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Gonzalo Lizarralde, "Unnatural Disasters: Why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed" (Columbia UP, 2021)
00:45:23
An interview with Gonzalo Lizarralde
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You're listening to New Books in Geography, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host for today, Stentor Danielson from the Department of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Slippery Rock University. Today I'll be talking to Gonzalo Lazzaralde, author of Unnatural why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail, But Some Succeed. Published this year by Columbia University Press. Dr. Lazarolda, welcome to the show.
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A
Hi, Stentor. Thank you very much. And thank you for the invitation to this podcast and to be part of the New Books Network. Thank you very much.
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C
All right, so to start us off, why don't you tell our listeners a bit about your background and how you came to write this book?
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A
Yes. Thank you. I was born in Bogota in Colombia. I was raised in a very crowded city, Bogota. And when I was studying architecture, a disaster hit my home country in Colombia. And I got interested about this reconstruction project and reconstruction process going on at that time. And I kind of felt that my skills in architecture were not sufficient to deal with this problem. And at the time I was thinking about doing a master's program, so I came to Canada to do my master's in low cost housing. And since then I've been living in Montreal. I teach architecture, I teach project management, and I teach issues related to risk and disasters for architects and urban planners.
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C
Okay, so in this book you draw really heavily on Naomi Klein's work on disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine. If I can speak today. So could you tell us a bit about her theory and then how your work builds on or goes beyond what she's written?
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A
That's right. A couple of decades ago, Naomi Klein started building this very interesting argument about the connections between risk, disasters and let's say, savage capitalism policy, neoliberalism. And by building these connections, Naomi Klein revealed that disasters are sometimes used to advance political agendas and particularly right wing political agendas linked to neoliberalism. And she started creating these connections in her first book, one of her first book, the Shock Duct Train and the Shock Doctrine was the term she used to explain how the moment of disasters, where people are busy about reconstruction, where people are busy about trying to resume their daily lives, are ideal moments for politicians and economic elites to advance neoliberal policy and savage capitalism agendas. And then in subsequent books, two or three books she wrote since the Shaktok Train, she has been elaborating a little bit more on this and showing the connections between these savage forms of capitalism and, for example, reactions to climate change or other forms of disasters. So I was certainly interested in that in my own research in Latin America, for example, in Honduras or in El Salvador, in Colombia and in Haiti, I found that there was certainly a shock to trend going on. There was very often this idea of using risk and the fear of danger and disasters and the disruption caused by disasters to advance certain agendas. So I got interested in this. But at the same time, I also found that this shock doctrine was not explaining totally the whole dynamics that I was finding on the ground. It was explaining a great deal of these political inequalities and games of power going on on the ground. But there was also other aspects that were missing. I found that there were mistakes that were not necessarily related to this tavish capitalism agendas. There were also misunderstandings, there were also overlooks. And then I got interested in trying to reveal and understand all these other causes and effects going on during disasters and the way we manage risk. And that was the main idea behind writing Unnatural Disasters, building up on Naomi Maclean's argument, but also trying to go forward a little bit more and see what are the other forces at play. And that's what the book is about.
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C
Okay, so then to get into another connection with previous literature, I think a lot of people probably will see the title of your book and it'll make them think of people like Ken Hewitt and Ben Wisner, who promoted the idea of vault vulnerability and the pressure and release model of disasters and the slogan there's no such thing as a natural disaster. But in your book, you're actually critical of the way vulnerability is usually understood and applied in dealing with disasters. So what does the vulnerability idea get wrong about disasters?
