How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia

by Stan Cox, Paul Cox

Overview

We've always lived on a dangerous planet, but its disasters aren't what they used to be. How the World Breaks gives us a breathtaking new view of crisis and recovery on the unstable landscapes of the Earth's hazard zones. Father and son authors Stan and Paul Cox take us to the explosive fire fronts of overheated Australia, the future lost city of Miami, the fights over whether and how to fortify New York City in the wake of Sandy, the Indonesian mud volcano triggered by natural gas drilling, and other communities that are reimagining their lives after quakes, superstorms, tornadoes, and landslides.

In the very decade when we should be rushing to heal the atmosphere and address the enormous inequalities of risk, a strange idea has taken hold of global disaster policy: resilience. Its proponents say that threatened communities must simply learn the art of resilience, adapt to risk, and thereby survive. This doctrine obscures the human hand in creating disasters and requires the planet's most beleaguered people to absorb the rush of floodwaters and the crush of landslides, freeing the world economy to go on undisturbed. The Coxes' great contribution is to pull the disaster debate out of the realm of theory and into the muck and ash of the world's broken places. There we learn that change is more than mere adaptation and life is more than mere survival. Ultimately, How the World Breaks reveals why—unless we address the social, ecological, and economic roots of disaster—millions more people every year will find themselves spiraling into misery. It is essential reading for our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620970126
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Stan Cox is research coordinator at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, where he lives. His books include Losing Our Cool and Any Way You Slice It (both published by The New Press). Paul Cox is an anthropologist and a writer on development and disaster. He is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and regularly conducts research in Central Africa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Fire Regimes: Australia and Siberia 15

2 Leave It Up to Batman: The Philippines 38

3 Neighbors to the Sky: New York City 64

4 Every Silver Lining… 88

5 Gray Goo: East Java, Indonesia 122

6 How to Booby-Trap a Planet 143

7 Foreshock, Shock, Aftershock: L'Aquila, Italy 160

8 Atlantis of the Americas: Miami, Florida 175

9 Engineer, Defend, Insure, Absorb, Leave 198

10 The Absorbers: Mumbai, India, and Kampala, Uganda 224

11 Vulnerability Seeps in Everywhere 238

12 Keeping the Lights On: Montserrat, West Indies 257

13 "We Do Things Big Here": Greensburg, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri 278

14 When Mountains Fall: Uttarakhand State, India 298

Epilogue: Rainbow of Chaos 317

Notes 325

Index 387

Editorial Reviews

05/09/2016
Scientist Stan and anthropologist Paul, father-and-son ecological investigators, travel the world on a grand tour of recent geoclimatic disasters in order to imagine how human habitats will change as the planet becomes warmer, wetter, and more crowded. They have few positive things to write about, covering such events as wildfires in Australia’s Blue Mountains, Hindu pilgrims caught in a Himalayan mudslide, super typhoons in the Philippines, and the Caribbean island of Monserrat getting buried in volcanic ash. U.S. locations, including Miami and the Tornado Alley of the Midwest, also feature prominently on the pair’s itinerary. En route, they tackle some difficult questions: Do natural disasters promote long-term economic growth? Can cities be made to float? How do a northward-creeping taiga and melting permafrost affect carbon balance? Does climate change disproportionately affect the world’s poor? Attempting to address these and other pressing ecological quandaries leads them to make some intriguing intellectual connections: they touch upon cultural anthropology, Enlightenment literature, Ponzi scheming, and real-life engineering that sounds like science fiction. While definitive answers remain difficult to come by, their message is clear: solving the ecological problems of climate change requires more than technological fixes. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for How the World Breaks:
"Highly recommended"
—Library Journal

“A frightening, from-the-trenches overview of "natural" and man-made disasters—and responses to them—across the globe.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“This is an important book. The Coxes with eyes wide deep see beneath the shimmering surface of progress and development. They name our demons, revealing how the assumptions we make for the sake of our behavior are burdening to death the most vulnerable people of the world and accelerating our demise.”
—Godfrey Reggio, director of the Qatsi trilogy

“In this period of ecological, social, and economic collapse, How The World Breaks is a must-read for all.”
—Dr. Vandana Shiva, founder of Navdanya

