Emergency Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 1 HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: THE EVOLUTION OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Since the dawn of time, humankind has had the need to deal with crises of all types. For much of history, this response was personal and intimate, and the victim did not always survive the encounter. As people grouped together for the common good, the idea of some sort of collective response to crisis gradually evolved. As governments came into being, this idea became an expectation that it was part of the responsibility of government to provide protection and assistance in times of crisis. From this expectation came the discipline of emergency management, the mechanism by which government discharges this perceived obligation.

Emergency management rests on three pillars as follows: a knowledge of history, an understanding of human nature expressed in the social sciences, and specialized technical expertise in crisis management. History tells us what happened, suggesting what events could occur again, and provides examples of how others have dealt with crisis. Social science suggests why people react to crisis in certain ways and why some methods of crisis management succeed and others fail. The technical expertise demanded of the emergency manager addresses how crisis is managed, both in the immediate response, but ...