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A
Well, just to be sure, the vulnerability theory is today our best tool to explain disasters. The pressure and release method. That was the pressure and release model. Sorry, that was developed by Blakey and Cannon and their colleagues. This is still one of the best tools we have to understand what's going on in terms of risk and disasters. But again, much like what happened with Naomi Klein, by understanding processes that I was finding on the ground, I found that the vulnerability theory was not always the best tool to explain everything we were finding on the ground. It was very useful to reveal very important cause effect relationships that we wanted to found. It was. It is still very useful to understand the factors that lead people to vulnerability. It's very useful still to understand the progression in time of conditions that lead to disasters. But at the same time, I also found that it was not possible to explain everything through that perspective alone. So again, much like with the case of Nod maclean, I got interested in how can we reveal other situations going on. And some examples come to my mind at this moment. Let's think, for example, of the fires that ravaged California in recent years. Some of those fires have certainly affected what we would normally call vulnerable people, vulnerable populations. But we also know that several of those disasters have also affected People that are kind of difficult to describe as being vulnerable. You can think about these posh neighborhoods in California, for example. Can we really claim that those wealthy citizens are vulnerable in the traditional way that the vulnerability theory will understand them? And here the answer becomes more puzzling. It's a little bit more difficult to understand everything from that perspective of power imbalances between rich and poor people, or between economic elites and marginalized people, or between oppressors and oppressed. And again, in natural disasters, I try to reveal other factors that still play a fundamental role in the way we understand crisis, risk and disasters, but perhaps cannot be always explained through the perspective of the vulnerability theory, or for example, the pressure and release model that the vulnerability theory developed during the 1990s.
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C
Okay, so I want to now pick up on something you mentioned. In both of those answers to those two questions. You were talking about some of these theories, not fully explaining everything that you were see on the ground. And when you talk about seeing things on the ground, you know, a lot of your research in this book is based on you having actually been part of the disaster recovery efforts for a number of significant disasters that have happened in various areas. Seems, especially in Latin America, that you've worked. And so I wanted to ask you about how your practice, your perspective as a practitioner, as a person that's actually involved with the disaster recovery, not just, you know, an academic sitting in the ivory tower writing about it. How did that perspective of being a practitioner involved in the work of disaster recovery shape how you did the research for this book?
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A
I think it has been very important to. And a natural disaster tries to reveal the importance of looking at this phenomena and looking at these situations from the ground, rather than starting labeling things by or through the theories and concepts we have in academia, trying to see first what's going on on the ground and then trying to conceptualize from that. So, yes, I have had the chance to meet and organize activities and meetings and events with, with decision makers on the ground, mayors and NGOs, and to work with community leaders on the ground and with citizens affected by disasters and interested in reducing risk in their own communities. And it is at that moment that I realized that, yes, the disaster doctrine and neoliberal framework allows us to understand part of the problem, and yes, the vulnerability theory allows us to understand another part of the problem. But there are other things. There are sometimes issues about stupidity and ignorance and naivety and very basic overlooks by decision makers. Not all the decision makers I have encountered on the ground have this evil attitude towards Beneficiaries they do not necessarily have these wrong intentions about developing political economic agendas at the global scale. Sometimes the people I have worked with or have met on the ground are well intended. Sometimes they genuinely want to help people. Sometimes they are touched by suffering, they are affected by the way governments are dealing with disasters. And sometimes they have very open and transparent intentions of working for the good of people. But sometimes they don't have the tools to do that. Sometimes they don't have the knowledge of how to deal with those issues in a clear way. Sometimes they don't have the information to make right decisions. So in many cases, of course, there are these tensions between the powerful and the oppressed. And of course there are tensions between economic and political elites and, and vulnerable people. But in many other cases there are also situations in which decision makers are trying to do their best, but they overlook certain things. They don't grasp the complexity of the issues at stake. They don't fully understand the interconnections between different systems, for example, urban systems, or they just don't have the data and information to deal with all these cascading effects that disasters are causing today. And that makes it for a way more complex context in which we are trying to work and understand today. So again, it's unnatural disasters is about understanding these overarching situations and phenomena and movements, but also going on the ground and trying to understand bottom up, what's going on, what are the intentions of people who are dealing with disasters every day, what is going on at the level of communities, what's going on at the level of NGOs, local governments and other stakeholders.
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C
Okay, so I want to dig in a little more on something that you were saying there, which is the idea that a lot of the people that are involved with this disaster recovery have good intentions, they want to do the right thing, and yet what they're doing is still not working. And that even includes you. You know, you, you yourself appear as one of the people that got some things wrong in some of the cases that, that you talk about. So, you know, if all these people or a lot of these people have these good intentions and mean to do well, what is it that's causing the problems to occur? Why can't these good intentions lead to good outcomes for people affected by disasters?
