Some of the most striking news stories from natural disasters are of animals tied to trees or cats swimming through murky flood waters. Although the issue of evacuating pets has gained more attention in recent disasters, there are still many failures throughout local and national systems of managing pets and accommodating animals in emergencies. All Creatures Safe and Sound is a comprehensive study of what goes wrong in our disaster response that shows how people can better manage pets in emergencies-from the household level to the large-scale, national level. Authors Sarah DeYoung and Ashley Farmer offer practical disaster preparedness tips while they address the social complexities that affect disaster management and animal rescue. They track the developments in the management of pets since Hurricane Katrina, including an analysis of the 2006 PETS Act, which dictates that animals should be included in hazard and disaster planning. Other chapters focus on policies in place for sheltering and evacuation, coalitions for animal welfare and the prevention of animal cruelty, organizational coordination, decision-making, preparedness, the role of social media in animal rescue and response, and how privilege and power shape disaster experiences and outcomes. Using data they collected from seven major recent American disasters, ranging from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Florence to the Camp, Tubbs, and Carr Fires in California and the Hawaii Lava Flow, the authors provide insights about the successes and failures of animal care. All Creatures Safe and Sound also outlines what still needs to change to best prepare for the safety and welfare of pets, livestock, and other companion animals in times of crisis.

The contemporary world is characterized by the massive use of digital communication platforms and services that allow people to stay in touch with each other and their organizations. On the other hand, it is also a world with great challenges in terms of crisis, disaster, and emergency situations of various kinds. Thus, it is crucial to understand the role of digital platforms/services in the context of crisis, disaster, and emergency situations. Digital Services in Crisis, Disaster, and Emergency Situations presents recent studies on crisis, disaster, and emergency situations in which digital technologies are considered as a key mediator. Featuring multi- and interdisciplinary research findings, this comprehensive reference work highlights the relevance of society's digitization and its usefulness and contribution to the different phases and types of risk scenarios. Thus, the book investigates the design of digital services that are specifically developed for use in crisis situations and examines services such as online social networks that can be used for communication purposes in emergency events. Highlighting themes that include crisis management communication, risk monitoring, digital crisis intervention, and smartphone applications, this book is of particular use to governments, institutions, corporations, and professionals who deal with crisis, disaster, and emergency scenarios, as well as researchers, academicians, and students working in fields such as communications, multimedia, sociology, political science, and engineering.

While under lockdown, women's work expanded exponentially, especially care work at home, including emotional care work. What the pandemic exposed is the unpaid care work that most women perform. Midway through the stages of lockdown researchers started to do surveys to find out what is happening to women, expressing the results of the research in statistical terms. Yet, this research does not get to the heart of the matter: women's lived experience of an historical epoch - of a virus spreading at breakneck speed across geographical boundaries, condemning the whole world to viral infections, state sanctioned lockdowns and death.

This has never happened before, so no-one was prepared for what was to come and how to handle the crisis. This collection of essays captures the existential feelings of anxiety, angst and uncertainty. They also express exhaustion, discovering new dimensions of life and rethinking priorities in the face of a rupture of what has gone before. What we hear in these essays are the voices of women speaking to this pandemic and what lockdown has meant to them and for them.

Some essays are written with raw emotion, others in beautiful poetic prose, some in poetry. Through the essays runs a golden thread of coming to terms with a new way of life and what it means to be a woman, a mother, a partner, a friend and a Covid-19 victim in the year that will be known as the year of the pandemic. The writers are from all walks and stages of life and the book represents stories from a range of different countries.

This collection of essays will help readers to make sense of the impact of Covid-19 on everyday reality.

Storms strike! When natural disasters take place there is always an a consequence. The survivors of dangerous storms have to rebuild their lives. There is a new beginning after the storm. You only have two decisions in life. You can choose to live or you can choose to die. These are the survivors who chose to persevere through devastating tragedy, to live!

Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben collects all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world. Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy-together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions-is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms. This leads to the urgency of the volume's title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?

In New England, 1816 was called the Year Without a Summer. Crops failed throughout America and, in Western Europe, it was even worse, with food riots and armed groups raiding bakeries and grain markets. All this turmoil followed a catastrophic volcanic eruption--a year earlier on the other side of the world--the eruption of Tambora, a blast heard almost a thousand miles away.
In When the Planet Rages, Charles Officer and Jake Page describe some of the great events of environmental history, from calamities such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 (the greatest in recorded history) and the ice ages, to recent man-made disasters such as Chernobyl, acid rain, and the depletion of the ozone layer. Officer and Page provide fascinating discussions of meteorites and comets; of the demise of mammoths, mastodons, and dinosaurs; and of great floods that have swept the earth. But they also show that human activity can make trouble for nature, discussing the depletion of natural resources (we burn coal and oil at millions of times their natural rate of production), air pollution in Los Angeles and London (where the Killer Smog of 1952 caused the death of some four thousand people), and the pollution of major waterways, like the Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie. For the paperback edition, the authors have included a new preface, have added material on the recent Sichuan, China earthquake, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina, and discuss such topics as of the (un)predictability of symptoms of global warming.
Ranging from the monumental eruption at Krakatoa to industrial disasters such as the mercury poisoning in Japan's Minamata Bay, When the Planet Rages will engage anyone concerned with the environment and the natural world.

What are the effects of a catastrophic earthquake on a society, its culture and politics? Which of these effects are temporary, and which endure? Are the various effects immediately discernible, or do they manifest themselves over time? What roles do artists, and writers in particular have in witnessing, bearing testimony to, and gauging the effects of natural disasters? What is the worth of literature in a time of disaster? These are the fundamental questions addressed in this book, which examines the case of the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010, a uniquely destructive event in the recent history of cataclysmic disasters, in Haiti and the broader world. The book argues that Haitian literature since 2010 has played a primary role in recording, bearing testimony to, and engaging with the social and psychological effects of the disaster. It further shows that daring literary invention-what Edwidge Danticat calls "dangerous creation"-constitutes one of the most striking and important means of communicating the effects of such a disaster, and that close engagement with the creative imagination is one of the most privileged ways for the outsider in particular to begin to comprehend the experience of living in and through a time of catastrophe.