How the World Breaks
eBook - ePub

How the World Breaks

Life in Catastrophe's Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

How the World Breaks

Life in Catastrophe's Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia

About this book

We've always lived on a dangerous planet, but its disasters aren't what they used to be. How the World Breaks gives us a breathtaking new view of crisis and recovery on the unstable landscapes of the Earth's hazard zones. Father and son authors Stan and Paul Cox take us to the explosive fire fronts of overheated Australia, the future lost city of Miami, the fights over whether and how to fortify New York City in the wake of Sandy, the Indonesian mud volcano triggered by natural gas drilling, and other communities that are reimagining their lives after quakes, superstorms, tornadoes, and landslides.

In the very decade when we should be rushing to heal the atmosphere and address the enormous inequalities of risk, a strange idea has taken hold of global disaster policy: resilience. Its proponents say that threatened communities must simply learn the art of resilience, adapt to risk, and thereby survive. This doctrine obscures the human hand in creating disasters and requires the planet's most beleaguered people to absorb the rush of floodwaters and the crush of landslides, freeing the world economy to go on undisturbed. The Coxes' great contribution is to pull the disaster debate out of the realm of theory and into the muck and ash of the world's broken places. There we learn that change is more than mere adaptation and life is more than mere survival. Ultimately, How the World Breaks reveals why—unless we address the social, ecological, and economic roots of disaster—millions more people every year will find themselves spiraling into misery. It is essential reading for our time.

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Yes, you can access How the World Breaks by Stan Cox,Paul Cox in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Ecology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction
  8. 1. Fire Regimes: Australia and Siberia
  9. 2. Leave It Up to Batman: The Philippines
  10. 3. Neighbors to the Sky: New York City
  11. 4. Every Silver Lining . . .
  12. 5. Gray Goo: East Java, Indonesia
  13. 6. How to Booby-Trap a Planet
  14. 7. Foreshock, Shock, Aftershock: L’Aquila, Italy
  15. 8. Atlantis of the Americas: Miami, Florida
  16. 9. Engineer, Defend, Insure, Absorb, Leave
  17. 10. The Absorbers: Mumbai, India, and Kampala, Uganda
  18. 11. Vulnerability Seeps in Everywhere
  19. 12. Keeping the Lights On: Montserrat, West Indies
  20. 13. “We Do Things Big Here”: Greensburg, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri
  21. 14. When Mountains Fall: Uttarakhand State, India
  22. Epilogue: Rainbow of Chaos
  23. Notes
  24. Index
  25. About the Authors