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Although loss of life from natural hazards has been declining, the property losses from those causes have been increasing. At the same time the volume of research on natural hazards and the books reviewing findings on the subject have also increased. Several major changes have occurred in the topics addressed. Emphasis has shifted from hazards to disasters. There has been increasing attention to vulnerability. Views of causation have changed. Four possible explanations are examined for the situation in which more is lost while more is known: (1) knowledge continues to be flawed by areas of ignorance; (2) knowledge is available but not used effectively; (3) knowledge is used effectively but takes a long time to have effect; and (4) knowledge is used effectively in some respects but is overwhelmed by increases in vulnerability and in population, wealth, and poverty.

In the roughly 70 yr since the concept of integrated water management in river basins replaced primarily single-purpose management, there has been increasing question by international science and policy agencies as to the full consequences of such strategies for both social and environmental systems and for fulfillment of the notions underlying sustainable development. The experience suggests there is continuing urgent need for expanding the range of management measures considered as part of the planning process; for deepening the quality of criteria to judge each measure for reconciling the various evaluation principles; and for making incisive, correct post-audits of what actually resulted from their applications. It also reminds us that realization of the full potential of truly integrated water management may be very long in coming. Problems of improved analysis and of necessary institutional reform are formidable.

The socioeconomic investigations of possible impacts of the proposed repository for high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, have been unprecedented in several respects. They bear on the public decision that sooner or later will be made as to where and how to dispose permanently of the waste presently at military weapons installations and that continues to accumulate at nuclear power stations. No final decision has yet been made. There is no clear precedent from other countries. The organization of state and federal studies is unique. The state studies involve more disciplines than any previous efforts. They have been carried out in parallel to federal studies and have pioneered in defining some problems and appropriate research methods. A recent annotated bibliography provides interested scientists with a compact guide to the 178 published reports, as well as to relevant journal articles and related documents.

Editor's Note: This article is the first in a series of three articles based on apresentation to the Symposium on the International Decade for Natural DisasterReduction held 24 January 1994 in Nashville, Tennessee. The symposium washeld in conjunction with the 75th AMS Annual Meeting.

The authors discuss the scientific justifications for studying the consequences of nuclear war. The consequences of nuclear war and nuclear winter - biotic impoverishment, climate change, pollution of the air, water, and soil - recapitulate in compressed time the patterns of ecological change humankind is even now imposing on the planet. By studying the biological consequences of nuclear war, important discoveries about the intricate nature of the global ecosystem may be made. Wiser management practices and more thorough appreciation of alterations in the physical and biological environment could results.

The world changed in at least three fundamental ways after World War II; people changed the earth and people's view of it changed. First, understanding deepened of the basic life support systems and of how resource use and abuse in one area may affect another. Second, we approached interdependence among societies and cultures on a global scale. Third, governments forged the capacity to destroy themselves and their resource systems through nuclear war. Geographers have a responsibility to help the human family come to see itself whole through several activities. Teaching can aid in our understanding of the spatial and environmental dimensions. Research can explore the conditions in which stable peace may flourish. Policy analysis can examine in an interactive mode the possible options for applying these insights and findings.

The International Geosphere Biosphere Program sponsored by the International Council of Scientific Unions is directing attention to geophysical and biological change as influenced by human modifications in global energy and mass exchanges. Geographers in the Soviet Union and the United States have joined in critical appraisal of their experience in studying environmental change. This initial report is on some promising approaches, such as the reconstruction of earlier landscape processes, modeling of the dynamics of present-day landscapes, analysis of causes and consequences of anthropogenic changes in specified regions, appraisal of social response to change, and enhanced geographic information systems supported by detailed site studies.

(1964). Vietnam: The Fourth Course. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Vol. 20, No. 10, pp. 6-10.

drainage basin programs. The day when one water project can be considered independent of others in the same drainage basin has passed. This statement is presented as a "fact" because the idea of unified programs is firmly imbedded in the survey reports prepared by federal and approved by state agencies which form the basis for the huge volume of new construction authorized by Congress during recent years.

Although precipitation was deficient to a greater extent than ever before during the spring and summer of 1934 in many parts of the United States west of the Appalachians, most of the public water supplies of the nation proved to be adequate. The abnormally small run-off and the recession of the shallow ground-water table, which caused severe shortage of water for domestic use and for livestock in numerous rural areas, resulted in general and acute shortage of public supplies in only a few sections of the country. The conditions resulting from the drought focused attention on certain areas in which unfavorable geologic and hydrologie conditions hinder the development of supplies that are adequate during very dry years, and on specific municipalities which have failed to make efficient provision for the use of sources that are readily available. In an effort to discover the areas of especially difficult environmental conditions, and the municipalities having deficient collecting systems, the Water Resources Section of the National Resources Board last autumn requested the aid of the American Water Works Association in determining the public supplies which suffered shortage during 1934.

The review by Waddell of the collection of papers edited by me in Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global raises two general questions about that cooperative effort (1977). One is whether its approach to the problem of social adaptation to extreme natural events is "resolutely deterministic" (p. 69). The second is whether the methods used were appropriate to the problem. Waddell mentions, but could not have had access to, the final text of the companion volume on the Environment as Hazard (Burton et al., 1978) which he reported as in press. In contrast to the reviewed volume, the second volume offers a number of generalizations about situation and process drawn in part from studies reported in the earlier volume, and in part from other field studies. Readers interested in the topic may wish to consult the second volume as well as to examine what the various authors of the first volume in fact had to say about natural hazards in the areas studied. The review concludes that most of the authors share a position that adjustment to extreme events lies in "increasing interdependence, development and governmental intervention" (p. 76). Some of the authors may wish to reply individually, and I shall not attempt a point-by-point response, but a few comments are in order. Unfortunately, a major argument in the volume seems to have been overlooked. A number of the papers provide evidence that applications of increased technology in developing economies lead to enlarged vulnerability to property damage and in some situations, as in the cyclone-prone coastal areas of Bangladesh, to heightened danger to life. They do not assume that "the active forces are vested in nature and the passive in man" (p. 69). Rather, they take off from the conviction that hazards result from interactions between social and biological and physical systems in which people exercise choice among a large number of options subject to social constraints. A major aim was to explore the factors affecting those choices. In several of the Third World situations studied it was found that economic specialization and government intervention narrow the range of choice, work