Social Science Disasters

After decades of the Cold War and renewed tensions, in the wake of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, cooperation between the United States and Russia seems impossible to imagine - and yet, as Douglas Smith reveals, it has a forgotten but astonishing historical precedent. In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, Herbert Hoover’s brainchild, to save communist Russia from ruin.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that governments matter again, that competent leadership is the difference between living and dying. A few governments proved adept at handling the crisis while many others failed. Are Western governments healthy and strong enough to keep their citizens safe from another virulent virus—and protect their economies from collapse? Is global leadership passing from the United States to Asia—and particularly China? As The Wake-Up Call makes clear, governments around the world must re-engineer the way they operate to meet the challenges ahead.

On the morning of 26 April 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than 5 percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.

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.

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.

Entre los escombros del huracan Maria, los puertorriquenos y los "Puertopians" ultra-ricos estan atrapados en una batalla campal sobre como reconstruir la isla. Autora Naomi Klein revela como las fuerzas de las politicas de "shock" y del capitalismo del desastre, buscan minar la vision radical y resiliente de una recuperacion justa. El cien por ciento de las regalias por la venta de este libro iran directamente a JunteGente, un espacio de encuentro entre organizaciones en resistencia al capitalismo del desastre y que luchan por una recuperacion justa y sostenible de Puerto Rico.

What would happen if terrorists detonated a nuclear device high above the United States? What about if the sun emitted a large coronal mass ejection that resulted in a damaging geomagnetic storm? In either case, electrical power could be lost for months. Shortages would quickly ensue - food, water, and fuel would disappear within days. Widespread panic and suffering would be unavoidable. Are you prepared for these large-scale disasters? This audiobook will help you to prepare for two the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it (TEOTWAWKI) events: the EMP attack and the solar storm.

Deepwater Horizon was supposed to be the cutting edge of energy exploration: drilling 5,000 feet below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, the $560 million rig would be indispensable in helping to solve the ongoing energy crisis. Then, on April 20, 2010, BP’s dismal safety record came home to roost.

A tremendous upheaval is coming this century: with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. While we can and should do everything we can to mitigate the impact of climate change, the brutal truth is that huge swathes of the world are becoming uninhabitable. Mass migration will remake the world in the 21st century, either by accident, or design—and as Royal Society Science Prize-winning science journalist Gaia Vince shows us, far better the latter.

Catastrophe weaves together compelling stories and potent lessons learned from the calamitous Halifax explosion—the worst non-natural disaster in North America before 9/11. Written from a scholarly perspective but in a journalistic style accessible to the general listener, this book explores how the explosion influenced later emergency planning and disaster theory.

Agent Orange, the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the Virginia Tech massacre, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Deep Horizon gulf oil spill: Each was a disaster in its own right. What they had in common was their aftermath - each required compensation for lives lost, bodies maimed, livelihoods wrecked, economies and ecosystems upended. In each instance, an objective third party had to step up and dole out allocated funds: In each instance, Presidents, Attorneys General, and other public officials have asked Kenneth R. Feinberg to get the job done.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror?

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information—social media, satellite imagery, and more—is often referred to as Big Data. Making sense of this data deluge during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations, which explains why they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians.

Current debates about economic crises typically focus on the role that public debt and debt-fueled public spending play in economic growth. This illuminating and provocative work shows that it is the rapid expansion of private rather than public debt that constrains growth and sparks economic calamities like the financial crisis of 2008.

An account of the Tulsa race riot of 1921 in which White people attacked and murdered Black residents in the Greenwood neighborhood burning and looting. Includes a collection of shorter witness testimonials and a partial list of property and financial losses of its victims.

Drawing on maritime stories from various languages and continents – from Brazil and Southeast Africa to India and the Philippines – Wreckers shares dramatic tales of the sea and the events on land that followed. This offers an alternative timeline for the century after Columbus’ 1492 voyage and sheds light on the fractures and fault lines that accompanied the increasing geographical range of European ships.

If you find yourself worried about all of the junk that is tainting the American food supply, then you might want to consider starting your own garden. Yet, if you use tap water and fertilizers you buy from the store to tend to that garden, you just might be tainting the produce you are growing. One of the best ways to have a garden and avoid these problems is to garden off the grid.

As we all know, our everyday foods have their respective life spans. While some may last a little bit longer than others, there are also some that can't last for more than a week or even for a couple of days. More often than not, we are also not able to consume the food within its given shelf life. So we just wish we can prolong its freshness. If you are one of those people who have always been planning to do canning and preserving yet still haven't started because you do not know anything about it, then it is about time that you learn the basic how-to of canning and preserving.

Americans have been shocked in the past few years to discover how vulnerable our nation is to disaster, be it terrorist attack or act of God. But what's truly shocking, argues leading security expert Stephen Flynn, is how little we have learned from the cataclysms of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. When it comes to catastrophe, America is living on borrowed time and squandering it. But it doesn't have to be this way.

This is an unconventional biography of an unconventional woman. Eglantyne Jebb moved from drawing rooms to war zones, often defying expectation and at times breaking the law. Although not fond of individual children, she founded Save the Children and originated the revolutionary concept of children's human rights. Clare Mulley brings to life the brilliant, charismatic, passionate, and compassionate woman, whose work has saved millions of lives and permanently changed the way the world treats children. Save the Children ambassador Joely Richardson narrates this extraordinary story.