Gilbert F. White

Gilbert Fowler White was an American geographer and water resources scholar, born in 1911 and died in 2006, known as the father of floodplain management. His 1942 doctoral research at the University of Chicago argued that flood losses are largely the product of human decisions to build and farm on flood-prone land rather than an unavoidable natural disaster, summarized in his own often quoted line that floods are an act of God but flood losses are largely an act of man. He chaired the University of Chicago geography department and later founded the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his research reshaped federal flood policy away from reliance on dams and levees toward floodplain zoning, insurance and other non-structural adjustments, establishing him as a founding figure of modern natural hazards research.