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A
Yeah, very good question. Sometimes the disaster industry is like a huge boat that is going in a certain direction. And sometimes people pedaling from within cannot really change the direction of the boat at the speed they would like to. Sometimes they want to change the direction of the boat. They want to change, for example, the way NGOs are working in developing countries. Sometimes they want to change un, United nations agencies to work in a different direction, to adopt other practices, but they do not necessarily have that power to change those organizations or those institutions. So sometimes they're trying to do small efforts to try to change that directional a little bit every day. But that's extremely difficult because that the industry, the aid industry, for example, or the emergency industry or the reconstruction industry are huge sometimes and very powerful. And there are certainly very powerful agents and organizations that dictate the way some things are happening. Right. So sometimes well intended young professionals, volunteers, they recognize that the work overall has some problems, some things need to be fixed, but they don't have the power to modify that. And I'm interested in natural disasters, in exploring that. Why is that happening? Why are they struggling to change? Very often it happens that there are major forces that change the course of the boat. There are these macroeconomic policies that are difficult to change. There are also these geopolitical games that are very difficult to change. And sometimes it's just a matter of some very key influential people, organizations trying to take advantage of the disaster context for their own purposes or agendas. But what I also found is that these people on the ground, they are trying their best to deploy their skills for a positive or a good cause. The problem also is that many of the times they don't have the right skills. So they're trying to use the skills they would apply in regular practice in situations of extreme conditions caused by disasters. And sometimes those are not the right skills. I have met thousands of architects who would like to use their architectural skills to help build housing after disasters. But the skills they have for regular practice are not necessarily the ones they would require in these very particular situations. And the same thing happens to engineers, urban planners, geographers, social workers, and many other professionals. So it's very important that we understand that having good intentions sometimes is not enough. We also have to develop certain skills and gain some knowledge in order to deal with vulnerable people. And good intentions, unfortunately, are not enough.
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C
Yeah, and it comes up several times, particularly with respect to architecture and housing. You know, a number of times it seems like what goes wrong is that these architects come up with ideas for what they think would be a really good way to build houses for people that have been hit by a, you know, a tsunami or a hurricane or whatever. And it's just not what the people there need or want. And so it goes, you know, at best Unused because people were trying to do kind of what they have the skills for, and it's not what the people actually need.
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A
Yes, exactly. There is a chapter in the book that is titled Humility. And it's this idea that as professionals we have to be more humble about the power we have and the knowledge we have and the skills we have. And perhaps we have to start listening more. As professionals, we're very competent very often on explaining our ideas. We're very competent on launching new projects. We're all sometimes very competent at describing a vision of the future. But quite often we don't have the right skills to listen to people, to try to understand their struggles, to decode the messages they're trying to deliver, to echo their voices in a different way so we can influence other people. And those are skills that we need to develop if we want to work with people affected by disasters or at risk of disasters. So humility is very important. Having good intentions again is not enough. It's about also changing our attitude and being capable of learning and accepting that we made mistakes. We all are going to make mistakes. When we work with people in conditions of poverty or conditions of informality or vulnerability. We are, we all, it's very likely that we will make mistakes, but we have to change our attitude and try to learn from those mistakes and be more critical and reflect on our practice in a more far away. If we do that and if we have more humility, perhaps we're going to start creating better solutions for people and we're going to be better equipped to work with them in order to overcome their challenges. And perhaps we're going to be able to provide a more meaningful contribution to the well being of vulnerable people and people affected by disasters.
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C
Okay, so that leads nicely, I think, into the next question that I wanted to ask. So there's a recurring trope in your book of the grand elaborate recovery plan that never gets implemented. And so people gave it all this attention, threw all this money at this plan, and it just amounts to nothing. So why does this keep happening? Why do we keep getting these big plans that don't go anywhere?
