Landscape Sustainability: Methods and Practices

**63**

**Chapter 6**

**Abstract**

Landscape Hazards: Destructive

Areas - An American Case Study

*Yoichi Kunii, Paige O'Keefe, Jon Burley, Luis Loures* 

*and Marifaye Regina Villanueva*

natural resources, physical geography

**1. Introduction**

Build Environment Zones and Safe

Planners, designers, governmental organizations, and citizens are interested in creating enduring safe buildable environments. Landscape hazards such as earthquakes, wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, flooding, volcanoes, radon, air pollution, sinkholes, avalanche, landslides, and blizzards create a complex set of destructive forces that form disturbances obliterating life and structures. In our study, we examined these forces across the lower 48 states of the United States of America. We applied geographic information system (GIS) technology to identify areas of extreme hazard and areas of low risk. Our investigation indicated that most of our study area (approximately 83%) was exposed to highly reoccurring destructive forces and that only relatively small patches (Upper Midwest-portions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) and thin stretches (Rocky Mountain Front Range—eastern Montana, Wyoming, and eastern Colorado) of land were relatively secure from these forces. This means that in the long term, much of the study area is not safe from disturbances that will destroy much of the built environment, challenging notions of sustainability for numerous metropolitan areas, United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Biosphere Reserves,

UNESCO World Heritage Sites, National Parks, other noted historic sites.

Safe, enduring, sustainable built environments are of great interest to planners, designers, governmental organizations, and citizens. Yet yearly across the globe, built environments are destroyed by tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, tornadoes, volcanoes, flooding, landslides, avalanches, and other environmental hazards. The loss of life and damage to property is extensive. As each event occurs, scholars study the cause of the event, the extent of the damage, and impact upon the environment. For example, Foxworthy and Hill describe the cataclysmic event of the Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption of 1980—this event was only a relatively small volcanic eruption [1]. Ekey recounts the extent and damage of the 1988 Yellowstone fire; while Daniel and Ferguson edited a series of papers discussing the knowledge concerning wildfires and the urban interface [2, 3]. Stanley Changnon

**Keywords:** environmental geology, environmental planning, landscape architecture,
