Gilbert F. White

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Gilbert Fowler White (born November 26, 1911 in Chicago , † October 5, 2006 in Boulder , Colorado ) was an American geographer . He is considered the founder of geographic risk research and had a great influence on flood protection in the United States.

Life

White, born in 1911, grew up in the Hyde Park district of Chicago, not far from the University of Chicago . There he attended the laboratory school founded by the educator John Dewey , whose pragmatic philosophy he largely represented in his later career. White studied geography at the University of Chicago , initially up to his master’s degree in 1934. Harlan H. Barrows , one of the most important representatives of human ecology in US geography, acted as an important mentor for him.

Until 1942 White worked in Washington, DC in the course of the New Deal for several government agencies and wrote his dissertation during this time. He then served in the Second World War as a refugee helper for the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in southern France, where he was taken prisoner by Germany in 1943. Until a prisoner exchange the following year, he was interned in a camp in Baden-Baden .

White became President of Haverford College in 1946, becoming the youngest college president in the United States at the time. He returned to the University of Chicago in 1955 and became a professor there. From 1963 to 1969, White was also chairman of the AFSC. In 1970 he moved to the University of Colorado Boulder , where he founded the Natural Hazards Center in 1976 . In 1980 White retired , but as Gustavson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography he continued to research and publish.

Gilbert F. White was married twice. His first wife Anne (née Underwood), with whom he had three children and who was also his research partner at times, died in 1989. He himself died in 2006 at the age of 94.

Work and action

White's dissertation Human Adjustment to Floods: A Geographical Approach to the Flood Problem in the United States , submitted to the University of Chicago in 1942 and published in 1945, is often regarded as the most important dissertation by a US geographer or the most important work of any such . Above all, through studies of settlements in the river plains on the Mississippi River , he came to the conclusion that the then common practice of primarily using technical measures such as the expansion of levees and the improvement of canals for flood protection was insufficient. He found that their supposed protective effect led to the development of flood-prone areas and that as a result, despite high public spending, the amounts of damage continued to rise. Flood protection therefore requires comprehensive planning and precautionary measures, in which the weighing of all available adaptation options would have to flow, taking into account the full economic costs and benefits.

White thus established geographic risk research as a scientific discipline and began to further expand his initially more administration-oriented approach under social science aspects. The human-ecological interpretation of research into hazardous events (hazard research), advocated by White and his most prominent students, Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton , reached its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, White dealt with the use of water as a natural resource , with arid regions and other issues of human-environment interaction.

From the late 1970s, this research was sharply criticized by representatives of the emerging political ecology . With regard to developing countries in particular , political and economic connections, historical developments and cultural differences are ignored, the initial research questions are naive and the results are trivial.

Awards and honors

White has received various awards, including the 2000 National Medal of Science . He also received the Charles P. Daly Medal of the American Geographical Society (1971), the Sasakawa Prize (1985) and the Global 500 Award (1988) of the United Nations Environment Program , the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (1987), the IGU Lauréat d'Honneur (1988), the Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1989), the Prix ​​Vautrin Lud (1992), the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society (1994), the Volvo Environment Prize (1995) and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2000).

White received several honorary doctorates relatively early in his career (LL.D. Hamilton College 1954, LL.D. Swarthmore College 1956, D.Sc. Haverford College 1956, LL.D. Earlham College 1958). He was later awarded honorary doctorates by Michigan State University , Augustana College , the University of Arizona and, shortly before his death, the University of Colorado Boulder.

White was also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969), the National Academy of Sciences (1973), the Soviet Academy of Sciences (1982) and the American Philosophical Society (1993). He was also a member of the Cosmos Club .

Fonts (selection)

  • Human Adjustment to Floods: A Geographical Approach to the Flood Problem in the United States (=  Geography Research Paper . Volume 29 ). Chicago University Press, Chicago 1945 (dissertation).
  • Water for the deserts: Worldwide cultivation of the dry zones (=  series of publications of the German UNESCO Commission ). Diederichs Verlag, Düsseldorf 1960 (original title: Science and the Future of Arid Lands . Translated by Hans Dietrich Berendt).
  • Choice of Adjustment to Floods (=  Geography Research Paper . Volume 93 ). Chicago University Press, Chicago 1964.
  • Strategies of American Water Management . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1969.
  • Gilbert F. White, David J. Bradley, and Anne U. White: Drawers of Water: Domestic Water Use in East Africa . Chicago University Press, Chicago 1972.
  • Gilbert F. White (Ed.): Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global . Oxford University Press, New York 1974.
  • Gilbert F. White and John E. Haas: Assessment of Research on Natural Hazards . MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1975.
  • Ian Burton, Robert W. Kates, and Gilbert F. White: The Environment as Hazard . Oxford University Press, New York 1978, ISBN 0-19-502221-1 .
  • Martin W. Holdgate , Mohammed Kassas and Gilbert F. White: environmental Worldwide: Reports of the United Nations Environment Program (UNAP) 1972-1982 (=  contributions to environmental design / A . Band 88 ). E. Schmidt, Berlin 1983, ISBN 3-503-02190-6 (Original title: The World Environment 1972-1982: A Report by the United Nations Environment Program . Translated by Angelika Bardeleben).

