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Disaster! – John Withington

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Disaster!

A History of Earthquakes, Floods, Plagues, and Other Catastrophes

John Withington

Genre: Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: February 16, 2010

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A comprehensive catalog of the most devastating and deadly events—natural or man-made—in human history.   If you follow the news it can seem like injury, sickness, and death are now constant, inescapable occurrences that threaten us every second of every day. But such catastrophic events—as terrible and frightening as they are—have been happening for as long as mankind has walked the Earth . . . and even before.   From ancient volcanoes and floods to epidemics of cholera and smallpox to Hitler’s and Stalin’s mass killings in the twentieth century, humanity’s continued existence has always seemed perilous. This volume offers a unique perspective on our modern fears by revealing how dangerous our world has always been—with examples such as: • the Black Death that killed over seventy-five million people in the 1300s; • the 1883 volcanic eruption on Krakatoa; • the Irish Potato Famine; • the 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh; • and the long-ago volcano in Sumatra that may have wiped out as much as 99% of the world population. With this catalog of calamity, readers will be engrossed, enlightened, and relieved to realize that despite all the disasters that have befallen humanity, we are still here. John Withington is the author of The Disastrous History of London and produces television documentaries. He lives in London.  

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Disaster! – John Withington

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American Buffalo – Steven Rinella

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American Buffalo

In Search of a Lost Icon

Steven Rinella

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 2, 2008

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.” A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.   In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.  Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

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American Buffalo – Steven Rinella

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How It Began: A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Universe – Chris Impey

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How It Began: A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Universe

Chris Impey

Genre: Astronomy

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 26, 2012

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W. W. Norton


“Impey combines the vision of a practicing scientist with the voice of a gifted storyteller.”—Dava Sobel In this vibrant, eye-opening tour of milestones in the history of our universe, Chris Impey guides us through space and time, leading us from the familiar sights of the night sky to the dazzlingly strange aftermath of the Big Bang. What if we could look into space and see not only our place in the universe but also how we came to be here? As it happens, we can. Because it takes time for light to travel, we see more and more distant regions of the universe as they were in the successively greater past. Impey uses this concept—"look-back time"—to take us on an intergalactic tour that is simultaneously out in space and back in time. Performing a type of cosmic archaeology, Impey brilliantly describes the astronomical clues that scientists have used to solve fascinating mysteries about the origins and development of our universe. The milestones on this journey range from the nearby to the remote: we travel from the Moon, Jupiter, and the black hole at the heart of our galaxy all the way to the first star, the first ray of light, and even the strange, roiling conditions of the infant universe, an intense and volatile environment in which matter was created from pure energy. Impey gives us breathtaking visual descriptions and also explains what each landmark can reveal about the universe and its history. His lucid, wonderfully engaging scientific discussions bring us to the brink of modern cosmology and physics, illuminating such mind-bending concepts as invisible dimensions, timelessness, and multiple universes. A dynamic and unforgettable portrait of the cosmos, How It Began will reward its readers with a deeper understanding of the universe we inhabit as well as a renewed sense of wonder at its beauty and mystery.

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How It Began: A Time-Traveler’s Guide to the Universe – Chris Impey

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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The residents of Uniontown, a poor, majority-black town in rural Alabama, are used to being ignored by the federal government. For years, they have fought against the Arrowhead landfill, a site that they say is negatively impacting the environment and forcing residents to cope with offensive odors, upper respiratory infections, headaches, and vomiting among other symptoms. The Environmental Protection Agency accepted a civil rights complaint from Uniontown in 2013, but earlier this month, the EPA announced that its External Civil Rights Compliance Office was “resolving and closing” the complaint citing “insufficient evidence” to find that the state violated any civil rights.

Have their options run out? “They’re not giving up by any stretch,” says Marianne Engelman Lado, a Yale University professor who helped represent Uniontown residents. Even after receiving the disappointing news from the EPA, residents are not going to back off. “We will continue to pursue every means that we can,” said Ben Eaton, the vice president of Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice. “Uniontown is a good place, with good people, even though we have an uphill battle to fight for our environmental civil rights.”

