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This essay describes how the renovated 1970s liberalism that would become a major thread of Thatcherism grew on the back of public perceptions of crisis, and adapted worries about ecology to worries about 'financial ecology', or money supply. The natural conditions of money movement have a particular place in the British constitution as the original basis of authority for the 1688 state, when Newtonian ideas of eternal laws of physics were 'financialised' by John Locke. In this thinking, the property basis of citizenship itself is nature, and must be underwired by universal terms of exchange following natural rules. Although Thatcherism has often been described as an alien credo, it was largely enabled by this promise of a return to a financial natural law. In the terms borrowed from Luc Boltanski by William Davies, it returns to a 'political physics' which now takes on a moral role preventing catastrophe, or an 'economic patriotism' seen to protect the constitution from political force. The 1970s return to Locke's understanding of nature builds on and repurposes visions of the catastrophic in popular culture, fiction, children's books and TV, which I describe here. It begins with those eco-catastrophes that describe a 'disaster of nature', which it sees as also including the disaster of the property-producing role of labour, in the 'despotic' role of trade unions, and the perceived threat to money as a universal measure, a disaster that would increasingly be given an arithmetic measure in inflation. For key liberal or neo-Lockean think-tanks of the mid1970s, the attack on natural law by despotic power, measured in inflation, could be seen as a mass erosion of individual responsibility, as dystopian, and as always calling for a restoration of the balances of nature. The result is a permanent and quotidian vigilance over threats to nature that sees their solution, paradoxically, as the creation of more property. Understanding this binding between nature and property in the constitution that gave rise to Anglophone capitalist modernity also helps give a fix on the way stories of ecological disaster can, as Frederick Buell has described, themselves be given values and repurposed for increased consumption.

Beginning with one of the most remarkable ecological collapses of recent time, that of the passenger pigeon, Hadlock goes on to survey collapse processes across the entire spectrum of the natural and man-made world. He takes us through extreme weather events, technological disasters, evolutionary processes, crashing markets and companies, the chaotic nature of Earth's orbit, revolutionary political change, the spread and elimination of disease, and many other fascinating cases. His key thesis is that one or more of six fundamental dynamics consistently show up across this wide range. These six sources of collapse can all be best described and investigated using fundamental mathematical concepts. They include low probability events, group dynamics, evolutionary games, instability, nonlinearity, and network effects, all of which are explained in readily understandable terms. Almost the entirety of the book can be understood by readers with a minimal mathematical background, but even professional mathematicians are likely to get rich insights from the range of examples. The author tells his story with a warmly personal tone and weaves in many of his own experiences, whether from his consulting career of racing around the world trying to head off industrial disasters to his story of watching collapse after collapse in the evolution of an ecosystem on his New Hampshire farm.

Natural Disasters in a Global Environment is a transnational, global and environmental history of natural and man-made disasters. Detailed case studies of past and present events are presented in a historical narrative, making use of the most recent scholarship. -Examines a range of disasters including volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, landslides, hurricanes, famines, and more -Highlights the role of science in studying natural disasters and describes the mechanisms responsible for them -Features a range of case studies which can be used in conjunction with one another or as standalone examples -Covers scientific material in a lucid and accessible style suited to undergraduate students or those outside of scientific disciplines -Traces the transition of our understanding of disasters, from religious and superstitious explanations to contemporary scientific accounts