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Author: Robert R. M. Verchick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674047915
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
The author argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to three simple commands: Go green, be fair, and keep safe. He argues that government must assume a stronger regulatory role in managing natural infrastructure, distributional fairness, and public risk.--[book cover].
Author: Robert R. M. Verchick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674047915
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 335
Get Book
Book Description
The author argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to three simple commands: Go green, be fair, and keep safe. He argues that government must assume a stronger regulatory role in managing natural infrastructure, distributional fairness, and public risk.--[book cover].
Author: R. W. Greene
Publisher: ESRI, Inc.
ISBN: 9781589480407
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
This handbook explains the importance and practice of using a geographic information system (GIS) in designing and implementing an effective response to large-scale disasters, including wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. The handbook is organized according to the accepted methodology of disaster management, which involves planning and identification, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. The first three stages involve tasks that an organization or community can perform before a disaster occurs. The latter two tasks focus on postdisaster efforts. The spatial display and analysis tools of GIS are ideal for assessing disaster risks, consequences, and responses. GIS can display the location, size, value, and significance of assets that may be impacted by disasters. It can show the kinds of environmental, atmospheric, and other conditions that contribute to particular kinds of natural disasters. GIS can also juxtapose a particular kind of asset with specific hazardous conditions over a wide geographic area, thus allowing a precise calculation of potential loss in the immediate area. With this kind of graphic depiction, the choices about what to do and where to do it are clarified for those charged with making fast, cost-effective decisions. This handbook details how GIS software features can be used at each stage of planning and response. The use of GIS in a disaster is illustrated by its application in New York City in the days after September 11, where it was used to provide assistance to rescue and recovery teams. The manual also profiles GIS-based disaster modeling software packages now available at no cost to local communities.
Author: Robert R. M. Verchick
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064259
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
As Hurricane Katrina vividly revealed, disaster policy in the United States is broken and needs reform. What can we learn from past disastersÑstorms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, and wildfiresÑabout preparing for and responding to future catastrophes? How can these lessons be applied in a future threatened by climate change? In this bold contribution to environmental law, Robert Verchick argues for a new perspective on disaster law that is based on the principles of environmental protection. His prescription boils down to three simple commands: Go Green, Be Fair, and Keep Safe. ÒGoing greenÓ means minimizing exposure to hazards by preserving natural buffers and integrating those buffers into artificial systems like levees or seawalls. ÒBeing fairÓ means looking after public health, safety, and the environment without increasing personal and social vulnerabilities. ÒKeeping safeÓ means a more cautionary approach when confronting disaster risks. Verchick argues that government must assume a stronger regulatory role in managing natural infrastructure, distributional fairness, and public risk. He proposes changes to the federal statutes governing environmental impact assessments, wetlands development, air emissions, and flood control, among others. Making a strong case for more transparent governmental decision-making, Verchick offers a new vision of disaster law for the next generation.