Toxic waste sites, such as landfills and oil refineries, are more likely to be located in communities of color so the pollution from these sites often has a disproportionate effect on marginalized people. This makes environmental justice an integral part of the civil rights movement. Just weeks after the EPA announcement, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a blistering statement about the EPA’s decision. “Sadly, these dismissals continue the EPA’s disturbing and longstanding track record,” it said. In 2016, the agency released a report that documented the EPA’s dismal failure to enforce civil rights. “We will continue to monitor the EPA’s enforcement of federal civil rights statutes,” the statement said, “and find this is yet another distressing step in the wrong direction for the agency.”

Uniontown is in Alabama’s Black Belt, a region in the central portion of the state that was once dominated by slave owners. The town is majority-black and poor with 48 percent of individuals living below the poverty line. Even before the landfill opened — which was designed to receive waste from over half the country — the people of Uniontown were against it. They formed the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice to stop its construction by suing the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the Perry County Commission, but a trial judge ruled against them.

Nonetheless, the Arrowhead landfill opened in 2007, and soon after, dust, foul odors, and flies became a part of daily life for the people living nearby. “People talk about how the paint peels from the cars,” Esther Calhoun, the president of the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, told Grist in 2016. “And there’s dust everywhere, everywhere. There’s buzzards everywhere, too.”

The following year, a disaster hundreds of miles away became Uniontown’s problem. In December 2008, a retaining wall at the Kingston Fossil Plant gave way in the middle of the night and more than 1 billion gallons of coal ash, the toxic byproduct of burning coal, spilled into the Tennessee River and on more than 300 acres of land. Three homes were destroyed and dozens were damaged. Even though no one was killed, the coal ash sludge, which contains hazardous chemicals such as arsenic and mercury, remained and needed to be cleaned up.

In 2009, with the blessing of local leaders and against the wishes of the residents, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the owner of the plant, began shipping its coal ash to the Arrowhead landfill. At the time, Bob Deacy, TVA’s vice president of clean strategies and project development told the New York Times that Arrowhead was chosen because it was accessible by train instead of truck, had the capacity to hold all the coal ash, and local leaders had underbid all the other offers.

Meanwhile, Uniontown residents had mobilized to fight back. In 2012, they filed their first complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the agency in charge of issuing permits for the landfill. The complaint alleged that because ADEM permitted the landfill, it was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from taking actions that have disproportionate adverse effects on the basis of race. The complaint described the dire health consequences of living near the landfill, they also said that dust from the coal ash collected on their homes, plants, and cars. The presence of the landfill has decreased property values. After six years, the EPA issued their final decision this month, saying there was insufficient evidence to find any discrimination.

Lawyers working with them suggest that there may still be some legal options. “We are still looking at further legal action,” Claudia Wack, a member of Yale Law’s Environmental Justice Clinic, told the Selma Times-Journal. “We are keeping up the good fight.”

Faced with this setback, residents still are trying to make a difference on the local level by continuing to pressure ADEM. Some have decided to run for office to replace the town leadership that they believe got them into this situation in the first place. Ben Eaton, BBCHJ’s vice president, has been inspired to run for county commissioner to add his voice to those of the commissioners who “originally voted to allow the coal ash to come into Uniontown.” In terms of mounting an effective opposition, Engelman Lado said, running for office is “a really important part of their strategy.”

The Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice has also continued to organize actions surrounding environmental concerns in their community. The group has scheduled events to attend Uniontown city council meetings to voice their concerns about pollution and other injustices.

Uniontown residents may not have been surprised about the outcome, given the EPA’s history of ignoring civil rights complaints, but they were still disappointed. “When you go Uniontown, you smell that landfill,” Engelman Lado says. “You don’t need a peer reviewed study to tell you it’s affecting peoples’ lives.”

