The Lynmouth Flood Disaster as a ‘Rural Enterprise Metabolic Rift’ and Securitising Rural Regions Against Future Hazards of Planetary Collapse

This article advances a novel synthesis of two critical theoretical positions to reinterpret the Lynmouth flood disaster of 1952 – an event which caused the deaths of 34 people. Rural enterprise criminology and the metabolic rift concept are brought into dialogue to elaborate a foundation from which to articulate the multifactorial process that eventuated in the flood. The article fills an absence in the social sciences on the significant loss of life that moves beyond descriptive narratives of the tragedy and dated positivist epistemology. The article displaces determinist explanations of natural science and popular invocations of ‘acts of God’ and offers an account based in rural criminology and dialectical materialism. A range of strategies and land management negligence are shown to have led to environmentally deleterious agricultural stewardship. Processes that were oriented to short-term commercial gains and conditioned by the pressures of historically specific political economic contexts. The article proposes a novel reframing of the flood and a framework to securitize rural regions against future socially conditioned environmental hazards.