Editorial

This special issue of the journal presents eight articles that cover different conservation-led responses to different forms and scales of disaster.

The process of compiling the issue began with a Call for Submissions in September 2022. The Call charged potential contributors with exploring issues of resilience, trauma and distress in the face of both contemporary and historic disasters and injustices, from hurricanes to war, from climate change to human error. Detailing the consequences of disasters as felt by communities and individuals was always a danger in overclocking the Call and the 30 or so submissions received tended to a positivist slant on what can and is being done; ‘people who are prepared recover better’ is the doxa. It is in recognition of this that we have retitled the issue, ‘Disaster and Response’.

Of course, there is no suggestion that any catastrophes can be brought under a regime of probability and management, nor that existential risk is now the business of networks of expert teams, nor even that the mitigation of inequality – which makes disasters so much worse - can be achieved through policy. However, in reading the issue one could almost start anywhere and find how each contribution highlights how vigorous campaigns of intensity sometimes flourish under the shadow of absolute duress. To respond to disaster is to enter into a relation to time in which one is by definition too late, but that does not necessarily mean that in the last moments we are condemned to merely look on as everything, near or far, crumbles. Instead, the contributions here report on what abilities disasters confer upon those involved and resourced in fighting against the odds. And all demonstrate gains in acuity of perception and the potential for developing new sensitivities and capacities for action.

This then is the positivism imbued in the contributions here, opening still further the window of consciousness afforded by a common thread, that the ending will arrive, but can always be infinitesimally deferred.