by Kate Tallman and Mark Tallman.
Hi everybody. We were both very pleased when Tod told us we could guest edit the Spring 2014 issue, Disasters: Natural and Un. We chose a topic that figures prominently in our minds, as one of us is a professional security and emergency management consultant, the other an academic librarian who has moonlighted in the field. We both also recently survived, and as of this writing, are still rebuilding from, a recent natural disaster that displaced us from our own house and tore up communities in the area. Writing and editing for this issue has been cathartic for us. It’s a weird thing to experience a disaster firsthand, especially when you helped write the emergency plan your local government uses to respond to it. But then, disaster is concomitant with weirdness, coincidences lucky and unlucky, strange observations, and the primitive, surreal, and sometimes dreamlike sensation that things have somehow gone radically against the plan, have dangerously deviated from how they’re supposed to be.
Disaster can range widely in scope and meaning, and we think the contributions for this issue illustrate it well. Disaster is not only about disappointment, tragedy, trauma, embarrassment, or ruined expectation, though to ignore these facets of it would be an insult. It’s also about learning, cooperating, recovering, supporting fellow human beings, and improving when possible, even if only to avoid the unpleasantness of repeating it. Disaster throws choices and assumptions into relief like few other things can, and often confounds us by demanding we make choices while threatening to render them moot. Disaster is by nature overwhelming on a human scale whether it impacts only one small corner of one person’s mind, or physically disrupts the lives of millions of people. Disaster shows us what is universal: what we value, what we fear, how we decide and react, and how we cope.
We want to thank everyone who contributed to this issue, and of course Tod, who indulged our disaster obsession while trusting us not to make it overly sensationalist, or unredeemably macabre. We submit this issue to you, hoping you’ll enjoy it, but even if you don’t, that’s no disaster.