on making the problem worse than on solving it. What is needed is a brutally honest assessment of why this is the case.

Notably, the GAR has finally come around to the view that we all bear the burden of reducing disaster risk. In putting individuals at the centre of a diagram of actions we see people either crushed between the rock of hazards and the hard place of risk-informed sustainable development or as protagonists in combatting the former with the latter. The GAR notes that "we all live in communities". No doubt we do, but the DRR community needs to do more to define what a community is, how it functions and whether it is really the right vehicle for solving our problems.

One of the most intransigent problems with the predecessor of the Sendai Framework, Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005-2015, was its resolute reliance on a 'top-down' approach. Studies showed that the HFA had had little impact at the local level (GNCSODR 2015). The Sendai Framework and all the United Nations impedimenta that goes with it tend to perpetuate this issue, despite the launch in 2010 of the UN Safe Cities programme (about 1% of towns and cities have signed up for it). Consequently, the greatest present-day challenge is to achieve change from the local level against rigid power structures and massive vested interests at the national and globalised levels. For the sake of survival, it must be done. The GAR helps, and no one would deny that a coordinated world-wide approach is needed, but there is a growing feeling that progress will never be rapid enough until there is a fundamental reorientation.

Further Reading

The full and abbreviated Global Assessment Report 2019 can both be freely downloaded from https://gar.unisdr.org.

Alexander, D.E. 2017. The 'should ratio'. Disaster Planning and Emergency Management, 18 July 2017.

http://emergency-planning.blogspot.com/2017/07/the-should-ratio.html

Di Mauro, M. (ed.) 2014. Global probabilistic assessment of risk from natural hazards for the Global Assessment Report 2013 (GAR13). International Journal for Disaster Risk Reduction 10(B): 403-502.

GNCSODR 2015. Views From the Frontline: Beyond 2015. Recommendations for a Post-2015 Disaster Risk Reduction Framework to Strengthen the Resilience of Communities to All Hazards. Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, Teddington, UK, 12 pp.

Mechler, R., L.M. Bouwer, T. Schinko, S. Surminski and J-A. Linnerooth-Bayer (eds) 2019. Loss and Damagefrom Climate Change: Concepts, Methods and Policy Options. Springer Open, Cham, Switzerland, 557 pp.

UNISDR 2005. Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities. United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, 22 pp.

UNISDR 2015. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, Geneva, 25 pp.

UNDRR 2019a. Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, 2019. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, 472 pp.

UNDRR 2019b. GAR Distilled. United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Geneva, 26 pp.

Wisner, B., P. Blaikie, T. Cannon and I. Davis and 2004. At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters (2nd edition). Routledge, London, 496 pp.

Leonardo and the Deluge

Leonardo da Vinci: Storm over a town in the mountains.

The 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is an occasion to reflect once again on the life of a genius with a very complex and sophisticated mind. Leonardo's reputation as a painter has never wavered, despite the relative paucity of his output (and notwithstanding his disastrous attempts at fresco in Florence and Milan). Much of his life was dedicated to the preparation of a 'scientific' treatise on painting, which reflected his love of objectivity and his outstanding clear-sightedness. Although it is tempting to see Leonardo as unique in his portrayal of nature, he did in fact come from a milieu in which there was increasing interest in portraying nature and landscapes as they were, rather than as a stylised backdrop to the human or spiritual drama. Painters of the 13th and 14th centuries saw no reason to depict nature as it is, which reflected the prevailing philosophy of life as something that was heavily predetermined by celestial will. Naturalists were few and far between. Ristoro d'Arezzo, La composizione del mondo, 1282, and Dante Alighieri, Quaestio de Aqua et Terra, 1320, represented the first awakening of interest in the natural world, Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 sealed the knot. Leonardo's reputation as a painter rests upon his skill with the brush and his brilliance in composition and observation.

Leonardo as a natural scientist requires a more complex interpretation. Until fairly recent times, the social order has been preserved by visiting extreme cruelty on anyone regarded as a heretic or counter-culturalist. No doubt Leonardo wished to avoid the fate of Girolamo Savonarola, who in 1498 was burnt at the stake for heresy. Leonardo wrote for himself, privately, often using his ambidextrous skills to write in mirror image. We are now treated to the irony of long queues forming to look at pages and notebooks whose author regarded them as intensely private. Leonardo's reputation as a polymath rests upon the curious fact that no one could be bothered to throw away his jottings. Nor, for more than four centuries, could they be bothered to read them.

