Sinkholes and Seismic Shifts
Disaster films and storylines overwhelm, shock, and immobilize publics. They offer little in the way of possibilities for social transformation or revolution. The individual crisis, the individualization of global catastrophe in its miniaturization in small disasters, like the sinkhole, personalizes ecological crisis and, quite literally, brings it home. Many of the popular media stories about sinkholes describe them as unpredictable and arbitrary events in which entire houses are consumed, streets and sidewalks cave in, and people and their pets are absorbed by hollow chasms in and around their homes. The sinkhole crisis demands expediency for the immediacy of its threat. The real threat of a sinkhole might be more effective in changing the relationship of individuals to the environment.