Abstract
The freezing rain of January 1998 in Northeastern North America seemed to be a natural disaster, but it in fact initiated a technological disaster because of decisions to superimpose vulnerable infrastructures on this region and make society dependent on them. This study investigates the interaction of manufactured risks and nature's risks, which is crucial now that modern society is generating creeping dangers such as global climate change that threaten to provoke sudden calamities. Examining the problematic relationship between ever-increasing knowledge and the obduracy of ignorance from a realist perspective captured the vulnerabilities of modern society in its context of nature's autonomous dynamics.
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