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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

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Black Holes – Stephen Hawking

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Black Holes

Stephen Hawking

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: August 23, 2016

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


The legendary physicist explores his favorite subject in a pair of enlightening, accessible, and cleverly illustrated essays for curious readers, originally delivered as BBC lectures.   “It is said that fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and nowhere is that more true than in the case of black holes. Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science-fiction writers, but they are firmly matters of science fact.”   For decades, Stephen Hawking has been fascinated by black holes. He believes that if we understood the challenges they pose to the very nature of space and time, we could unlock the secrets of the universe. In these conversational pieces, Hawking’s sense of wonder is infectious as he holds forth on what we know about black holes, what we still don’t know, and theoretical answers to more specific questions, such as: What would happen if you ever got sucked into one? Annotated and with an introduction by BBC News science editor David Shukman, featuring whimsical and illuminating illustrations, Black Holes offers a candid peek into one of the great scientific mysteries of all time.   Praise for Stephen Hawking   “[Hawking] can explain the complexities of cosmological physics with an engaging combination of clarity and wit. . . . His is a brain of extraordinary power.” — The New York Review of Books   “Hawking clearly possesses a natural teacher’s gifts—easy, good-natured humor and an ability to illustrate highly complex propositions with analogies plucked from daily life.” — The New York Times   “A high priest of physics, one of a handful of theorists who may be on the verge of reading God’s mind.” — Los Angeles Times

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Black Holes – Stephen Hawking

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Scott Pruitt plans to close an EPA office that studies how chemicals harm children.

Facing backlash from professors, Tennessee Technological University president Philip B. Oldham sent a letter to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday asking him to ignore the results of a study produced by his own university.

Here’s what happened.

Tennessee Republican Representative Diane Black, who has been pushing the EPA to adopt looser regulations for big trucks, asked Pruitt to roll back regulations on a certain kind of freight truck called a glider last July.

Previous EPA tests found gliders produce somewhere between 40 and 50 times more pollution than new trucks, but a study from Tennessee Tech published in 2016 found that gliders produce about the same levels of emissions as other trucks.

It turns out that the largest manufacturer of gliders, Tennessee-based Fitzgerald Glider Kits, funded the study and offered to build the university a spanking new research center to boot.

In November, Pruitt cited the study when he announced plans to ease up regulations on gliders. Faculty at Tennessee Tech asked the university to denounce the study on Friday, arguing that, among other things, it was a) conducted by an unsupervised graduate student and b) unverified. Then, on Wednesday, the EPA said in a statement that Pruitt’s decision didn’t have anything to do with the controversial study. … OK.

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Scott Pruitt plans to close an EPA office that studies how chemicals harm children.

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Coal’s death spiral, in 3 charts

The latest reports suggest that coal has the equivalent of black-lung disease: the condition is chronic, and the long-term prognosis is dire.

Power companies plan to shutter more than 10 big coal plants in 2018, extinguishing a major portion of coal burning in the United States (see the map below). According to projections released by the Energy Information Administration this week, coal-fired plants will produce less than 30 percent of the electricity Americans use this year. Back in 2000, coal provided more than half of our electricity. Cheap natural gas has knocked coal out of competition.

2018 will be a bad year to be a gray dot.

EIA

This year is expected be a big one for coal-plant retirements but, as you can see below, so was 2015, and 2012, and, well, much of the past decade.

Pretty much all the plants shutting down are fossil-fuel plants.EIA

“Coal in the U.S. might not be dead, but it is in a death spiral,” said Alex Gilbert, of the energy research firm SparkLibrary. “Coal’s demise is inevitable, but it can still emit significant greenhouse gas and other emissions on its way out. The main policy question now is whether the death spiral should be a decade long or decades long.”

What pushed coal power into the death spiral? In a word, fracking. A crackdown on toxic pollution and the rise of wind and solar power, too. If you look at this map of plants scheduled to open this year, it’s all renewables and gas.

Look at all those renewables… and gas plants.EIA

Gilbert said coal companies also played a supporting role in the dirty fuel’s demise. “Coal’s decline is mainly due to market competition with natural gas with regulations playing a secondary role,” he said. “Fundamentally, however, coal is dying because the industry decided to fight changing times. Instead of innovating into a 21st-century compatible energy source, they played politics.”

So, what does all this mean for greenhouse-gas emissions? Well, even if we stop burning coal, it wouldn’t be enough to solve our emissions problems. And as we squeeze carbon out of our electrical system, carbon emissions from cars, industry, and heating are all going up. That’s consistent with a long term trend.