Leonardo was the illegitimate son of an accountant and an immigrant serving girl, born in a modest farm house about a kilometre from the outskirts of the Florentine town of Vinci. It has been suggested that his lack of formal education catalysed his ability to observe objectively: he has no knowledge of Latin or Greek and hence could not read the classic texts of orthodox learning. Nowadays, it would be fatal to ignore the body of knowledge accumulated in any field - the equivalent of trying to become an eminent surgeon by Googling illnesses. In the Renaissance, there was not only a growing desire to question ancient orthodoxies, there was an imperative to do so. Centuries later, George Bernard Shaw summarised it as follows: "A reasonable man adapts himself to the world. An unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man." Leaving aside the latent sexism (in Shaw's day, 'man' was considered to be acceptable shorthand for 'man or woman'). Yet strangely, Leonardo, the archetypal Renaissance polymath, did not take on the world. His fascination in the modern era consists of a mixture of his genius in many fields (painting, natural history, hydraulics, flight, mechanics, architecture, military strategy, weaponry, anatomy, and so on) and his secretiveness.

Another aspect of his fascination concerns the uncanny ability of his inventions, discoveries and observations suddenly to appear relevant to modern preoccupations. In has native Italy, climate change appears to have intensified microcyclonic storms, which the public has begun to call 'water bombs'. These can cause sudden, catastrophic floods, often compounded by wind or hail damage. Towards the end of his life he became preoccupied with the threat of the Universal Deluge (in this he was not alone: see my paper on the etymology of the term 'resilience'). His sketches of deluges draw on observation of violent storms, particularly in alpine environments, and the knowledge of hydraulics and hydrology that he obtained by studying the middle Arno Valley and the Valdichiana in Tuscany. Despite a certain stylisation, some of the drawings are remarkably realistic representations of extreme meteorological and hydrological events. Scholars have seen this preoccupation as his reflection on his own impending death. It clashes with the uniformitarianism of much of his earlier work on fossils, strata and rivers, although he was never able to resolve the balance of evidence between catastrophism and uniformitarianism. It is curious how, in an age of vastly increases scientific knowledge, that dilemma has resurfaced in an equally intractable form.

Further Reading

Alexander, D.E. 1982. Leonardo da Vinci and fluvial geomorphology. American Journal of Science 282(6): 735-755. DOI: 10.2475/ajs.282.6.735

Alexander, D.E. 1984. The reclamation of Val-di-Chiana (Tuscany). Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74(4): 527-550.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1984.tb01472.x

Alexander, D.E. 1986. Dante and the form of the land. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76(1): 38-49. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8306.1986.tb00102.x

Alexander, D.E. 2013. Resilience and disaster risk reduction: an etymological journey. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 13(11): 2707-2716. DOI: 10.5194/nhess-13-2707-2013

Clayton, M. 2019. Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing. Royal Collection Trust. Windsor, UK, 255 pp.

La Romantica

Lago di Pietra di Pertusillo

In 2010 a remarkable film was released in Italy. It was called Basilicata, Coast to Coast. Obviously, the title makes ironic reference to the archetypal road trip across the United States. Basilicata, the forgotten region of the Italian South, does not have two oceans, but it does have two seas. The protagonists of the film are a musical group who live in Maratea on the Tyrrhenian Sea coast. They travel eastwards across the region to Policoro on the Ionian Sea coast, where they have been invited to play at one of those summer festivals that small towns in the South always have. True to form, they make the trip in a donkey cart, loaded with their instruments and a couple of tents. But this is the 21st century, so it is a solar-powered donkey cart with navigation by laptop.

The motto of the film is "La Basilicata esiste, è un po' come il concetto di Dio, ci credi o non ci credi." - "Basilicata exists: it's a bit like God: either you believe in it or you don't." At intervals they are stopped by patrols of Carabinieri police, who cannot get their heads around the fact that anyone in this day and age would be mad enough to do a trip of this kind. The journey (160 km - they opt for the long way around), takes several days, and occupies so much time that eventually they arrive at the music festival in the middle of the night about an hour after everyone has packed up and gone home. The band and their donkey are confronted with the stage, bare, windswept and abandoned.

