The Butterfly Effect on Emergency Management
Edward Lorenz’s more than 50-year-old premise, which starts out that “if a single flap of a butterfly’s wings can be instrumental in generating a tornado” certainly sounds like it has a direct impact on disasters, but it was designed as a metaphor for chaos theory. There’s even a paper published on the Butterfly Effect of the Butterfly Effect itself. I’m going to make the point that Emergency Management can help society benefit from the Butterfly Effect in a positive way, through Preparedness.
So there’s this theory that when a butterfly flaps its wings in one place, something bad happens someplace else. It’s called “The Butterfly Effect” — and while it was originally used to be a metaphor for many actions and impacts (mostly economic, as many theories are), it built an entire physics model known as “Chaos Theory”. Usually, these theories do end up with something bad happening. I’m going to take the more “glass is half-full” approach and make the case for how the Butterfly Effect can positively impact people — and Emergency Management/Emergency Managers can play a part in making those butterfly wings flap. Just as all disasters start and end locally, local prevention, protection, and preparedness efforts can help locally. It may not be tomorrow, or next month, or even ever. But those communities as a whole — and the emergency managers who perform these missions and…
