In a cemetery on the outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of a hundred of what many have called the first casualties of global climate change. They are the so-called abandoned or forgotten victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck France in August 2003, leaving 15,000 people dead. They are those who died alone in Paris and its suburbs, buried at public expense when no family claimed their bodies. They died (and to a great extent lived) unnoticed by their neighbors, discovered in some cases only weeks after their deaths. And as with the victims of Hurricane Katrina, they rapidly became the symbols of the disaster for a nation wringing its hands over the mismanagement of the heat wave and the social and political dysfunctions it revealed. Chasing Ghosts tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the anecdotal lives and deaths of its victims, and the ways in which they illuminate and challenge typical representations of the disaster; and the scientific understandings of catastrophe and its management. It is at once a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape, and an ethnographic account of how a city copes with dramatic change and emerging threats.
