AP English Language — Mixed Skills I — Drill 3

The following text is adapted from a modern essay on the framing of natural disasters and human vulnerability. We call them natural disasters, and the name does real work in the world. It places the event in the category of things that happen — geological events, weather systems, forces beyond human agency — and away from the category of things that are made. But the category is wrong, or at least profoundly incomplete. The disasters are natural. The catastrophes are not. The distinction matters. An earthquake is a geological event. An earthquake that kills fifty thousand people in one city and forty in another of comparable size is not simply a geological event. It is also a story about building codes, infrastructure investment, land use policy, and the distribution of political attention across populations of different economic means. The earthquake does not choose its victims. The built environment does. Consider the pattern that emerges when you look at which populations bear the greatest losses in events we call natural disasters. Across dozens of countries and decades of data, the pattern is consistent: it is the poor, the politically marginal, the communities built on flood plains and hillsides and coastlines because those were the only available lands, who die in disproportionate numbers. The hurricane does not know about property values. It does not know which neighborhoods had the resources to build seawalls and which did not. But the outcomes sort themselves with a precision that weather cannot explain. None of this is to say that natural forces are irrelevant. A Category 5 hurricane produces destruction that a Category 1 does not. Earthquake magnitude matters. The point is not that nature contributes nothing to the disaster. The point is that nature rarely determines who suffers most. That determination is made by decades of decisions about investment, regulation, and whose safety is worth protecting. The language of natural disaster serves a political function. It naturalizes outcomes that are partly the result of political choices, diffusing accountability across the neutral forces of geology and weather. When the hurricane is the actor, no one built the inadequate levee. When the earthquake is the cause, no one failed to enforce the building code. The naming of disasters is not an innocent act of description. It is a way of deciding, in advance, that certain losses were inevitable — and therefore that no one is responsible for them.