The Greensburg tornado: Exploring meaning in environmental catastrophe
By Daniel Sullivan, University of Arizona. Feb 23, 2021
As Nietzsche famously proposed, a person can suffer anything as long as their suffering has a meaning. Disasters, environmental hazards, and accidents have always posed an existential threat not only because of the destruction they cause, but because they raise profound questions about the meaning of our lives, and whether we truly have agency over the events that befall us.
Mary Douglas raised this issue insightfully in a discussion of early 20th-Century ethnographic work on attributions for suffering made by Zande participants living in Central Africa. She asks how a person in this context might explain the accidental collapse of a granary on a bystander.
“The question that interests them is the emergence of a unique event out of the meeting point of two separate sequences. There were many hours when no one was sitting under that granary and when it might have collapsed harmlessly, killing no one. There were many hours when other people were seated by it, who might have been victims when it fell, but who happened not to be there. The fascinating problem is why it should have fallen just when it did, just when so-and-so and no one else was sitting there” (Douglas, 1966, p. 109).
As Douglas further observes, “The vital questions in any world-view are the same as for the Azande…Why me? Why today? What can be done about it?” (p. 110).
Importantly, the answers to such questions tend to come not only from our past personal experience but from our culture – our religious beliefs or scientific views, our support networks, the experts and leaders whom we look to for guidance in extremis. Confronted by the seemingly random destructive path of a hurricane or tornado, many of us living in the affluent and secularized sectors of U.S. society may be inclined to see only “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet other people, with different cultural backgrounds, may see profound meaning in such events.
Aftermath of the Greensburg tornado
On May 4, 2007 an EF5 tornado, wider than Greensburg itself, killed 11 residents and leveled 95% of the town’s buildings.
The questions posed by Douglas remind me of a research trip I took to Greensburg, Kansas (reported in Sullivan, 2016). This rural town was completely decimated by a tornado in May 2007. I had gone there to ask a unique group of residents about their experience – a congregation of traditionalist Mennonites. For a century and a half these people have lived largely agrarian lifestyles in the Midwest. They have a strong sense of community and faith, and try to keep a distance from the mainstream U.S. political, economic, and educational infrastructure.
I asked one of these Mennonites – a carpenter whose home had been ravaged by the Greensburg tornado – whether he thought there was any meaning behind the storm. He reflected, and said,
“There’s some things about this tornado – for instance, why. That’s really not our business, as far as I’m concerned. That belongs to the Lord. And why He, why it didn’t go 500 feet over, why it had to hit us, why, I don’t know, that…There are no answers for that kind of thing, I don’t think, that belongs to the Lord.”
Indeed, in my research I found that the traditionalist Mennonites strongly believed that God had allowed the tornado to happen for some unknowable reason, that it had served as a kind of test of their faith. And my findings suggested they passed the test. The congregation recovered remarkably well compared to the town of Greensburg at large and its majority working-class residents. Because they did not receive sufficient insurance compensation to undergo the extensive process of rebuilding their homes with outside contractors, about 40% of Greensburg’s population moved away, many leaving the place they’d lived their whole lives. By contrast, the Mennonite congregation relied on their own internal insurance mechanisms and their own skills in trades such as carpentry. They had rebuilt all damaged homes within two years. While the tornado was a life-changing event for majority Greensburg residents, for the Mennonites it was just a temporary roadblock on their path to a better plane of existence.
Cultural trade-offs and the meaning of environmental catastrophe
Cultures resolve existential dilemmas for their members by making tradeoffs, sheltering individuals from certain kinds of threats but often increasing the risk of others. For example, religious worldviews that provide a strong sense of meaning may predispose their members to feeling guilty about falling short of moral standards. More secular worldviews may encourage freedom of self-expression but leave their proponents anxious about the future of the world.
However, when it comes to the experience of natural disaster, orthodox religiosity is not necessarily the royal road to resilience. A classic study found that people in the southern United States were more likely to attribute tornadoes to God’s will, and as a consequence prepared less for them compared to northerners, possibly contributing to a national discrepancy in tornado death rates (Sims & Baumann, 1972). Recent research in India has documented a similar phenomenon, finding that those individuals with stronger religious attachments are less likely to prepare for devastating seasonal floods (Mishra et al., 2010).
