Cartographies of Danger: Mapping Hazards in America

by Mark Monmonier

No place is perfectly safe, but some places are more dangerous than others. Whether we live on a floodplain or in "Tornado Alley," near a nuclear facility or in a neighborhood poorly lit at night, we all co-exist uneasily with natural and man-made hazards. As Mark Monmonier shows in this entertaining and immensely informative book, maps can tell us a lot about where we can anticipate certain hazards, but they can also be dangerously misleading.

California, for example, takes earthquakes seriously, with a comprehensive program of seismic mapping, whereas Washington has been comparatively lax about earthquakes in Puget Sound. But as the Northridge earthquake in January 1994 demonstrated all too clearly to Californians, even reliable seismic-hazard maps can deceive anyone who misinterprets "known fault-lines" as the only places vulnerable to earthquakes.

Important as it is to predict and prepare for catastrophic natural hazards, more subtle and persistent phenomena such as pollution and crime also pose serious dangers that we have to cope with on a daily basis. Hazard-zone maps highlight these more insidious hazards and raise awareness about them among planners, local officials, and the public.

With the help of many maps illustrating examples from all corners of the United States, Monmonier demonstrates how hazard mapping reflects not just scientific understanding of hazards but also perceptions of risk and how risk can be reduced. Whether you live on a faultline or a coastline, near a toxic waste dump or an EMF-generating power line, you ignore this book's plain-language advice on geographic hazards and how to avoid them at your own peril.

"No one should buy a home, rent an apartment, or even drink the local water without having read this fascinating cartographic alert on the dangers that lurk in our everyday lives. . . . Who has not asked where it is safe to live? Cartographies of Danger provides the answer."—H. J. de Blij, NBC News

"Even if you're not interested in maps, you're almost certainly interested in hazards. And this book is one of the best places I've seen to learn about them in a highly entertaining and informative fashion."—John Casti, New Scientist

Genres: Maps

377 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 1997

About the author

Mark Stephen Monmonier is an American author and a Distinguished Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

He specializes in toponymy, geography, and geographic information systems. His popular written works show a combination of serious study and a sense of humor. His most famous work is How To Lie With Maps (1991), in which he challenges the common belief that maps inherently show an unbiased truth.

Reviews

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though Monmonier is most well known for “How to Lie with Maps”, he has quite a few other books in his arsenal, collectively capturing the cartographic moment of the late 90s/early 2000s. Those who know about contemporary GIS/mapping technology, know just how precarious of a position that makes the topic going into things. While I find it to harsh to deduct a star for simply being written during a “behind the times” moment, the book has a 90s tone in unflattering ways unrelated to technology.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The genre Monmonier tackles here is “danger”, or (more accurately) danger response. Breaking conventional structurings, Monmonier decides to amalgamate a series of “natural”, artificial, and social disasters. It is an intriguing choice that I tend to agree with, but (like with much of the book) the theoretical justification is rather lacking.

But what this means for our reader is that they are exposed to a bevy of maps covering topics like earthquakes, volcanism, flooding, pollution, nuclear activity, crime, and disease. As an expert cartographer, Mark knows rather well which maps are worth showing and which need adjustments from the source material. In many ways, the reader could just go through the book scrutinizing each map and then taking or leaving prose as they see fit. There are also additional statistics and non spatial graphics that do awesome jobs showcasing the state of emergency response, advanced options, and normative paths for future work. It is nice that he has all three elements along with accompanying maps.

There are quite a few chapters for an academic book this length: 14! This makes the chapters a rather pleasant length (with large maps only enhancing the readability). Some chapters I felt could have been combined (it felt like there were multiple flooding and nuclear chapters) and some I thought should have been omitted. While the technological datedness is understandable, the theoretical lag is not. There seems to be an unfortunate drain in quality of the book as Monmonier progresses from traditional natural disasters to social disasters. The crime and disease chapters struck me as particularly weak, and almost stereotypical in their “conclusions”. This brings up the other main issue with the book: there isn’t much of an argument. Monmonier does take the step to include conclusion sections in each chapter to tell the reader what he thought the big take aways were, but they often felt unlinked with what we actually read. This isn’t purely a problem, I think a book with a theme that spread out should stick with a survey-feel, but it feels as though a lot of those purely argumentative paragraphs are just shoehorned in at the end. A part of me wonders if this is just a subconscious writing style on his part (having seemingly mass produced this type of book).

Nonetheless, what it doesn’t deliver theoretically, it delivers cartographically. The greatest strength of this book is the research into these various industries and the old maps they have hanging in their conference rooms, festering in a filing cabinet, or developing on that wacky World Wide Web. Monmonier tells you the decisions made by these cartographers (even if many of those employees would runaway from that label) and how they should be improved. He does a notably better job explaining the phenomena in the front half of the book than the latter, but there certainly is much worse you can do for crime and health geographies.

Overall, I give a 3.5. I really just recommend if you are a mapping or local government/disaster planning nerd. Or if you are just *that into* pre-2000s GIS in action, in which case more power to you!

[Jeff Bloomquist · Rating 2 out of 5]

So so. The guy is no Vince Flynn. The book could have been so much better if written by someone who actually makes these maps.