Yes, yes, Elaine, John, and Charles!
Taking all your comments on board, I think that Elaine has the trump card. A couple of 12 year olds in Australia have caused quite a flap by publishing a scathing criticism of government's failure to inform children about hazards, especially those associated with climate change, and have called for a youth world summit on risk education in April 2007. Many of you probably have seen this announcement.
So there is a need, a hunger, for ACCESSIBLE information. Some of this can take a very straight forward form as physical geography -- accessible if well taught in an hands on manner, and geographers have been quite attuned to pedagogy in recent years. Yet how does one raise the BIG questions -- the questions about root causes of disaster vulnerability? It could well be one accessible vehicle is via literature. Sci Fi is part of that.
John is correct, of course, that there are dystopias as well in this genre. At the moment the dytopian outweighs the utopian probably by an order of magnitude. I have read a dozens of apocalyptic tales of climate change of the past few years. (Ah, how you know what I do when I kick back!)
I have had undergrads view and review films that take up environmental themes in fictional form from "Solent Green" to "The Day After Tomorrow." My students also read Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and try to understand why that book was so influential and how these films may, or may not, have influence over popular perceptions.
An important issue is how one deals with mis-information and bad science when they surface in fiction.
In any case, I am encouraged to move ahead with this kind of review. I'd encourage international list server participants to contact me with titles in French, Spanish, German -- in fact, any and all languages. I wonder, for that matter, what lessons about resilience one might glean from the Bhagavad Gita or the Heart Sutra?
All the best, BEN
-----Original Message-----
>From: Elaine Enarson <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Oct 13, 2007 4:18 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Characteristics of a Disaster-resilient Community
>
>Ben, when we start analyzing resilience through sci-fi, I dibs Ursula Le
>Guinn! Could be a great teaching and training approach and leads also to
>working with secondary teachers to integrate some of these writings and
>ideas from a DRR perspective. For the same reasons, I'd look at
>international children's literature and then of course all kinds of cultural
>workers as you say. Nope, I don't think we're in our dotage--not quite yet!
>It's a good idea.
>
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