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A
Yeah, the example of Haiti comes to my mind. If you Remember after, in January 2010, there was this massive earthquake that destroyed part of the city of Port au Prince and other cities in Haiti that was massive destruction. Some statistics talk about 200,000 people killed by that event alone. When the Haitian disaster happened, there were hundreds of ideas and organizations moving to develop these master plans and think ahead and plan how reconstruction in Haiti was supposed to be. And there was this intention of collecting vast amounts of money in New York, in Washington, in Brussels, in Paris. There was this idea that the international community was going to collect vast amount of money, professionals were going to design these master plans, and all of a sudden we were going to have a different Haiti. Port au Prince was going to be radically transformed into a sustainable, resilient city. And the slums and informal settlements of Port au Prince were going to be replaced by this residential, new, modern, sustainable neighborhoods. Well, we know years later that nothing of that really happened. And you're absolutely right. It's kind of a common subject in my book. How, how come that we develop all these resources to plan and to master plan ideas and we years later, when we go into the ground, we find that they're not having the expected effect or they're not really happening at all. And one of the explanations is that disasters are good moments to collecting money. Funding agencies see disasters as an opportunity to touch donors and call the attention of international media, powerful economic elites. So this is a right moment to collect donations. And then there is this idea that we must act very quickly because there are people homeless, there are basic needs about infrastructure, people are hungry, and so on. So these two conditions combined makes it for an ideal context in which we produce band aid solutions that try to respond very quickly and use resources very quickly, but that ultimately have very little impact on the long term. So coming back to the idea of architecture, urban planning or interventions in the built environment, we saw in Haiti, for example, many interventions dealing a kind of band aid way, dealing very quickly with basic needs, deploying vast resources, but at the end changing very little in the political and administrative, administrative structures that were required later on. So what we found years later in Haiti, for example, is that most of the funds that were collected in the US and in Europe actually stayed in the US and in Europe. Most of those resources were invested in European or American companies. And very little at the end reached Port au Prince. And from the money that reached Port au Prince, very little of that of those resources actually went to the government. Several donors wanted to bypass governments because they, they saw the Haitian government as corrupt and they saw municipalities as inefficient. So they wanted to bypass the, the regular institutions. And what, what we found years later is that many of those plants actually were not developed, few of them were implemented, but they were kind of band aid solutions and many others that attempted to produce long term change actually didn't work. Yes, I think you're right in pointing out that it is very important that we realize that again, good intentions and lots of money and media attention do not necessarily translate into better conditions for people on the ground, or doesn't translate necessarily into reduced risk or better reconstruction projects.
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C
Yeah. And in describing the Haiti example there, you mentioned that this plan made big deal about being sustainable or eco friendly, green, whatever terms we want to put on that. And that seemed to be again, a recurring thing. A lot of these plans really emphasized that they were doing cutting edge sustainability stuff. And you kind of get the impression that all of that is as much for the benefit of the people making the plans as for anybody that's actually going to live in these redeveloped neighborhoods and stuff that they're, they're building. So, you know, the sustainability discourse is not really helping to accomplish anything in the, the disaster recovery or area, despite the fact that it sounds really like important. Right. We want to deal with climate change better and stuff, and yet our attempts to do that and the things that get sold under the rubric of sustainability are not accomplishing that and are sometimes not even getting built. Or if they do get built, they aren't, you know, helping the people that they're supposed to help.
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A
Absolutely, yes. And one example comes to mind again, the Clinton's foundation building back better program in Haiti is a good example of this. After the disaster, the Clinton foundation, promoted by former President Clinton and his wife, attempted to develop new neighborhoods in the periphery of Port au Prince, actually in a place called Sorrengy. And the idea was to build ideal neighborhoods in Soranji. They were going to be sustainable houses developed by star architects and well known construction companies. And these homes were going to be sustainable, reducing energy consumption. They were going to use recycled materials. They were going to be very kind of progressive idea of a modern neighborhood in the periphery of Port au Prince. And again, what happened years later is that nothing of this actually materialized or became real change on the ground. And the rhetoric was there. There was this rhetoric of sustainability as much as the result in this rhetoric of resilience or participation or innovation. So the decision makers and policymakers had the right narrative at that moment, or what seemed to be at that moment, the right narrative, but that narrative did not translate into more efficient action on the ground. So again, in this book, I try to pick up on at least four narratives and I try to analyze what, what are their impact on the ground and how much of that is producing positive change and how much of those narratives are actually producing secondary effects or actually negative effects. So I pick up on, on four narratives that are closely interrelated. One is sustainability. Another one is resilience. As we know, today's kind of a buzzword in the disastrous field. The third one is participation, not only citizens and community participation in action on the ground. And the fourth one is innovation. And in the fourth cases, what I have found is again, the disconnect between the narrative as presented in policy and brochures in opening remarks by presidents during his speeches, and, and the reality on the ground. And those disconnects are not only causing frustration, but they're also increasing the lack of trust that people have in institutions. By adopting jargon that is meaningless, that is void of values, and that is not actually having an impact on the ground, we are motivating citizens to be ever more cynical about governments and distrust authorities and distrust institutions and agencies and thus creating major, major negative consequences in the global south, for example.