literature

  • Robert E. Hinshaw: Living with Nature's Extremes: The Life of Gilbert Fowler White . Johnson Books, Boulder 2006, ISBN 978-1-55566-388-9 .
  • Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton (Eds.): Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White (=  Geography, Resources, and Environment . Volume 1 ). University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986, ISBN 0-226-42575-4 .
  • Robert W. Kates and Ian Burton (Eds.): Themes from the Work of Gilbert F. White (=  Geography, Resources, and Environment . Volume 2 ). University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986, ISBN 0-226-42577-0 .
  • Martin Reuss: Water Resources People and Issues: Interview with Gilbert F. White . US Army Corps of Engineers, Fort Belvoir 1993 ( Online [PDF; 27.1 MB ; accessed on May 28, 2019]).
  • Gilbert F. White: Autobiographical Essay . In: Peter Gould and Forrest R. Pitts (Eds.): Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical Essays . Syracuse University Press, Syracuse 2002, ISBN 0-8156-2940-0 , pp. 341-364 .
  • Robert W. Kates: Gilbert F. White 1911-2006 . In: Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences . 2011 ( Online [PDF; 246 kB ; accessed on May 28, 2019]).
  • Jürgen Pohl: The emergence of geographic hazard research . In: Carsten Felgentreff and Thomas Glade (eds.): Natural risks and social disasters . Spectrum, Heidelberg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8274-1571-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James L. Wescoat, Jr .: Common Themes in the Work of Gilbert White and John Dewey: A Pragmatic Appraisal . In: Annals of the Association of American Geographers . tape 82 , no. 4 , 1992, pp. 587-607 , JSTOR : 2563691 .
  2. ↑ a b c d Kates: Gilbert F. White 1911-2006 . In: Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences . 2011.
  3. ↑ a b Patricia Sullivan: Gilbert F. White. The Washington Post , October 9, 2006, accessed October 6, 2016 .
  4. ^ A b John Schwartz: Obituaries: Gilbert F. White, 94, Expert on Floods and Nature, Dies. The New York Times , October 7, 2006, accessed October 5, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Pohl: The emergence of geographical hazard research . 2008, p. 48 .
  6. ^ Carsten Felgentreff and Wolf R. Dombrowsky : Hazard, Risk and Disaster Research . In: Carsten Felgentreff and Thomas Glade (eds.): Natural risks and social disasters . Spectrum, Heidelberg 2008, p. 16 .
  7. ↑ Pohl: The emergence of geographical hazard research . 2008, p. 50 .
  8. ↑ Pohl: The emergence of geographical hazard research . 2008, p. 49-51 .
  9. ↑ James L. Wescoat, Jr .: Gilbert Fowler White (1911-2006), Wisdom in Environmental Geography . In: The Geographical Review . tape 96 , no. 4 , 1997, p. 700-710 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1931-0846.2006.tb00524.x .
  10. ↑ in summary: Michael J. Watts: On the Poverty of Theory: Natural Hazards Research in Context . In: Kenneth Hewitt (Ed.): Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology (=  The Risks & Hazards Series . Volume 1 ). Allen & Unwin, Winchester 1983, ISBN 0-04-301160-8 , pp. 239-242 .
  11. ↑ Eric Waddell: The Hazards of Scientism: A Review Article . In: Human Ecology . tape 5 , no. 1 , 1977, pp. 69-76 , JSTOR : 4602392 .
  12. ^ William I. Torry: Hazards, Hazes and Holes: A Critique of the Environment as Hazard and General Reflections on Disaster Research . In: The Canadian Geographer . tape 23 , no. 4 , 1979, p. 368-383 , doi : 10.1111 / j.1541-0064.1979.tb00672.x .
  13. ↑ Henry Clepper (ed.): Leaders of American Conservation . Ronald Press, New York 1971 (Retrieved from the World Biographical Information System Online ).
  14. ↑ Honors Received by Gilbert F. White. Natural Hazards Center, accessed October 5, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Gilbert F. White, "Father of Floodplain Management" and Former Haverford President, Dies at 94th Haverford College, accessed October 5, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME White, Gilbert F.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Gilbert Fowler (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geographer
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 2006
Place of death Boulder , Colorado