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The media like to report on sudden, short and sharp, disasters; eg an earthquake or hurricane, something that causes thousands of casualties in a few days or less. What does not make the news are slower disasters that may nevertheles kill many times more, eg AIDS, or slow drought caused perhaps by CO2 and climate change. What suprises me is that of late the discussion on crit geog has somewhat mirrored (no, no pun intended here) the media's concerns. This is all very well, but subjects like E Timor, Kosovo, etc have already been well covered in the papers - surely as crit geographers we should be drawing attention to the world's more forgotten disasters. These, like the various forms of pollution world wide, the various pandemics, eg AIDS, TB, the worlds regions of water shortage (itself the likely cause of the next Middle East war), our inability to predict really big quakes (Tokyo, San Francisco, Istambul, the Vancouver area Tehran, and other v large cities are due for one which will likely dwarf any casualties seen in E Timor, Kodsovo, etc, )...all these are more amenable to the sort of discussion crit geog could be good at than the recent sudden war casualties we have seen. These latter happen v fast, and protests such as street action outside embassies, written petitions etc are possibly the most effective form of action here. So how about a return to some of the more traditional geographical issues on crit geog - more lives and human development could be at stake on these issues in the long run. Hillary Shaw, P/G Geography, University of Leeds %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%