Libros electrónicos gratuitos para descargar en formato epub How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia Stan Cox, Paul Cox (Literatura española) 9781620970126

Descripción

In How the World Breaks, scientist and author Stan Cox and his son, anthropologist Paul Cox, take us on an breathtaking journey from typhoon-plagued central Philippines to the wildfire belts of Australia and Siberia, and to other regions where people are already living in the greenhouse future; from the slums of Mumbai and Kampala, where residents face repeated flooding so that the wealthy parts of the city can stay dry, to Indonesia, where tens of thousands have lost their homes to the decade-long eruption of a mud volcano caused by gas drilling; from the boom city of Miami, destined to become the Atlantis of the Americas as the world’s oceans rise, to other diverse scenes of past and future destruction. This journey reveals that as long as such destructive events are treated as “natural,” and unless we address the social, ecological, and economic roots of disaster vulnerability, millions more people every year will find themselves spiraling into misery. Nandini, a teacher and a survivor of the devastating floods that struck the Indian Himalaya in 2013, put it this way: “When you disturb the Earth, you bring out a bad reaction from her, like she is regurgitating the destruction.” Anyone interested in the fate of those who live in our planet’s most dangerous places will want to read this book; in it, the Coxes eloquently challenge the increasingly common idea that the Earth’s inhabitants must simply get used to the idea that we’re going to be battered by more and worse catastrophes and therefore must simply become more “resilient.” They argue that such an idea simply places the loss and the responsibility on the shoulders of the earth’s most vulnerable people and communities, leaving the the economically powerful free to make more money and more disasters. On the scene before, during, and after calamity strikes, the Coxes introduce us to the communities that are in the path of destruction and death—often the most marginalized people in the world—and show us that change is more than adaptation and that life is more than just survival.