"Rising Tide: How Social, Political, Economic and Technological Forces Can Create Conditions That Worsen ‘Natural’ Disasters"

Sept. 18, 2006 @ 7 p.m.
Location: The Forum

John Barry
Visiting Scholar
Tulane University

John Barry is the author of the award-winning Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How itChanged America, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History and many other notable books and articles. These two works explore the themes of uneven technological progress and how social, economic, and political forces create conditions that worsen “natural” disasters in spite of our best technological know-how. The lessons learned in the way political leaders exacerbated the problems caused by these disasters and in the mistakes made in the emergency response still resonate today, particularly in light of the tragedy in the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the potential threat of another pandemic flu.

Mr. Barry is currently the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Tulane University. He is a native of Rhode Island, a graduate of Brown University, and has written extensively on politics, economics, and medicine.