A sketch of a traditionally dressed young Mennonite family (Jantz, 2020). The denomination which participated in Dr. Sullivan’s research generally avoids use of personal photography.
In general, demographic and infrastructural factors play a major role in the impact of environmental hazards, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown. The Mennonites I interviewed possessed high levels of what researchers call social capital – they had important practical skills and resources, as well as the support of a tightly-knit community, to successfully weather the storm. While the Mennonites believed that God intervened to protect them, as a social scientist I must recognize that certain groups possess the material resources for resilience which others lack.
Variation in social capital is at the heart of one of the major paradoxes undermining public health in the United States today – namely, that those individuals and communities which possess the fewest coping resources are often the ones most likely to be impacted by hazards. Thus, while people often attribute calamities to divine intervention, these events and their fallout are in fact strongly influenced by social forces. Indeed, given that global climate change is exacerbating the frequency and damage of disasters, it is an open question today whether such a thing as a purely “natural” disaster even exists or whether we’re seeing the rise of “human-made” environmental disasters.
For those who are victims of technological disaster and failure – be it the meltdown at Chernobyl, or the lead poisoning permitted and covered up by government officials in Flint, Michigan – a different set of existential concerns is raised. Rather than affirming the randomness of extra-human nature, these events seem to testify to how the odds are systematically stacked against certain kinds of people. In the United States, the proportion of ethnic/racial minority and lower-income individuals living in a neighborhood is a strong predictor of the likelihood of exposure to contaminants and hazardous waste.
Partly because these events can diminish people’s trust in the agencies and experts who are supposed to keep them safe and the companies that are supposed to respect their basic human rights, technological disasters and environmental contamination can be extremely stressful. My colleague Harrison Schmitt and I recently reviewed the available relevant literature and found, in a comprehensive analysis of the data, that living with chronic contamination appreciably increases anxiety, depression, and even symptoms of post-traumatic stress (Schmitt et al., 2021). Thus, in addition to the potentially life-altering physical health impacts of prolonged exposure to contaminants for oneself and one’s family, the existential affront to agency and certainty posed by this experience takes a significant psychological toll.
Linking social capital
Blue SUV on South Main Street, Greensburg, Kansas May 5, 2007 by Larry Schwarm (larryschwarm.com). Artwork reproduced with permission from Larry Schwarm and the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas (Museum purchase: R. Charles & Mary Margaret Clevenger Fund, 2008.0278).
As in the case of natural disaster, social capital is a crucial resource for resilience to these “human-made” disasters. However, due to the complexity of the issues involved, communities cannot rely on their own local resources alone. Although many residents of impacted neighborhoods have met the challenge head-on by becoming citizen scientists and lay epidemiologists, eventually scientific expertise and extensive funding and equipment are required to address the environmental and health threats presented by chronic contamination.
Thus, my colleagues and I have proposed that linking social capital is especially crucial for (often disadvantaged) communities to overcome the crisis of industrial, slow-scale disaster. This term refers to a community’s capacity to “link up” with broader institutional forces in order to attain recognition and assistance for their local plight. Grassroots organizations that mediate between the community and these external forces are key sources of linking social capital. For example, in Flint, a history of local political organizing combined with support from physicians and outside environmental scientists to turn the water crisis into a nationally recognized travesty (Pauli, 2019).
Human “being” and the coming climate apocalypse
Reflection on the existential implications of natural and technological disaster reminds us of Heidegger’s observation that our existence is truly a matter of Being-in-the-world. All too often, in existentialism and in psychology more broadly, there is a tendency to view the human individual as a creature apart—an ethereal self that transcends nature in its ability to enact creative projects. In this valorization of human agency lies a potentially fatal concealment of our dependence and deleterious impact upon the material environment. Indeed, our transcendent power may be the eventual cause of our undoing in the apocalypse of climate change. Nietzsche may have been correct to say, in The Genealogy of Morals, that with the evolutionary appearance of humans “the aspect of the earth was fundamentally altered.”
Daniel Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona and the Director of the Cultural-Existential Psychology Lab. He received a BA in German Studies from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas. He has contributed to over 100 scholarly publications in psychology, philosophy, sociology, environmental science, and film and literary studies. His collaborative research with graduate students has been funded by NSF and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.