Inherited memory, social learning, and resilience: lessons from Spain's Great Blizzard of 1888

Abstract

The snowstorms that affected the Cantabrian Mountains in the winter of 1888 caused unprecedented damage, and the absence of a “resilient approach” to this episode had several consequences worth further consideration. In this study, we explored interconnections between and among memory, social learning, and resilience by surveying the affected landscapes, conducting interviews with current residents, and reviewing historical sources such as press archives. The mixed method has enabled us to examine the construction and transmission of respondents' memories and to link those narratives to our reading of the presence or absence of risk mitigation actions—especially against snow avalanches. Our analysis has established that the 1888 snowstorms are remembered down the decades in ways that downplay risk, neglect social learning and changes to community practices and capacities to cope with uncertainties, and fail to shape preventive measures against future disasters. These insights have relevance for those interested in how archival research, field observations, and contemporaneous interviews can aid understandings of inherited memory, social learning, and resilience.

Disaster, demographics, and vulnerability: Interrogating the long‐term effects of an extreme weather event

“…More than 1,000 buildings collapsed, almost 20,000 livestock died, essential working tools were lost, harvests were ruined, and there was serious damage to farmland. Moreover, damage to infrastructure caused significant difficulties for supplies and exchanges for many months after the events (García‐Hernández et al, 2019). The situation thus had the potential to cause significant socioeconomic disruptions and health impacts in the long term.…”

“…Lin (2010) associated natural disasters with a decrease in fertility in Italy between 1820and 1962and in Japan between 1671and 1965 In the United States, Raker (2020) showed that severe tornadoes led to notable compositional changes in local population, and, in south-eastern Arabia, Petraglia et al (2020) found ancient droughts corresponded with the decline of inland occupations and population movements. In Spain, studies also considered long-term effects of historical disasters (for example, Alberola-Rom a, 2019; García-Hern andez et al, 2019;García-Torres, 2017;Gil-Guirado, 2017), but only Cuadrat et al (2016) delved specifically into their demographic impact, examining the effects of mid-seventeenth century droughts in the Central lands of the Ebro Valley, showing the event's correspondence with a sharp decline in the birth rate and a strong increase in mortality.…”

“…Isolation inside the region and from the rest of Spain lasted more than a month. To date, the impacts of the 1888 snowstorms have been explored in successive studies to determine the causes and repercussions of avalanches (García‐Hernández, Ruiz‐Fernández, & Pereira, 2017; García‐Hernández, Ruiz‐Fernández, Sánchez‐Posada, et al, 2017, 2018) and landslides (García‐Hernández, Ruiz‐Fernández, Oliva, & Gallinar, 2018), the crisis’s socio‐political management (García‐Hernández, 2019), impacts on fauna (García‐Hernández et al, 2016), and the influence of inherited memories on current risk management (García‐Hernández et al, 2019). Nevertheless, the demographic consequences of such a remarkable episode remain unexplored so far.…”

Helices of disaster memory: How forgetting and remembering influence tropical cyclone response in Mauritius

“…The ways in which both normal and extreme weather are understood, remembered, memorialised and recorded determines how descendants understand risk emergent from those extremes, and how climate and climate changeis positioned and contextualised (Hall and Endfield, 2016;Lorenzoni and Pidgeon, 2006;Palutikof et al, 2004). A growing literature is also demonstrating the importance of considering the complex long-term processes behind remembering and forgetting past disasters when developing disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies (García-Hernández et al, 2019;Garde-Hansen et al, 2017;McKinnon, 2019;McKinnon and Cook, 2020;Simpson and Corbridge, 2006). However more research is needed, and comparatively speaking, there are still few studies into the memory of extreme events or weather and how this influences vulnerability (Adamson, 2012;Endfield and Veale, 2017;Jones et al, 2012).…”