Catastrophe In The Making

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Catastrophe in the Making

Author : William R. Freudenburg
Publisher : Island Press
ISBN 13 : 9781610911634
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (116 download)

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Book Synopsis Catastrophe in the Making by : William R. Freudenburg

Download or read book Catastrophe in the Making written by William R. Freudenburg and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 book to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a “perfect storm,” but a tragedy of our own making—and one that could become commonplace. The authors, one a longtime New Orleans resident, argue that breached levees and sloppy emergency response are just the most obvious examples of government failure. The true problem is more deeply rooted and insidious, and stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast. Based on the false promise of widespread prosperity, communities across the U.S. have embraced all brands of “economic development” at all costs. In Louisiana, that meant development interests turning wetlands into shipping lanes. By replacing a natural buffer against storm surges with a 75-mile long, obsolete canal that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they guided the hurricane into the heart of New Orleans and adjacent communities. The authors reveal why, despite their geographic differences, California and Missouri are building—quite literally—toward similar destruction. Too often, the U.S. “growth machine” generates wealth for a few and misery for many. Drawing lessons from the most expensive “natural” disaster in American history, Catastrophe in the Making shows why thoughtless development comes at a price we can ill afford.

The Cure for Catastrophe

Author : Robert Muir-Wood
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465096476
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (65 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cure for Catastrophe by : Robert Muir-Wood

Download or read book The Cure for Catastrophe written by Robert Muir-Wood and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.

Disaster Capitalism

Author : Antony Loewenstein
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1784781169
Total Pages : 443 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (847 download)

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Book Synopsis Disaster Capitalism by : Antony Loewenstein

Download or read book Disaster Capitalism written by Antony Loewenstein and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “keenly observed and timely investigation” of how capitalism makes a fortune from disaster, poverty and catastrophe—“a potent weapon for shock resistors around the world” (Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine) Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. What emerges through Loewenstein’s reporting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valuable commodity.

Facing Catastrophe

Author : Robert R. M. Verchick
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674047915
Total Pages : 335 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Facing Catastrophe by : Robert R. M. Verchick

Download or read book Facing Catastrophe written by Robert R. M. Verchick and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to three simple commands: Go green, be fair, and keep safe. He argues that government must assume a stronger regulatory role in managing natural infrastructure, distributional fairness, and public risk.--[book cover].

Katrina

Author : Andy Horowitz
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 067497171X
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (749 download)

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Book Synopsis Katrina by : Andy Horowitz

Download or read book Katrina written by Andy Horowitz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year “The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.” —Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. “Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.” —New York Review of Books “If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

The Culture of Calamity

Author : Kevin Rozario
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226725707
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (267 download)

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Book Synopsis The Culture of Calamity by : Kevin Rozario

Download or read book The Culture of Calamity written by Kevin Rozario and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-08-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turn on the news and it looks as if we live in a time and place unusually consumed by the specter of disaster. The events of 9/11 and the promise of future attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, and the inevitable consequences of environmental devastation all contribute to an atmosphere of imminent doom. But reading an account of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, with its vivid evocation of buildings “crumbling as one might crush a biscuit,” we see that calamities—whether natural or man-made—have long had an impact on the American consciousness. Uncovering the history of Americans’ responses to disaster from their colonial past up to the present, Kevin Rozario reveals the vital role that calamity—and our abiding fascination with it—has played in the development of this nation. Beginning with the Puritan view of disaster as God’s instrument of correction, Rozario explores how catastrophic events frequently inspired positive reactions. He argues that they have shaped American life by providing an opportunity to take stock of our values and social institutions. Destruction leads naturally to rebuilding, and here we learn that disasters have been a boon to capitalism, and, paradoxically, indispensable to the construction of dominant American ideas of progress. As Rozario turns to the present, he finds that the impulse to respond creatively to disasters is mitigated by a mania for security. Terror alerts and duct tape represent the cynical politician’s attitude about 9/11, but Rozario focuses on how the attacks registered in the popular imagination—how responses to genuine calamity were mediated by the hyperreal thrills of movies; how apocalyptic literature, like the best-selling Left Behind series, recycles Puritan religious outlooks while adopting Hollywood’s style; and how the convergence of these two ways of imagining disaster points to a new postmodern culture of calamity. The Culture of Calamity will stand as the definitive diagnosis of the peculiarly American addiction to the spectacle of destruction.

Catastrophizing

Author : Gerard Passannante
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022661235X
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (266 download)

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Book Synopsis Catastrophizing by : Gerard Passannante

Download or read book Catastrophizing written by Gerard Passannante and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

The Making of the Greek Genocide

Author : Erik Sjöberg
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 1785333267
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis The Making of the Greek Genocide by : Erik Sjöberg

Download or read book The Making of the Greek Genocide written by Erik Sjöberg and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During and after World War I, over one million Ottoman Greeks were expelled from Turkey, a watershed moment in Greek history that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. And while few dispute the expulsion’s tragic scope, it remains the subject of fierce controversy, as activists have fought for international recognition of an atrocity they consider comparable to the Armenian genocide. This book provides a much-needed analysis of the Greek genocide as cultural trauma. Neither taking the genocide narrative for granted nor dismissing it outright, Erik Sjöberg instead recounts how it emerged as a meaningful but contested collective memory with both nationalist and cosmopolitan dimensions.

Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster

Author : Eugenie L. Birch
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812204484
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster by : Eugenie L. Birch

Download or read book Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster written by Eugenie L. Birch and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-01-09 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disasters—natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks—are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will. Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon. This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.

The Shock Doctrine

Author : Naomi Klein
Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1429919485
Total Pages : 721 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis The Shock Doctrine by : Naomi Klein

Download or read book The Shock Doctrine written by Naomi Klein and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

Doom

Author : Niall Ferguson
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593297385
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis Doom by : Niall Ferguson

Download or read book Doom written by Niall Ferguson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.

Catastrophe and Philosophy

Author : David J. Rosner
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498540120
Total Pages : 371 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis Catastrophe and Philosophy by : David J. Rosner

Download or read book Catastrophe and Philosophy written by David J. Rosner and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a different approach to the history of philosophy, exploring a neglected theme, the relationship between catastrophe and philosophy. The book analyzes this theme within texts from ancient times to the present, from a global perspective. The book’s focus is timely and relevant today, as the planet is certainly facing a number of impending catastrophes right now, e.g., environmental degradation, overpopulation, the threat of nuclear war, etc.

Design and Catastrophe

Author : L. James Gibson
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781940980300
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (83 download)

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Book Synopsis Design and Catastrophe by : L. James Gibson

Download or read book Design and Catastrophe written by L. James Gibson and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An in-depth exploration of the way the biblical record illuminates various phenomena observed in the natural world"--

There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster

Author : Gregory Squires
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136084827
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster by : Gregory Squires

Download or read book There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster written by Gregory Squires and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster is the first comprehensive critical book on the catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. The disaster will go down on record as one of the worst in American history, not least because of the government’s inept and cavalier response. But it is also a huge story for other reasons; the impact of the hurricane was uneven, and race and class were deeply implicated in the unevenness. Hartman and. Squires assemble two dozen critical scholars and activists who present a multifaceted portrait of the social implications of the disaster. The book covers the response to the disaster and the roles that race and class played, its impact on housing and redevelopment, the historical context of urban disasters in America and the future of economic development in the region. It offers strategic guidance for key actors - government agencies, financial institutions, neighbourhood organizations - in efforts to rebuild shattered communities.

The Disaster Artist

Author : Greg Sestero
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476730407
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (767 download)

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Book Synopsis The Disaster Artist by : Greg Sestero

Download or read book The Disaster Artist written by Greg Sestero and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 2003, an independent film called The room ... made its disastrous debut in Los Angeles. Described by one reviewer as 'like getting stabbed in the head,' the six-million-dollar film earned a grand total of $1800 at the box office and closed after two weeks. Ten years later, The room is an international cult phenomenon ... In [this book], actor Greg Sestero, Tommy's costar and longtime best friend, recounts the film's long, strange journey to infamy, unraveling mysteries for fans ... as well as the question that plagues the uninitiated: how the hell did a movie this awful ever get made?"--

Deadly Indifference

Author : Michael D. Brown
Publisher : Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN 13 : 1589794869
Total Pages : 245 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (897 download)

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Book Synopsis Deadly Indifference by : Michael D. Brown

Download or read book Deadly Indifference written by Michael D. Brown and published by Taylor Trade Publications. This book was released on 2011-06-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At last, former Under Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Brown—infamously praised by President George W. Bush for doing a "heckuva job" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—tells his side of the response to one of the greatest natural disasters to occur in the United States. Without making excuses for anyone, least of all the President of the United States or himself, Brown describes in detail what ultimately turned out to be the largest federal response to a natural disaster in U.S. history.

Disaster

Author : Christopher Cooper
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1429900245
Total Pages : 374 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

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Book Synopsis Disaster by : Christopher Cooper

Download or read book Disaster written by Christopher Cooper and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on exclusive interviews, the inside story of how America's emergency response system failed and how it remains dangerously broken When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on the morning of August 29, 2005, federal and state officials were not prepared for the devastation it would bring—despite all the drills, exercises, and warnings. In this troubling exposé of what went wrong, Christopher Cooper and Robert Block of The Wall Street Journal show that the flaws go much deeper than out-of-touch federal bureaucrats or overwhelmed local politicians. Drawing on exclusive interviews with federal, state, and local officials, Cooper and Block take readers inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to reveal the inexcusable mismanagement during Hurricane Katrina—the bad decisions that were made, the facts that were ignored, the individuals who saw that the system was broken but were unable to fix it. America's top emergency response officials had long known that a calamitous hurricane was likely to hit New Orleans, but that seems to have had little effect on planning or execution. Disaster demonstrates that the incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina is a wake-up call to all Americans, wherever they live, about how distressingly vulnerable we remain. Washington is ill equipped to handle large-scale emergencies, be they floods or fires, natural events or terrorist attacks, and Cooper and Block make a strong case for overhauling of the nation's emergency response system. This is a book that no American can afford to ignore.