“Between 2005 and 2016, almost 80 percent of the reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions in the U.S. came from the electric power sector,” wrote Trevor Houser and Peter Marsters of the Rhodium Group, a company which analyzes energy trends. To get greenhouse-gas emissions down, other sectors have to play a larger role.

Rhodium Group

This year, people are expected to drive more, and a growing economy will cause industry to ramp up. All told, the United States is likely to pump out more greenhouse gases this year, according to the new data from the EIA.

“After declining by 1.0 percent in 2017, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to increase by 1.7 percent in 2018,” the EIA wrote.

It looks like our biggest problem is no longer coal. It’s cars.

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Coal’s death spiral, in 3 charts

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The practice of drilling into the ground to release natural gas — known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking — first made national headlines in 2011 when drinking water taps in fracking towns in Pennsylvania began catching fire because flammable methane was seeping into water supplies.

Since then, fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma and a myriad of health issues. Proponents of fracking say the practice has reduced energy costs and has created thousands of jobs. But environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that for people living near sites, fracking can have severe health affects such as respiratory illnesses and cancer.

A new study from the journal Science Advances found that infants born to women living near fracking sites in Pennsylvania were especially vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. “As local and state policymakers decide whether to allow hydraulic fracturing in their communities, it is crucial that they carefully examine the costs and benefits,” said Michael Greenstone, a coauthor of the study and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, in a press release. “This study provides the strongest large-scale evidence of a link between the pollution that stems from hydraulic fracturing activities and … the health of babies.”

The researchers analyzed vital statistics of more than 1.1 million births in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2013. They studied infants born to women living 1 kilometer (or slightly over half a mile) away from fracking sites, as well as women living within 3 kilometers (or less than 2 miles), and women living between 3 to 15 kilometers (or less than 2 miles to 9 miles) away.

They found that fracking reduces the health of infants born to mothers living within 3 kilometers from a fracking site. But for mothers living within 1 kilometer, the affects were acute. The probability of low infant birth weight, meaning the infant weighs less than 5.5 pounds, increased to 25 percent.

Studies show that low birth weight can lead to infant mortality, asthma, lower test scores while school-age, and lower earnings as adults. The study also found that mothers whose babies may have been exposed to nearby fracking sites tend to be younger, less educated, and less likely to be married — factors that can also lead to poor infant health.

But there are significant differences between the mothers who give birth close to fracking sites and those who don’t. Black mothers included in the study were more likely to live nearest to fracking sites, exposing their infants to higher risks of pollution. “This difference arises because over time, more wells were drilled near urban areas such as Pittsburgh, where higher numbers of African Americans live,” the authors wrote. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, has 63 active fracking wells. Many other fracking sites are located in lower-income communities.

Nationwide, between July 2012 and June 2013, as many as 65,000 infants were exposed to pollution from fracking, because their mothers lived within 1 kilometer of a fracking site.

“Given the growing evidence that pollution affects babies in utero,” said coauthor Janet Currie, who is a economics and public affairs professor at Princeton University, “it should not be surprising that fracking has negative effects on infants.”

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

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A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee finally got to grill Scott Pruitt on Thursday.

A new report by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation found economic and health disparities among those affected by Harvey.

Sixty-six percent of black residents surveyed said they are not getting the help they need to recover, compared to half of all hurricane survivors. While 34 percent of white residents said their FEMA applications had been approved, just 13 percent of black residents said the same.

And even though they are receiving less assistance, black and Hispanic respondents and those with lower incomes were more likely to have experienced property damage or loss of income as a result of the storm.

Additionally, 1 in 6 people reported that someone in their household has a health condition that is new or made worse because of Harvey. Lower-income adults and people of color who survived the storm were more likely to lack health insurance and to say they don’t know where to go for medical care.

“This survey gives an important voice to hard-hit communities that may have been forgotten, especially those with the greatest needs and fewest resources following the storm,” Elena Marks, president and CEO of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said in a statement.

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A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee finally got to grill Scott Pruitt on Thursday.

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Scott Pruitt just got debunked by climate scientists.

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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Scott Pruitt just got debunked by climate scientists.

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