The nature’s risk: landscape and risk in the analysis of socioenvironmental disasters

Abstract

The present paper discusses the use of the concept of risk to rethink the notion of landscape, and employs it to study the history of socioenvironmental disasters. In this way, a discussion is produced about the emergence of landscape concept arising from the plastic arts and appropriated by historical studies. The importance of landscape “de-sacralization” is supported by the understanding of a constant exchange between perception and representation in order to define Nature. The Environmental History, in its turn, also considers human interference is important to the landscape construction and transformation. There is a strong anthropic element in the disaster definition because normally the extreme climatic events are featured as disaster when they affect human populations. Due to these issues, the risk perception of new disasters change the environment understanding people have. The Risk Society notion from Ulrich Beck offers a fruitful ground to environmental disasters and uncertainty’s sense discussion in contemporaneous societies.