The whole film is a sort of tough guy's version of John Lennon's Fool on the Hill. It is as lyrical as it is barmy. But at a certain point things go wrong. After 85 km, the intrepid band and their donkey arrive at the Lago di Pietra di Pertusillo, which translates literally as "the lake of the stone with the hole in it." This is a delightful spot greatly loved by the ancient Romans who, with much effort, patience and tenacity, conquered and subdued Basilicata. In their ignorance, our modern travellers take the southern route around this picturesque body of water. Indeed, they camp on the south side, totally missing what there is on the north shore.

Now I know Basilicata, something that few outsiders can boast. It took 15 years of hard work, tenacity, resilience, patience and persistence. This, of course, was nothing in comparison with the hard work, tenacity, resilience, patience and persistence of the people who actually live there (I tried to do that too, but the 1980 earthquake drove me out). It is a remarkable region. In the modern age it pretends to be very European, but in reality it is nothing of the sort, and neither is it Asian or African. Perhaps Basilicata is a figment of the Oscan imagination. The Oscans were a pre-Roman people. The Romans were not particularly welcome, and neither were the Saracens, Normans, Swabians, Anjouins and all the other invaders, up to and including tourists.

I know this: on the northern side of the lake there is a lush thicket of trees in which there is an abandoned building. It is modern, not ancient, and a faded sign proclaims it as 'Ristorante La Romantica'. Now La Romantica is a common enough name for a restaurant, but this one was quite different. Due to an incredible error, it was built back to front. The kitchen window had a magnificent view of the lake with its wooded shores and rippling sheet of water. In contrast, the dining room had a massive plate-glass picture window that looked upon the back yard where the restaurant staff stacked up crates of empty bottles before recycling them.

One summer there was a drought and the lake level slowly subsided. A curious spectacle emerged beneath the kitchen window. It was a heap of small bones. Alerted by a local resident, the NAS, police hygiene inspectors, raided La Romantica and promptly shut it down for six months. The staff so hated the customers (and animals) that they had been cooking and serving up cats and dogs. When the restaurant reopened, it did a lively trade made up of people who were curious about the whole story. I was one of them; but, of course, the popularity didn't last and closure came quickly. Paradoxically, the spot is more romantic as an abandoned building being slowly reclaimed by nature than it was as a back-to-front restaurant. And the people who made the film knew nothing of any of this.

The moral of this story hardly needs explaining. Look around you. We all think we know the answer. But perhaps what we fail to see is a back-to-front edifice that confounds our whole story. Cast your net wider, draw more inferences, look behind the screens of this life. You will be surprised at what lurks there.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on the Notre Dame Fire in Paris

As the cathedral is located in a congested space on an island in the River Seine, the 'convergence reaction' of emergency vehicles and equipment cannot have been easy to manage. On the other hand, evacuation and keeping the scene clear of unauthorised people would have been relatively easy. The fire underlines the need for metropolitan fire services to have long aerial ladders, something that was problematic in London's Grenfell Tower conflagration.

Donald Trump made a casual reference to aerial fire-fighting, sometimes colloquially known as 'water bombing' (although flame-retardant chemicals are used as well as water). France's Sécurité Civile organisation has 12 Bombardier CL-415 fire-fighting aircraft, each of which has a capacity of 6,140 litres of water or chemicals. They are based in the Midi, far from Paris, because that is where wildfires mainly occur. Fire-fighting aircraft with a capacity up to 12 times as large do exist, but they are not used in France. Apart from the time taken to load up with fluid and reach Paris, such is the air-speed and trajectory of a CL-415, that most of the fluid would not land on Notre Dame. These aircraft are built to tackle wide-area environmental fires, not urban conflagrations. Moreover, the weight of water when released could cause stonework to collapse - possibly onto fire fighters on the ground. The scoop-and-release helicopters used in forest-fire fighting would not carry enough water or provide sufficient continuity of flow to make much difference to a well-established fire that had generated large amounts of heat. For this, a constant jet of water is necessary, pumped over several hours or longer. Failure to cool down the embers can lead to a resumption of the fire.