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C
Okay, so we've been talking about the bad side of everything for most of this interview, but your subtitle of your book does say why most responses to climate change fail, but some succeed. So I was wondering if you could tell us about an example of disaster recovery succeeding where things actually did work out well for the people impacted by disaster, and then maybe say a little bit about what we can learn from that example for other cases.
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A
Yes, a good example is what's going on in several Cuban villages and Cuban communities. As you know, Cuba is in the path of several tropical storms and hurricanes every year. So coastal communities are highly impacted by climate change. Not only sea level rise, but also the exacerbated impact of tropical storms, changes in precipitation, and hurricanes that travel through the Caribbean every year. Several of those villages will be underwater in 50 or 60 years time due to sea level rise and other impacts of climate change. And the government wants to move several of those villages to safer areas. And there is good reasons for doing that. There are the risk associated with living in coastal areas. And those people are often reconstructing every year. And that's causing not only human toll, but also very important investment in capital. So the government, the Cuban government wants to relocate some of those villages to safer areas. But here is where everything becomes interesting. Those villagers sometimes organize themselves. And we have met, I've met with many of them in Cuba, and they organize themselves and they start lobbying against changes in their location. They start developing ways of what we could say, respond to those risks. They develop ideas, technical solutions, and social networks and community activities to try to mitigate the risk of climate change impacts and try to stay close to the water as they wish, they want to stay close to the water, not only for economic reasons, but also because they have psychological connections with water and the ocean. And they are succeeding and those community leaders are succeeding in mobilizing their communities to try to find the right answers, to try to explain to governments that there are other ways of seeing this. There are alternative narratives that we can deploy is not only the narrative of relocation to mitigate climate change impacts, it's also the narrative of attachment to place and staying in place and finding new ways of dealing with disasters and risk and similar phenomena we're finding in informal settlements, for example, in Colombia or in Chile, where again, local leaders mobilize communities and try to create different narratives. They are not interested in the narrative of resilience. They're not interested in the narrative of sustainability. Sometimes they're not even interested in the narrative of participation or innovation. They're interested in dealing with their daily challenges, changing the narratives or explaining a different narrative to local authorities or governments, and try to deal with their struggles in a different way. And those are the type of bottom up solutions that I'm trying to reveal in natural disasters. Very often they contrast with this top down policy and master plan and radical change solutions promoted by governments and economic elites. Here what we found is bottom up action coming from citizens, through local leaders trying to change policy, through daily struggles, explaining to politicians and explaining to decision makers what their real struggles are and how they can change or adapt or modify their behaviors to be less affected by disasters. Again, it's a problem of humility. Sometimes as professionals and decision makers and politicians, we do not really understand those bottom up solutions. We tend to think about our preconceived ideas and our most current narratives and plans and neglect that there are very interesting solutions coming from the bottom, bottom up. And what I try to do in the book is try to reveal some of them to see and to show that there is hope. There is hope when we start listening, when we assume more humility towards citizens on the ground and we find solutions that can be scaled up, supported and eventually replicated at larger scale.
- [35:50]
C
Okay, so my next question is going to be a little bit of a curveball, but so for to contextualize this, near the beginning of the book, you mentioned your worry that the book might be on the one hand too academic for some people, but on the other hand not academic enough for others. But I thought as I read it that you really hit a good balance and you wrote in a way that was very accessible but without losing the grounding in the Scholarly debates, like some of the things we talked about in the first few questions I had. And so as I was going through this, I started to think that this might be a useful text to use in something like an upper level undergraduate seminar about disasters and hazards. And so I wanted to know if that was the kind of thing that you thought about at all while you were writing it, that it might be a book for teaching as well as a book that, you know, practitioners might read. And if you have any thoughts about how a book like this might be used in a classroom setting.