“This book, crafted with stunning, moving, and crisp story-telling, settles the score about the stark human fingerprint on our own civilization's agonies and misfortunes. It is clearly a battle we cannot afford to lose, and How the World Breaks is the reality jolt we need. I will hold Stan and Paul Cox responsible for that day when we walk towards a new dawn declaring triumph over the madness.”
—Yeb Saño, former climate diplomat and leader of the People's Pilgrimage

“I found How the World Breaks intriguing and unexpected in how it uses major disasters to illuminate inequalities of both wealth and power—and cases where a society acted wisely.”
—Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts and other books

“Think climate change is a far off, distant threat? Then think again. In their must-read new book How the World Breaks, father and son team Stan and Paul Cox travel the world exploring how the devastating impacts of disasters are made notably worse by human-caused climate change.”
—Michael E. Mann, distinguished professor, Penn State University, and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

“A devastating account of how regular working people show great bravery and generosity in the face of disaster, but also how the sheer number of disasters can overwhelm a society's ability to recover.”
—Erik Loomis, author of Out of Sight

“With powerful prose and meticulous scrutiny, How the World Breaks strips naked the dynamics of risk creation and the consequent disasters. Alternating chapters of keen analysis and veracious case studies elucidate the false notion that disasters bring about beneficial change, demonstrate who profits as opposed to who pays the price, and illuminate how failed disaster policies have led to horrific duress. A must-read for everyone in all the fields relating to disaster studies, and indeed all who are asking what is breaking apart the world today.”
—Dr. Susanna Hoffman, editor of The Angry Earth and Catastrophe and Culture

“A breathtaking new view of crisis and recovery on the unstable landscapes of the Earth's hazard zones.”
—Resilience.org


Praise for Losing Our Cool:
Stan was The Atlantic's Readers' Choice Brave Thinker

One of the Mother Nature Network "Top Ten Environmental Books of the Year"

“This is an important book. The history of air-conditioning is really the history of the world's energy and climate crises, and by narrowing the focus Stan Cox makes the big picture comprehensible. He also suggests remedies—which are different from the ones favored by politicians, environmentalists, and appliance manufacturers, not least because they might actually work.”
—David Owen, New Yorker staff writer and author of Green Metropolis

“This book is the go-to source for a better understanding of the complexity of pumping cold air into a warming climate.”
—Maude Barlow

“Stan Cox, in his fascinating book Losing Our Cool, offers a long list of ways in which air conditioning has transformed the U.S. economy.”
—Bradford Plumer, The Washington Post

“As Stan Cox details in his excellent new book, Losing Our Cool, air conditioning has been a major force in shaping western society.”
—The National

“Stan Cox offers both some sobering facts and some interesting strategies for thinking through a big part of our energy dilemma.”
—Bill McKibben

“Well-written, thoroughly researched, with a truly global focus, the book offers much for consumers, environmentalists, and policy makers to consider before powering up to cool down.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2016-04-19
A frightening, from-the-trenches overview of "natural" and man-made disasters—and responses to them—across the globe. This father-and-son team of scientists—Stan (Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, 2013, etc.) is a research coordinator at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and his son, Paul, is an anthropologist based in Copenhagen—delves closely into "geoclimatic hazards," such as earthquakes, cyclones, volcanic eruptions, and mudslides, from Missouri to Australia, gauging the human toll and cultural value of so-called victimization and resilience. These are personal stories of cataclysm—e.g., the almost resigned, mystical attitude of Filipinos to deadly cycles of typhoons and earthquakes, during which thousands of people perish, a toll unimaginable to Western nations; or conditions in the slums of flooding-prone Mumbai, where residents have no choice but to accept their role as "absorber" of shocks for the rest of the stricken city. The authors also offer stories of how disasters are used as opportunity, especially in economic rebuilding—i.e., pushing through much-needed legislation for reinvigorating the status quo, which occurred in Joplin, Missouri, after a deadly tornado wiped out its blighted business district in 2011 or in New York City and coastal New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Each chapter of this work of wide-traveled research takes up one aspect of these geoclimatic hazards once considered a kind of punishment for man's sins (such as the mother of all disasters, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755). More recently, the horrendous 2013 mountain landslides in Uttarakhand, India, were arguably the result of man-made road building and deforestation. In the end, the authors assert that communities at risk, such as Miami Beach, Florida, "have to abandon as a mirage the old promises of security and development" and embrace what is going to become the art of resilience. Though short on a clear thesis, the book is strong on examples of human adaptation in the face of catastrophe.

Kirkus Reviews