At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf.

That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. Odd things seemed to happen everywhere: A plague of crickets engulfed Waco. The Bering Glacier began to shrink. Rain fell on Galveston with greater intensity than anyone could remember. Far away, in Africa, immense thunderstorms blossomed over the city of Dakar, and great currents of wind converged. A wave of atmospheric turbulence slipped from the coast of western Africa. Most such waves faded quickly. This one did not.

In Cuba, America's overconfidence was made all too obvious by the Weather Bureau's obsession with controlling hurricane forecasts, even though Cuba's indigenous weathermen had pioneered hurricane science. As the bureau's forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cuba's own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. A curious stillness gripped Antigua. Only a few unlucky sea captains discovered that the storm had achieved an intensity no man alive had ever experienced.

In Galveston, reassured by Cline's belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people, possibly as many as 10,000, would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

And Isaac Cline would experience his own unbearable loss.

Meticulously researched and vividly written, Isaac's Storm is based on Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last great uncontrollable force. As such, Isaac's Storm carries a warning for our time.

Can we better predict or mitigate the consequences of natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes? Can we reduce the number of oil spills? And what should be done to clean up the mess when something does goes wrong? Why are people concerned about nuclear plants, but so reckless when they go skiing, or when they drive their motor cars? And how can we ensure that experts and ordinary citizens exchange meaningful information about hazards? Over the past fifty years or so, eminent scholars from the decision sciences, geography, sociology, anthropology, and many other fields, have offered useful pointers towards finding an answer to these and other crucial questions. Their prolific and converging efforts have established Risk Analysis as a vivid new discipline, a discipline which this new Routledge collection enables users to discover-or to understand better. The collection conveys essential lessons about how risks can be better assessed. Sophisticated models about the probability and magnitude of harms have been developed and tested in a variety of fields, for example, by engineers trying to build safer plants, or by toxicologists trying to understand the pathways of pollutants. The materials gathered here also help us to understand how powerful perception drivers shape our views of different risks and, as a consequence, how risk communication may be best conducted. Risk also brings together and makes sense of a body of knowledge that has allowed the development of specific methods to join together these two crucial elements into a coherent management `whole'.

This book is the first comprehensive, in-depth English language study of the animals that were left behind in the exclusion zone in the wake of the nuclear meltdown of three of the four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in March 2011, triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake of magnitude 9.0.The Japanese government designated an area of 20-kilometer radius from the nuclear power station as an exclusion zone and evacuated one hundred thousand residents, but left companion animals and livestock animals behind in the radioactive area. Consequently, about 90 percent of the animals in the exclusion zone died. This book juxtaposes policies of the Japanese government toward the animals in Fukushima with the actions of grassroots volunteer animal rescue groups that filled the void of the government.

A collection of articles that showcases the diversity of tsunami science. This is truly an interdisciplinary field that brings together seismologists, engineers, social scientists, emergency managers, geologists, and geophysicists, to name a few. The title reflects this diversity of tsunami research, ranging from understanding the source mechanism, working towards the fast detection of tsunamis in order to take prompt action, and predicting impacts so those affected are better prepared to respond, reduce losses and recover in a reasonable amount of time. The chapters are arranged such that they follow in some virtual way the tsunami from the source to propagation, inundation and impacts on the social, natural or built environment. The book therefore naturally begins with a chapter on the Nankai Trough, a source of great earthquakes and potentially destructive tsunamis. Chapter Two presents a methodology on detecting and identifying tsunamigenic events, followed by Chapter Three, which uses a popular seismological technique to understand tsunami propagation and potential impact on shores. Chapter Four presents an application of tsunami modeling on evacuation planning. Chapters Five and Six look into the impact of tsunamis on structures such as bridges, utilizing valuable data collected after the 2011 Tohoku tsunami in Japan. Chapter Seven is a risk assessment study that predicts the financial cost of a 1960 Chile type of earthquake if it were to happen today. Chapters Eight and Nine look into the social aspect of disasters by interviewing survivors and presenting how geospatial techniques can be used to reveal potential risks in our environment that could potentially hinder the recovery of communities after a disaster. All of the chapters have been written by specialists in their respective fields, representing a vast range of sciences and research that covers nearly the entire globe, stretching from the US to Japan, Taiwan and New Zealand.

