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In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than twenty-five hundred responses, and followed up two years later with more than five hundred of the initial respondents. Showcasing these landmark findings, Caught in the Path of Katrina yields a more complete understanding of the traumas endured because of the Storm of the Century. The authors report on evacuation behaviors, separations from family, damage to homes, and physical and psychological conditions among residents of seven of the parishes and c...
Ranging widely, essayists here examine the 1900 storm that ravaged Galveston, Texas, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Titanic sinking, the Northridge earthquake, the crash of Air Florida Flight 90, the 1977 Chicago El train crash, and many other devastating events. These catastrophes elicited vastly different responses, and thus raise a number of important questions. How, for example did African Americans, feminists, and labor activists respond to the Titanic disaster? Why did the El train crash take on such symbolic meaning for the citizens of Chicago? In what ways did the San Francisco earthquake reaffirm rather than challenge a predominant faith in progress?
Environmental Sociology: From Analysis to Action illustrates how sociological perspectives can help us better understand the causes and consequences of environmental problems and provides examples of efforts to ameliorate these problems. The fourth edition of this environmental sociology reader includes 22 edited excerpts (10 of them new to this edition) that address, among other things, environmental inequalities, knowledge creation, media, and perspectives on disaster. The selected pieces use a variety of sociological perspectives, including environmental justice, power structure research, ecological modernization, ecological footprint, and more, to examine a wide range of environment-rela...
The development of this volume reflects the collective research interests of the editors over the last seven years on the Exxon disaster in Alaska ... [Their] primary objective in compiling this volume was to provide a general introduction to the social problem of technological disasters in terms of a case study of the largest oil spill in North American history, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill ... [They] have used a number of these articles as required readings in courses such as social problems, environmental sociology, sociology of disasters, human ecology, the community, and environmental economics. Those reprinted in this text proved to be both informative and interesting to a broad cross-section of students from undergraduate to graduate ... This volume will be of interest to researchers and a broad spectrum of the general public.-Pref.
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Introduction: A Way of Looking -- APPROACHES -- View from the Fourteenth Floor -- The Individual and the Social -- Knowing the Place for the First Time -- Disaster at Buffalo Creek -- BEGINNINGS -- Human Origins -- Discovering the Social -- Coming to Terms with Social Life -- The Journey of Piotr and Kasia Walkowiak -- PLACES -- Village -- City -- Worlds Beyond -- It Seemed Like the Whole Bay Died -- PROCESSES -- Becoming a Person -- Creating Divisions -- Becoming a People -- War Comes to Pakrac -- Postscripts -- Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- G -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Oil Injustice examines the mobilization efforts of four communities with different oil histories in response to the construction of an oil pipeline. Using multiple sites in Ecuador as case studies, Patricia Widener examines the efforts of grassrootsgroups, non-governmental organizations, activist mayors, and transnational advocates that mobilized to redefine the country's oil path and to represent the voice of many local communities and organizations that sought to offer an alternative to the nation's oil dependency and to the use of its oil wealth. These groups generated divergent and at times rival reactions to the pipeline, though at their core, the multiple campaigns developed from a shared history and awareness of a number of marginalized communities and degraded environments in areas most important to the oil process. Widener shows that global environmental justice demands are bound within a capitalist political system, where community activists, national NGOs and their international allies are forced to seek local change rather than attempt to defeat a disabling and unequal system.
Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. The book begins with two chapters that address Katrina's impact and the planning and public sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods are then presented and analyzed. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L'Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore hous...
Environmental decision-making in recent decades has become increasingly dependent on scientific expertise. Grounded in universal principles of knowledge, these expert evaluations often depart from the assessments of ordinary members of the public. Whether the issue is nuclear power, genetic testing, food safety, or biodiversity, conservation lay people are increasingly charging experts with being ignorant of local contextual considerations. Scientists, as well as many policy-makers, in turn contend that the public is hopelessly irrational in gauging environmental risks. A growing group of social theorists has begun to take a keen interest in these disputes because risk captures central themes of late modernity. Increasing individualization, emerging new social movements, and declining public trust in key institutions are notions that loom large in these debates. Highlighting both theoretical and empirical perspectives, this volume brings together a distinguished group of environmental sociologists who critique and extend current thinking on what it means to live in a 'risk society'.
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