Cathedral 'disasters' are not uncommon in European history. For instance, the nave of Utrecht cathedral was destroyed by a storm in 1675 and is now a piazza of open ground between the west tower and the surviving chancel. In 1349 the Black Death left Siena cathedral half-built. In the 13th century Wells cathedral was damaged by earthquake and was only saved from collapsing by an ingenious structural bracing system, the famous 'scissors arches'. We recall more easily the loss of part of the roof of York Minster when it was struck by lightning in 1984.

Thinking of the longer term, fire can be considered as part of the challenge of renewal.  French national pride, and the concern of wealthy people who want to support European civilisation, will ensure that the resources for rebuilding are made available. There is no shortage of artisans and experts in conservation and repair, especially in France. In fact, with modern methods, access to knowledge, science and training, restorers and artisans are probably better equipped now than at any time in the past. Digital finite-element modelling by engineers can accurately predict stresses and strains on a wrecked building. And, of course, everyone wants to help.

As the aftermath of the fire at York Minster reminds us, at Notre Dame stonework is at risk of collapse. Critically so are ancient painted glass windows, where they have survived. At York Minster, they waved backwards and forwards in the wind until scaffolding could be erected to stabilise them. Hence, a big challenge arises as soon as the ruins are cool enough to work in; a challenge of stabilising what is left. The bracing and buttressing of the mediaeval stone fabric of Notre Dame was arrived at by mason-architects intuitively, with a combination of over-design and under-design. It is now critically at risk of collapse until further bracing can be added. Bracing nowadays is both soft and hard: steel scaffolding and woven polymer bands are used. Much has been learned from post-earthquake consolidation work.

Painted and stained glass in Windsor Castle pays tribute to the fire fighters who fought to save the building during the conflagration of 1992. Similar images can be found in the windows of London's Guildhall, commemorating the work of London Fire Brigade during the Blitz of 1940-1, when the building was seriously damaged. Such cases remind one that major restoration projects are an opportunity, not only to recreate past work and make it safe to hand on to future generations, but also an opportunity to add something precious and creative.

Should there be any doubt about what can be achieved in reconstruction, the example to look at is the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which was built in 1726-43. The fire-bombing of the city in 1945 reduced this magnificent Baroque temple to a few unrecognisable pieces of wall. In 1993, after Germany had been reunified, reconstruction finally began. It was completed in the mid-2000s, using as many of the original materials as possible. This was a local, national and international project, meticulous in its planning and execution. That is how another Church of Our Lady was given back to the people. It can be done again in Paris.

Mon apprentissage - Il mio tirocinio - My apprenticeship - Meine Lehre

 

Colette

 We must all learn to write. Writing is our craft and our main means of communicating our ideas. Good writing can be judged by whether or not it is good communication. For many years I have advocated a particular technique to students. As they have never followed my advice, perhaps I am not communicating well enough. But let us not be deterred. If, gentle listener, you want to write well, consult the experts. Learn from them. This means that you must read widely and analytically.

In the inter-war period there were writers who understood their craft so well that they practised it with little or no pretension. When I write in Italian, I have to remind myself that a good literary model is as complex as it is elegant. Not merely balance, but poise must be achieved. The armoury includes present- and past-tense subjunctives, reflexives, engineering the position of clauses and sub-clauses vis-a-vis the stem, choosing longer, more abstruse words rather than shorter, simpler ones, always with the proviso that they convey elegance. By contrast, the simpler we make English, the better it is. There is an amusing reflection by J.B. Priestley that I was served up with at school many years ago. Its title is "My first article". He concludes, "I signed it pretentiously 'J. Boynton Priestley'" The essay recounts his mixture of pride and youthful ostentation at seeing his first, very modest effort published with all its vain attempts to appear cultured, literary and authoritative. How quickly he abandoned the smokescreen! In a later essay, "Making writing simple" he reflects: "Writing that was hard to understand was like a password to their secret society." 'They' in this case was a young group of writers who believed that readers should have to work hard, but without any valid reason why.

Consider this exchange between the authors of Lord of the Flies and For Whom the Bell Tolls. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." (William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway). Hemingway retorts, "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" Now who would you side with?