Is resilience simply a fad, or is it a new way of thinking about human-environment relations, and the governance of these relations, that has real staying power? Is resilience a dangerous, depoliticizing concept that neuters incipient political activity, or the key to more empowering, emancipatory, and participatory forms of environmental management? Resilience offers an advanced introduction to these debates. It provides students with a detailed review of how the concept emerged from a small corner of ecology to critically challenge conventional environmental management practices, and radicalize how we can think about and manage social and ecological change. But Resilience also situates this new style of thought and management within a particular historical and geographical context. It traces the roots of resilience to the cybernetically-influenced behavioral science of Herbert Simon, the neoliberal political economic theory of new institutional economics, the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, and the modernist design aesthetic of the Bauhaus school. These diverse roots are what distinguish resilience approaches from other ways of studying human-environment relations. Resilience thinking recalibrates the study of social and environmental change around a will to design, a drive or desire to synthesize diverse forms of knowledge and develop collaborative, cross-boundary solutions to complex problems. In contrast to the modes of analysis and critique found in geography and cognate disciplines, resilience approaches strive to pragmatically transform human-environment relations in ways that will produce more sustainable futures for complex social and ecological systems. In providing a road map to debates over resilience that brings together research from geography, anthropology, sociology, international relations, and philosophy, this book gives readers the conceptual and theoretical tools necessary to engage with political and ethical questions about how we can and should live together in an increasingly interconnected and unpredictable world.

In recent years, `environmental collapse' has become an important way of framing and imagining environmental change and destruction, referencing issues such as climate change, species extinction and deteriorating ecosystems. Given its pervasiveness across disciplines and spheres, this edited volume articulates environmental collapse as a discursive phenomenon worthy of sustained critical attention. Building upon contemporary conversations in the fields of archaeology and the natural sciences, this volume coalesces, explores and critically evaluates the diverse array of literatures and imaginaries that constitute environmental collapse. The volume is divided into three sections- Doc- Collapse, Pop Collapse and Craft Collapse -that independently explore distinct modes of representing, and implicit attitudes toward, environmental collapse from the lenses of diverse fields of study including climate science and policy, cinema and photo journalism. Bringing together a broad range of topics and authors, this volume will be of great interest to scholars of environmental communication and environmental humanities.

What is the relationship between education and natural disasters? Can education play a role in ameliorating and mitigating them, preparing people in how to respond, and even helping to prevent them? If so, how? Drawing on research carried out in a number of different countries, including Australia, China, India, Japan, the UK and the USA, the contributors consider the role of education in relation to natural disasters. The case studies expand conceptual and empirical understandings of the understudied relationship between education and natural disasters, uncover the potential and the limitations of education for mitigating, responding to, and potentially preventing, natural disasters. The contributors also consider the extent to which so-called natural disasters, such as mudslides caused by deforestation and flooding areas built on known flood plains, are linked to human behaviour and how education can impact on these.

The largest earthquake ever recorded in Haiti devastated parts of the country, including the capital, on January 12, 2010. The quake, centred about 15 miles south-west of Port-au-Prince, was a magnitude of 7.0, followed by a series of severe aftershocks. It is estimated that 3 million people, approximately one third of the overall population, have been affected by the earthquake. The Government of Haiti is reporting an estimated 112,000 deaths and 194,000 injured. This book explores the Haitian earthquake and global response as immediate needs are met and the humanitarian relief operation continues. The government is struggling to restore the institutions needed for it to function, ensure political stability, and address long-term reconstruction and development planning.