Environmental anomie and the disruption of physical norms during disaster

Abstract

Large-scale disasters cause a wide variety of disruptions across impacted communities. Existing research has broadly addressed the ways in which both social norms and physical features constrain and dictate everyday life. During disasters, vast disruptions occur to both social and physical norms, which can have negative impacts on people’s sensemaking processes. This study uses transcripts from 24 semi-structured interviews conducted with people from Paradise several months after they survived the Camp Fire – at the time, California’s most destructive wildfire. Drawing on Durkheim’s classical theory of anomie along with extensive work done by environmental sociologists about the importance of place, I introduce the concept of environmental anomie. This recognizes the ways in which sudden changes to the physical landscape can upend the established order and can undermine people’s ability to comprehend, relate to, and function within their environment. Expectations from the physical environment are a taken-for-granted authority that guide and constrain the routines of daily living and enable people to locate themselves spatially and temporally. The Camp Fire challenged this authority in a way that mirrors Durkheim’s socially conceived idea of normlessness.