Social Science Disasters

Carl Safina has been hailed as one of the top 100 conservationists of the 20th century (Audubon Magazine) and A Sea in Flames is his blistering account of the months-long manmade disaster that tormented a region and mesmerized the nation. Traveling across the Gulf to make sense of an ever-changing story and its often-nonsensical twists, Safina expertly deconstructs the series of calamitous misjudgments that caused the Deepwater Horizon blowout, zeroes in on BP’s misstatements, evasions, and denials, reassesses his own reaction to the government’s crisis handling, and reviews the consequences of the leak.

On May 2, 2008, an enormous tropical cyclone made landfall in Burma, wreaking untold havoc and leaving an official toll of 138,300 dead and missing. In the days that followed, the sheer scale of the disaster became apparent as information began to seep out from the hard-hit delta area.

In the fall of 2015, Steven Heighton made an overnight decision to travel to the front lines of the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece and enlist as a volunteer. He arrived on the isle of Lesvos with a duffel bag and a dubious grasp of Greek, his mother's native tongue, and worked on the landing beaches and in OXY - a jerrybuilt, ad hoc transit camp providing simple meals, dry clothes, and a brief rest to refugees after their crossing from Turkey. Reaching Mithymna is a firsthand account of the crisis and an engaged exploration of the borders that divide us and the ties that bind.

An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford. We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of Covid-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. To Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, this is a retrograde notion. He believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report.

When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to "natural disasters" or "acts of God." But what if they're neither? What if we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves? That's the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first audiobook to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a "perfect storm," but a tragedy of our own making - and one that could become commonplace.

In August 1995, twenty-six passengers and a crew of three board a commuter plane in Atlanta headed for Gulfport, Mississippi. Shortly after takeoff they hear an explosion, and some see a mangled engine lodged against the wing. From that moment, nine minutes and twenty seconds elapse until the crippled plane crashes in a west Georgia hayfield. Gary Pomerantz takes listeners deep into the hearts and minds of the people aboard, each of whom prepares in his or her own way for what may come.

Rescue offers riveting stories about what happens when things go terribly wrong in some of the world's most perilous places: Himalayan peaks, African plains, vast oceans, remote Arctic wilderness. The result is a collection of first-rate prose read by masterful narrators that makes for compulsive listening.

On Shishmaref Island in Alaska, homes are being washed into the sea. In the South Pacific, small island nations face annihilation by encroaching waters. In coastal Louisiana, an area the size of a football field disappears every day. For these communities, sea level rise isn’t a distant, abstract fear: it’s happening now and it’s threatening their way of life. In The Rising Sea, Orrin H. Pilkey and Rob Young warn that many other coastal areas may be close behind.

La crisis ambiental se cobrará más vidas y golpeará más duraderamente a México que el Covid-19, simplemente no hemos querido verlo.

February 5, 1898. Witnesses report a giant orange fireball reflected in the glacial waters of Alaska's Lynn Canal. At the height of Klondike gold fever, the Clara Nevada disappeared into an epic storm - taking passengers and priceless cargo with it. Was the explosion an accident or a robbery gone wrong? Did Captain C.H. Lewis make off with $165,000 ($13.6 million in today's currency) in raw gold? Or was the sinking a case of a sea-weary steamer meeting an untimely end?

If you want to continue your lifestyle AND make smart money moves, then The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide is the book for you. Saving money and profiting means understanding the many aspects of life where problems can strike, and this book will be your guide. In the face of disaster it is better to plan than panic. A bulletproof plan will protect you from the disastrous surprise of a mishap-from shakeups in the stock market to the next oil crisis to fires and floods.

This is the story of three terrible famines. The first is an Gorta Mór, the great hunger of Ireland, which began in 1846. The second is the deadly famine that struck Bengal in 1943. The third is the Ethiopian famine, which first sprung up in lethal form in the 1970s under Emperor Haile Selassie and then reappeared under the brutal dictator Mengistu in the 1980s.

How an underground fire turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town. On May 27, 1962, a fire set to clean up the town dump outside Centralia, Pennsylvania, spread by accident into abandoned coal mines beneath the small town. This spawned the environmental disaster known around the world today as the Centralia Mine Fire.

Resilience is a worthwhile pursuit, both for individuals and communities. But how do we build strength into our lives as citizens? And into our towns? According to author Scott James, the answer lies within our neighborhoods, where sustainability meets preparedness. Prepared Neighborhoods will walk you step by step through creating a more resilient - and enjoyable - neighborhood and community.

A passionate student of Japanese poetry, theater, and art for much of her life, Gretel Ehrlich felt compelled to return to the earthquake-and-tsunami-devastated Tohoku coast to bear witness, listen to survivors, and experience their terror and exhilaration in villages and towns where all shelter and hope seemed lost.

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end - if indeed it will - and why we can't stop fantasizing about it.

Matt Damon besuchte 2006 das ländliche Sambia und traf dort Frauen und Mädchen, die täglich mehrere Stunden damit zubrachten, ihre Familien mit Wasser aus weit entfernten Quellen zu versorgen – Zeit, die ihnen fehlte, um zu spielen, zur Schule zu gehen oder eigenes Geld zu verdienen. Über zwei Milliarden Menschen weltweit haben keinen sicheren Zugang zu sauberem Trinkwasser und sanitären Anlagen.

The year was 1922: World War I had just come to a close, the Ottoman Empire was in decline, and Asa Jennings, a YMCA worker from upstate New York, had just arrived in the quiet coastal city of Smyrna to teach sports to boys. Several hundred miles to the east in Turkey's interior, tensions between Greeks and Turks had boiled over into deadly violence. Mustapha Kemal, now known as Ataturk, and his Muslim army soon advanced into Smyrna, a Christian city, where a half a million terrified Greek and Armenian refugees had fled in a desperate attempt to escape his troops.

Horrified, saddened, and angered: That was the American people's reaction to the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the 2008 financial crisis. In Consuming Catastrophe, Timothy Recuber presents a unique and provocative look at how these four very different disasters took a similar path through public consciousness. He explores the myriad ways we engage with and negotiate our feelings about disasters and tragedies.

An inside account of the fight to contain the world's deadliest diseases - and the panic and corruption that make them worse. The Next Pandemic is a firsthand account of disasters like anthrax, bird flu, and others - and how we could do more to prevent their return. It is both a gripping story of our brushes with fate and an urgent lesson on how we can keep ourselves safe from the inevitable next pandemic.