Showing titles in Human Geography

Identity politics occupies the front line in today’s culture wars, pitting generations against each other, and progressive cities against the rural traditions of our past. Rich in data and detail, Who Are We Now? goes beyond today’s headlines to connect our current reality to a larger more-than-human story. At the heart of the book is a set of surveys conducted between 2016 and 2021, asking thousands of anonymous respondents all over the United States questions about their behavior and identity, and especially about gender and sexuality.

The industrial age made possible by fossil fuels will surely decline as these fuels run out. In The Ecotechnic Future John Michael Greer alerts the listener to possible changes future generations may face as these dwindling fuel supplies lead first to a deindustrial age, then to a society which salvages the remnants of our current plenty, and eventually to a time in which people may learn to live in balance with the environment: an ecotechnic society.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

In recent years our world has seen transformations of all kinds: intense climate change accompanied by significant weather extremes; deadly tsunamis caused by submarine earthquakes; unprecedented terrorist attacks; costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a terrible and overlooked conflict in Equatorial Africa costing millions of lives; an economic crisis threatening the stability of the international system.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found - Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators - and surveys the science of human navigation.

New islands are being built at an unprecedented rate, whether for tourism or territorial ambition, while many islands are disappearing or fragmenting because of rising sea levels. It is a strange planetary spectacle, creating an ever-changing map that even Google Earth struggles to keep pace with. In The Age of Islands, explorer and geographer Alastair Bonnett takes the listener on a compelling and thought-provoking tour of the world's newest, most fragile and beautiful islands and reveals what, he argues, is one of the great dramas of our time.

Humans versus Nature tells a history of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between the human and natural worlds. Nature is cast as an active protagonist rather than a mere backdrop or victim of human malfeasance. Daniel R. Headrick shows how environmental changes - epidemics, climate shocks, and volcanic eruptions - have molded human societies and cultures, sometimes overwhelming them.

To many of us, the Earth's crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, stones are richly illustrated narratives, telling gothic tales of cataclysm and reincarnation. For more than four billion years, in beach sand, granite, and garnet schists, the planet has kept a rich and idiosyncratic journal of its past. Fulbright Scholar Marcia Bjornerud takes the listener along on an eye-opening tour of Deep Time, explaining in elegant prose what we see and feel beneath our feet.

We all know that at some point in life, we will experience pain, uncertainty and loss. Widowhood, redundancy, a life-changing diagnosis, pregnancy loss, or a global pandemic. So how can we weather the storms, and cope with whatever comes next? No one can answer this better than Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner whose job is to support survivors of major disasters. She has been there after countless earthquakes, fires and floods. Time and again she has watched how people rebuild: the work, the pitfalls and the fragile joy.

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

In this fascinating exploration, geneticist Bryan Sykes turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour, interviewing genealogists, geneticists, anthropologists, and everyday Americans with compelling ancestral stories.

Drawing on a variety of sources from film, literature, and popular culture, and analyzing different historical moments, including the establishment of the Wilderness Act in 1964 and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Finney reveals the perceived and real ways in which nature and the environment are racialized in America. Looking toward the future, she also highlights the work of African Americans who are opening doors to greater participation in environmental and conservation concerns.

Since the publication of her prize-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake, writer and artist Kim Mahood has been returning to the Tanami desert country in far north-western Australia where, as a child, she lived with her family on a remote cattle station. The land is timeless, but much has changed: the station has been handed back to its traditional owners, the mining companies have arrived and Aboriginal art has flourished.

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes - from global tourism to undocumented labor - have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time.

Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen.

Authors Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin trace the emergence of the concept of the environment following World War II, a period characterized by both hope for a new global order and fear of humans' capacity for almost limitless destruction. It was at this moment that a new idea and a new narrative about the planet-wide impact of people's behavior emerged, closely allied to anxieties for the future. With the rise of "the environment", the authors argue, came new expertise, making certain kinds of knowledge crucial to understanding the future of our planet.

One word binds us all: geography. We are all geographers, human beings who care about the places we think of as 'home' - our habitat. And yet we have lost touch with the connection between our actions and the state of the planet that we all share. We need a new myth, a new narrative that restores the connections between humanity and the Earth. We are being confronted by a daily barrage of geographical stories on climate change, geopolitics, population growth, migration, dwindling resources, polluted oceans and natural hazards. These are planetary concerns affecting all people and all places.

Depuis le massacre perpétré par le Hamas le 7 octobre 2023 en Israël, l’auteur, comme tant d’autres, a vu son monde s’effondrer. Elle, dont la mission consiste à porter sur ses épaules la souffrance d’autrui et à la soulager par ses mots, se trouve soudain en état de sidération. Dans la stupeur, elle écrit alors ce petit traité de survie qui interroge ses fondements existentiels.

Have you been looking for a way to work on memorizing the world's countries and their capitals? Have you ever wanted a study buddy to read you questions, but don't have anyone around? Look no further. In this revolutionary new audiobook, you have a partner for your memorization practice without having to find someone to quiz you. Like verbal flashcards, World Geography Quiz: Countries of the World and Their Capitals (Geography Trivia) is here to be the partner to your study session, reading off questions to help you memorize the capitals, or quiz yourself for trivia.

First published in 2012, Borders: A Very Short Introduction began with the premise that "we live in a very bordered world." The intervening decade has witnessed a flurry of events and developments that continue to highlight the centrality of borders in contemporary domestic and international affairs, as well as the interstices between the two....