- [36:51]
A
Yeah, well, thank you. I take your comment as a compliment because that's certainly something I wanted to achieve. I wanted to achieve a book that is accessible and that resonates among different types of citizens, not only academics, but also local leaders and maybe activists, and maybe people who work on NGOs and even those who want to engage now in graduate studies. And it's a very tricky balance. And the reason is that for many years, the disasters studies field have produced concepts and ideas that initially make sense when they are trying to understand, when they are used to explain a very pragmatic, contextual situation. The problem is that as they grow old, these concepts and ideas sometimes become disconnected from the realities they are trying to explain. They become abstract notions that start to lose their actual practical meaning. They start to be studied by scholars as independent from the context where they were originated. The idea of resilience is a good example. Resilience emerged in the disastrous field as a very pertinent, much needed way to explain the strengths that people have to deal with their daily struggles, but again, eventually was so much talked about, so much used and so much abused that it lost its connection and its real meaning and became one of those buzzwords and full of jargon that became disconnected from the realities it was trying to explain. So in this book, there is always, in the disasters field, there is always this risk of jumping too quickly into these ideas and concepts that lose meaning. So I wanted to recover some of those meanings by again listening to people on the ground, seeing what's going on on the ground, reflecting from the ground first, and then trying to produce concepts and theories. So the book is an attempt to do that. It's an attempt to reveal the realities on the ground and at the same time trying to inform those realities with theories and concepts when they are required, but trying to find this proper balance between empirical evidence on the ground and concepts and ideas that become rather abstract. So the idea is, yes, to provide some basis for graduate students, for example, I think about geography, but I can also think about urban planning. I think about social studies, development studies, students interested in international aid, emergency action, design, engineering, many other professions like that. But at the same time also try to talk to decision makers, young professionals who end up working for NGOs. I have the privilege of working very often with graduate students or students who graduated very recently from architecture, urban planning, sociology, geography. And they want to make a change in their communities, they want to make a change abroad. Sometimes they want to travel and helping distant communities and contribute. So the idea of this book was also trying to talk to them. What are the tools they need, what is the knowledge they need? So it's a delicate balance between having something that is very theoretical and at the same time trying to talk to these young professionals in language and terms that will resonate with their intentions and their objectives to help people on the ground.
- [40:41]
C
Yeah, and I think you did a good job of that with this book. So to wrap up our interview here, we always like to ask what you're working on next. What kind of projects are you taking up now that this book is out?
- [40:53]
A
Well, thank you, Sandra. One of the things that I'm working right now is a book called. It's an online publication, actually it's not going to be a book, but only an online publication called Artifacts of Disaster Risk Reduction. And those artifacts I touch a little bit at the end of the book on the, on that subject and kind of open the door to this exploration. But now I'm really taking it more directly. And is this idea of exploring how people modify their immediate surroundings, their housing conditions, their neighborhood, their street, to deal with risk and disasters and climate change? We call these artifacts of disaster risk reduction because very often it's about modifying the physical space. Quite often it involves modifying public space, modifying the park or intervening the road, or working on housing space. But they also involve processes and activities that have both social and cultural value for them in their communities. So it's about modifying the space, but quite often as well, it's about creating these social networks. Quite often it's about developing these social rituals, it's about recovering these traditions, making social activities that have a cultural value for them, that resonate among community members and that have produce social and cultural value within communities. We call them Artifacts of disaster risk reduction. To describe at the same time this physical change, but at the same time the social change that is required and that often happens bottom up. Communities, citizens, local leaders trying to deal with climate change and risk and daily struggles through their interventions in this space. So as you see, it's kind of the continuation of what I develop in natural disasters, trying to contrast top down approaches with bottom up approaches. But here I go more in detail to explain how is this happening, how, how are they done? And the advantage is that I, my team and I, we received funding from the Canadian government to work for the past four years, funding community leaders in Colombia, Cuba, Haiti and Chile. And we gave them money to community leaders and we were able to follow their activities for over four years. And now we were able to write this publication in which we're going to explain what they did, how they used the money, what struggles they found, what their ambitions were, how eventually they transformed the space, how difficult or not it was to deal in, was to deal with authorities and other decision makers. So hopefully you will like it too. It's going to be out very soon. Artifacts of disaster risk reduction. All right.
- [44:00]
C
Well, I will look forward to that. So, Dr. Lizzaralda, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [44:07]
A
Thank you, Stentor, thank you very much. And thank you for inviting me to be here. And it was always, it's a pleasure and I hope to come back.
- [44:16]
C
All right. You just heard a conversation with Gonzalo Lizarralda, author of Unnatural why Most Responses to Risk and Climate Change Fail But Some Succeed, published this year by Columbia University Press.