| In response to the exorbitant costs of natural disasters, federal disaster management agencies are calling on communities to shoulder a greater burden of the responsibility to mitigate the risks and the losses. As part of this initiative, federal leadership (Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US Congress, and others) is sending the message to at-risk communities that they must improve their hazard mitigation practices if they are to sustain the community's long-term quality of life. Long-term physical, social, and ecological stability is especially difficult for communities at-risk to natural hazards. This dissertation explores the influence of the sustainable development movement on South Florida's hazard mitigation community, as it recovers from the impacts of Hurricane Andrew. South Florida's emergency managers, land-use planners, and environmental resource managers have learned from the Andrew experience that the region's sustainability is first and foremost a matter of protecting the physical landscape and the material assets that shape their sense of community and place. Such protection is a matter of mitigating the risks through technical, political, and ideological means. In response, South Florida's regulatory professionals have produced innovations in technology, ideology, strategy, and policy for mitigating the region's risks to natural hazards like hurricanes and floods. As such, they have expanded the concept of hazard mitigation beyond its traditional methods and contexts in federal disaster preparedness and recovery grant programs. Exploring Metro-Miami's response to Andrew, and to federal mitigation and sustainability initiatives is unique and vital to the federal leadership's twin goals of promoting the sustainable development of communities and reducing the nation's risks to disasters through locally-customized risk reduction and resource development strategies. |