Another protagonist from that period was Eric Arthur Blair, nom de plume George Orwell. Besides the question of his name, he was not what he seemed in other matters as well. A visionary and a revolutionary in some ways, he lived a double life, Eton educated, as both an exponent and a critic of the British Establishment. Despite his identity crisis, he wrote some interesting tirades against the misuse of the English language, especially on how it had been hijacked by fascists (something that is happening again). To me, his prose always seems to mask a substratum of hysteria. Perhaps that is what we need nowadays in order to defend language, given that satire falls like water off a duck's back among the swelling masses of people who are unable to recognise irony, the shouting, cursing classes. To appreciate irony to the full you must have experienced the Baroque (as a culture, not an art form - see my book Confronting Catastrophe; I was much influenced by José Antonio Maravell, a Spanish historian of the Baroque).

On to other things. I learned the triple cadence from Montague Rhodes James, who was sometime Master of King's College Cambridge. James was a palaeographer and a great admirer of the work of Dickens. He never said he could improve on it, but linguistically he did, at least in my humble opinion. James's short stories are so good that I almost know them by heart. I read every one of them at least three times a year. In his non-fiction writing, by deploying the triple cadence, he could achieve balance, economy and precision (there you are, just like that!). The triple cadence is something that can convey extreme elegance or alternatively be a deadly weapon, depending on how one wants to use it. In language, it is power! I have used it to shoot down both published and aspiring authors.

Like Dickens, M.R. James could break the rules. Both of them were not scientists and so were liberated from many of the constraints of objectivity. Of course, we can all break the rules, but how many of us can do so legitimately? To break the rules and not be convicted for it, one has to understand them - fully and intimately (that, by the way, is the double cadence, a weapon of smaller calibre). One has to know which rules one is breaking and exactly how one is doing so. It becomes a game, but one played according to very strict rules (paradoxically).

Breaking the rules - legitimately - adds colour to prose. Arthur Conan Doyle, like Charles Dickens, did it all the time. Anthony Trollope, like John Galsworthy, never did it. M.R. James was the past-master of it, and nobody better demonstrated how it evokes an atmosphere or an emotion. But he was a palaeographer and understood language (English, French, Latin, Greek) down to the finest of its finer points. Claudio Vita Finzi was one of my mentors. He was Professor of Earth Sciences at UCL. His book The Mediterranean Valleys is worth reading for the spare elegance of the prose. He once confessed to me that he had developed an inadvertent fixation with the phrase "to throw light upon". He realised this when he found that he was stalking through his prose throwing light left, right and centre!

With all respect to Jane Austen and Regency fiction in general, the Victorian novel was the pinnacle of achievement. Whenever I pass down Via de' Tornabuoni in Florence, which is quite often, I cast my eyes up to the memorial plaque to George Eliot, whose real name was May Anne Evans. That is where she wrote her great fictional account, entitled Romola, of 1492 and the demise of Savonarola. Her masterpiece was Middlemarch. Consider this extract from a concluding chapter:-

    "It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light piercing into the room. She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining."

For me, this paragraph is the culmination of the book. It is masterly in its deployment of language, cadence, balance and idiom; speaking of which, I read that there has recently been an initiative to translate the classic authors from English into American. This involves substituting words with modern slang equivalents and selling the result as an e-book for 99 cents: the Walmart 'pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap' versions of Emily Bronte and Jane Austen. Bah!

Here is half a poem:-

1953:
First came cold wind, followed by lashing rain.
Scudding scraps of cloud disappeared into
Grey masses, which during the night went black:
Colours dense enough to strangle the eye,
To throttle hope.

Then up welled the water, trickling, gurgling.
Menacingly it lapped at the threshold
And it came in, kicked the door down, entered,
Slid along the corridor, pushed its way
Into the rooms.

No tap-water this; freezing and sullen,
Mud-laden, stinking of estuary,
It rose like a canker swelling with pus,
It sucked the life out of the house
And left it dead.

Dawn spread its pewter light over the scene,
Obscured it with a heavy cloak of mist.
Silently, the turgid pool of water
Intersected the street, foreshortened it,
Cut the houses in half.

Where was rescue, where was blessed relief?
Firemen in their oilskins wielding axes,
With Rule Britannia helmets, grim faces,
Dragging hoses, gamely struggling in mud,
Policemen in capes.

No boats, no hoses, no rescuers came.
The silent pond in the street lay waiting.
Blackly, a dead dog floated in the mire,
Time stood still, stunned by the onslaught, beaten
Into abeyance.

A monochrome story of post-War life
Was this, a grainy newsreel disaster.
Perhaps all floods are cast in black and white,
For the greens and blues of tranquil waters
Fade away in adversity.

