It has been a month since Neil's passing. I was set to return from Toronto to New York today to meet with his people and to tend to his plants. This is a familiar trip-one he and I took many times over the course of our years together. But as I write, my fl ight has already been canceled and rescheduled three times because of hurricane Sandy. The storm wreaked havoc on many people and places in its path. It also makes the loss of Neil's voice painfully acute. Today, an article of his circulates widely online that helps many make sense of the social life of 'natural' disasters. Writing in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina, Neil (Smith, 2006) insisted on the politics of catastrophic events. He asked us to resist the ways in which the insertion of 'natural' before 'disaster' served to naturalize the organized violence of uneven development, uneven preparedness, and uneven emergency response.
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