Author: Jon Kabat-Zinn
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0345539729
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 720
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Book Description
The landmark work on mindfulness, meditation, and healing, now revised and updated after twenty-five years Stress. It can sap our energy, undermine our health if we let it, even shorten our lives. It makes us more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, disconnection and disease. Based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s renowned mindfulness-based stress reduction program, this classic, groundbreaking work—which gave rise to a whole new field in medicine and psychology—shows you how to use medically proven mind-body approaches derived from meditation and yoga to counteract stress, establish greater balance of body and mind, and stimulate well-being and healing. By engaging in these mindfulness practices and integrating them into your life from moment to moment and from day to day, you can learn to manage chronic pain, promote optimal healing, reduce anxiety and feelings of panic, and improve the overall quality of your life, relationships, and social networks. This second edition features results from recent studies on the science of mindfulness, a new Introduction, up-to-date statistics, and an extensive updated reading list. Full Catastrophe Living is a book for the young and the old, the well and the ill, and anyone trying to live a healthier and saner life in our fast-paced world. Praise for Full Catastrophe Living “To say that this wise, deep book is helpful to those who face the challenges of human crisis would be a vast understatement. It is essential, unique, and, above all, fundamentally healing.”—Donald M. Berwick, M.D., president emeritus and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement “One of the great classics of mind/body medicine.”—Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom “A book for everyone . . . Jon Kabat-Zinn has done more than any other person on the planet to spread the power of mindfulness to the lives of ordinary people and major societal institutions.”—Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair, Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin–Madison “This is the ultimate owner’s manual for our lives. What a gift!”—Amy Gross, former editor in chief, O: The Oprah Magazine “I first read Full Catastrophe Living in my early twenties and it changed my life.”—Chade-Meng Tan, Jolly Good Fellow of Google and author of Search Inside Yourself “Jon Kabat-Zinn’s classic work on the practice of mindfulness to alleviate stress and human suffering stands the test of time, a most useful resource and practical guide. I recommend this new edition enthusiastically to doctors, patients, and anyone interested in learning to use the power of focused awareness to meet life’s challenges, whether great or small.”—Andrew Weil, M.D., author of Spontaneous Happiness and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health “How wonderful to have a new and updated version of this classic book that invited so many of us down a path that transformed our minds and awakened us to the beauty of each moment, day-by-day, through our lives. This second edition, building on the first, is sure to become a treasured sourcebook and traveling companion for new generations who seek the wisdom to live full and fulfilling lives.”—Diana Chapman Walsh, Ph.D., president emerita of Wellesley College
Author: Carl Boggs
Publisher: Political Animal Press
ISBN: 9781895131475
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 310
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Book Description
The modern ecological crisis, now visible in its many symptoms across the global landscape, appears as a looming nightmare, revealing more clearly with each passing moment the utterly destructive character of globalized corporate power.? Revisiting the famous Marxist injunction "socialism or barbarism", Facing Catastrophe focuses on how the crisis threatens the natural habitat more severely than even most environmentalists today are prepared to recognize.? That threat encompasses climate change but extends beyond to include shrinking natural resources (above all land and water), food and agricultural challenges, addiction to economic growth, geopolitical conflict and resource wars, and the assault on nonhuman beings.? This unprecedented challenge has inspired, more accurately forced, new ways of viewing not only economic development but political action, cultural norms, natural relations, and social change.? One conclusion is that unless new modes of production and consumption are globally adopted - and soon - the planet is sure to follow a path toward catastrophe.? Carl Boggs urges an ecological radicalism bold enough to move beyond a long record of historical failures, from liberalism to social democracy, Communism, and anarchism as well as mainstream environmental reformism.
Author: Cass R. Sunstein
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479808482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 175
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Book Description
Best-selling author Cass R. Sunstein examines how to avoid worst-case scenarios The world is increasingly confronted with new challenges related to climate change, globalization, disease, and technology. Governments are faced with having to decide how much risk is worth taking, how much destruction and death can be tolerated, and how much money should be invested in the hopes of avoiding catastrophe. Lacking full information, should decision-makers focus on avoiding the most catastrophic outcomes? When should extreme measures be taken to prevent as much destruction as possible? Averting Catastrophe explores how governments ought to make decisions in times of imminent disaster. Cass R. Sunstein argues that using the “maximin rule,” which calls for choosing the approach that eliminates the worst of the worst-case scenarios, may be necessary when public officials lack important information, and when the worst-case scenario is too disastrous to contemplate. He underscores this argument by emphasizing the reality of “Knightian uncertainty,” found in circumstances in which it is not possible to assign probabilities to various outcomes. Sunstein brings foundational issues in decision theory in close contact with real problems in regulation, law, and daily life, and considers other potential future risks. At once an approachable introduction to decision-theory and a provocative argument for how governments ought to handle risk, Averting Catastrophe offers a definitive path forward in a world rife with uncertainty.
Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195346398
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.
Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593297385
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
Author: Michael B. Gerrard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107025761
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 661
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Book Description
This book addresses legal issues of rising seas endangering the habitability and existence of island nations in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Author: Bill Gates
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385546149
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.