What one struggles with in this is the transformation of imagery into words: how to convey insight by word-painting. It has to be done with strict economy of language. In fact this piece is written in a very ordinary five-beat Iambic pentameter (beloved of Dante and Chaucer), with a coda at the end of every quatrain. The coda, or tail, is designed to lessen the cantilena, to stop each verse from being tritely sing-song. The absence of rhyme does that as well. The whole puts the steel clamp of discipline upon thoughts in order to render their expression as imagery.

When the brother of Niels Bohr presented his thesis at the University of Copenhagen, an examiner said, "Sir, there is much in your thesis that is new, and much that is original. Unfortunately that which is new is not original, and that which is original is not new." Dr Samuel Johnson once demolished one of his critics with a similar epithet. It is a useful one to deploy with the typical run-of-the-mill science that one is forced to read today, but what about applying it as a test of one's own work?

Sometimes, reading prose is like going for a stroll in a field of barbed wire and concrete blocks. It is neither edifying nor satisfying. Perhaps the perpetrators should be locked up in a room for half an hour a day and forced to recite over and over again: "The cat sat on the mat". The - definite article; cat - subject and common noun; sat - verb; on - preposition; the - definite article; mat - object and common noun; no clauses or sub-clauses. All too often, unravelling syntax is like playing cat's cradle with a live snake. Remember: clarity of writing reflects clarity of thinking. Evidently, dear scholar, your mind is lost in a fog.

Language has a definite, formal structure. You cannot imitate it, you have to practise it. You cannot write what language "sort of sounds like". You must write according to the canons of proper practice. Language is communication. You need to stop miscommunicating. Precision, not blather, tells your story.

Too many in the academic world have no idea about how to improve their writing, or even why it is necessary to do so. To me it seems blindingly obvious. For a start, it is time to stop inflicting pain. The pain is not in the mistakes, which are numerous enough to be legion, it is in the breathtaking approximation. I find approximation insulting. It makes me feel worthless.

Read some Hemingway. He wrote in short sentences, full stop. This was good, full stop. It did no harm, full stop. His writing is respected and admired, full stop. It could be a model for yours, full stop. Hemingway, the mortal enemy of the clause (now tell me what rule I have just broken).

Learn the rules: for example, subject-verb accordance. Discover what a clause is and how to delimit it. Find out why you should not write sentences that are only clauses. Bad writing is a form of laziness. Never forget that.

If you want to read writing as it should be, try Colette's Paradis terrestre (particularly the part entitled Mes apprentissages). Even in translation (as Earthly Paradise), it sparkles with a rare clarity and beauty. The work is a fine illustration of the principle that clarity of thought is reflected in clarity of writing. It is the perfect marriage. (Sadly, Colette's unions were anything but.) Now there is someone who truly served her apprenticeship - and as a result became a national treasure. (Perhaps we should say the same of the translator). Reading Colette's intimate reflections on her own life shines a light on the way forward. It is not merely edification, it is a toolkit: a toolkit for you, gentle listener.

Appendix: a list of common errors in scientific writing in English

• errors of common English usage 
• failure to observe standard conventions 
• wrong choice of words 
• misuse of idiom 
• absence of articles where they are required 
• lack of prepositions where they are needed 
• lack of synonyms, resulting in 'wooden' prose 
• awkward, unbalanced and contorted syntax 
• indiscriminate use of slang or excessively colloquial language 
• clash or misuse of tenses 
• failure to use the possessive case when it is needed, or misuse of it 
• misuse of capitalisation (common and proper nouns) 
• clash of singular and plural in the same sentence (subject-verb agreement) 
• failure to  recognise collective nouns 
• use of past progressive where the simple past tense is needed: 'was going' instead of 'went' 
• lop-sided clauses without initial or final comma to delimit them 
• missing hyphens in compound adjectives 
• misuse of the present participle (e.g. 'going') 
• wrong wording to introduce lists 
• synthetic words with no real meaning 
• starting sentences with figures 
• misuse of contractions (an overly colloquial tone) 
• starting a sentence with a conjunction 
• a sentence without a verb 
• missing function words (e.g. 'that') 
• failure to recognise the plural form in Latin derivatives 
• inadvertent legalese - ‘insurance policy’ prose 
• writing a clause as if it were a sentence.