Chang, Shenglin Elijah and Pochun Huang (2012). When Disasters are a Part of Home: The Hakka Community’s Rootedness and Resilience to Periodic Landslides in Shenmu Village. Landscape Review, 14(2), 34–47.
According to Saylor’s (1993, p 2) definition, a disaster ‘has an identifiable beginning and end; adversely affects a relatively large group of people; is “public” and shared by members of more than one family’; and ‘is traumatic enough to induce distress in almost anyone’. While we agree with Saylor’s definition in general, in this paper, we address certain cases wherein disasters recur and it is difficult to define their origins and ends. In such instances, they are repeated events possessing their own life cycles. Under particular circumstances, the aftermath of such disasters takes from a few months to years to correct. In worst-case scenarios, these periodic disasters never cease but become integrated into the residents’ way of life, shaping and reshaping their dynamic relationships within the physical landscape. The people and landscapes continually impacted by these events might never be able to return to their pre-disaster conditions. Instead, the landscape and its relationship to the local people are often repeatedly changed engendering new forms of landscape identity. Paton and Johnston (2006) argue that continual disasters could function as catalysts for socio-environmental change. People, communities and societal institutions might ‘generate a stronger sense of community amongst those affected than had prevailed prior to the disaster’ (Paton and Johnston, 2006, p 8).