The Dilbit Disaster

The Dilbit Disaster
Author: Elizabeth McGowan
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-10-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9781539009597

InsideClimate News won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for this four-part narrative and six follow-up reports into an oil spill most Americans have never heard of. More than 1 million gallons of oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River in July 2010, triggering the most expensive cleanup in U.S. history -- more than 3/4 of a billion dollars -- and after almost two years the cleanup still isn't finished. Why not? Because the underground pipeline that ruptured was carrying diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the dirtiest, stickiest oil used today. It's the same kind of oil that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline could someday carry across the nation's largest drinking water aquifer. Written as a narrative, this page-turner takes an inside look at what happened to two families, a community, unprepared agencies and an inept company during an environmental disaster involving a new kind of oil few people know much about.

Biopolitical Disaster

Biopolitical Disaster
Author: Jennifer Lawrence
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317216296

Biopolitical Disaster employs a grounded analysis of the production and lived-experience of biopolitical life in order to illustrate how disaster production and response are intimately interconnected. The book is organized into four parts, each revealing how socio-environmental consequences of instrumentalist environmentalities produce disastrous settings and political experiences that are evident in our contemporary world. Beginning with "Commodifying crisis," the volume focuses on the inherent production of disaster that is bound to the crisis tendency of capitalism. The second part, "Governmentalities of disaster," addresses material and discursive questions of governance, the role of the state, as well as questions of democracy. This part explores the linkage between problematic environmental rationalities and policies. Third, the volume considers how and where the (de)valuation of life itself takes shape within the theme of "Affected bodies," and investigates the corporeal impacts of disastrous biopolitics. The final part, "Environmental aesthetics and resistance," fuses concepts from affect theory, feminist studies, post-positivism, and contemporary political theory to identify sites and practices of political resistance to biopower. Biopolitical Disaster will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers, and academic scholars working in Political ecology; Geopolitics; Feminist critique; Intersectionality; Environmental politics; Science and technology studies; Disaster studies; Political theory; Indigenous studies; Aesthetics; and Resistance.

The Disaster Resiliency Challenge

The Disaster Resiliency Challenge
Author: James Bohland
Publisher: Charles C Thomas Publisher
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0398092346

Resilience as a concept has become embedded in public policy discourse within countries across the world in a wide range of contexts--planning, education, emergency management, and supply chains. The goal of this book is to assist future community leaders and professionals with the subsystem components and the actions that must be taken to insure community resilience, and to alert them to the potential pitfalls when adapting their community to the challenges that continually change. The development of trust among and between diverse members of communities and the political and economic leaders is essential if our views of how to build resilience are to change. The book is divided into five sections. The first section explores the challenges of transformational change, building community resilience with alternative frameworks, and resilience in time and space with lessons from ecology. Section II covers the building of hazard resilient communities through technology, microscale disaster and local resilience, the building of resilient cities by harnessing the power of urban analytics. and the failure to describe and communicate the possible future climate change scenarios. Section III examines challenges for urban theory when conceptualizing financial resilience, the role of social capital in community disaster resilience, the challenges of citizen engagement and resilience in the Dutch disaster management, and the rationalities of extraction and resilience of fossil-fueling vulnerability in an age of extreme energy. Section IV explores shifting from risks to consequences when building resilience to mega-hazards, resilience and small island nations, the sea level rise, demographics and rural resilience on Maryland’s Eastern shore, and the epicenter of community resilience in the California’s San Francisco Bay Area. Section V discusses observations and challenges on building community resilience in the twenty-first century. This highly informative and indispensable volume will be meaningful for future community leaders, citizens, stakeholders, government officials, emergency management, and crisis interveners.

Where We Live

Where We Live
Author: Randy Cunningham
Publisher: The Pilgrim Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2024-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0829802150

Drawing on extensive interviews he conducted with environmental activists across rural and urban Appalachia and the Midwest, Randy Cunningham analyzes what motivates activists, how they strategize, and what issues they encounter. An indispensable guide to the on-the-ground realities of environmental activism in contemporary America. Randy Cunningham's Where We Live analyzes key aspects of environmental activism through the perspectives of those who know the field best: activists themselves. Each chapter grapples with a different topic. Readers thus come to know not only the stories of individuals and groups in their specific struggles. Cunningham's sharp analysis also enables readers to grasp how their struggles are related to one another. This book will be invaluable to activists looking for a better understanding of their own work as well as to historians, sociologists, and anthropologists conducting research on environmentalism in the contemporary United States. The book includes extensive documentation and endnotes.

Unprecedented

Unprecedented
Author: David Ray Griffin
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 614
Release: 2015-01-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0986076910

This book combines (1) the most extensive treatment of the causes and phenomena of climate change in combination with (2) an extensive treatment of social obstacles and challenges (fossil-fuel funded denialism, media failure,political failure, and moral, religious, and economic challenges), (3) the most extensive treatment of the needed transition from fossil-fuel energy to clean energy, and (4) the most extensive treatment of mobilization. It provides the most complete, most up-to-date treatment of the various kinds of clean energy, and how they could combine to provide 70% clean energy by 2035 and 100% before 2050 (both U.S. and worldwide).

This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything
Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 576
Release: 2014-09-16
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1451697384

With strong first-hand reporting and an original, provocative thesis, Naomi Klein returns with this book on how the climate crisis must spur transformational political change

Keystone XL Pipeline

Keystone XL Pipeline
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (2011). Subcommittee on Environment
Publisher:
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2013
Genre: Oil sands
ISBN:

Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines

Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2016-03-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0309380103

Diluted bitumen has been transported by pipeline in the United States for more than 40 years, with the amount increasing recently as a result of improved extraction technologies and resulting increases in production and exportation of Canadian diluted bitumen. The increased importation of Canadian diluted bitumen to the United States has strained the existing pipeline capacity and contributed to the expansion of pipeline mileage over the past 5 years. Although rising North American crude oil production has resulted in greater transport of crude oil by rail or tanker, oil pipelines continue to deliver the vast majority of crude oil supplies to U.S. refineries. Spills of Diluted Bitumen from Pipelines examines the current state of knowledge and identifies the relevant properties and characteristics of the transport, fate, and effects of diluted bitumen and commonly transported crude oils when spilled in the environment. This report assesses whether the differences between properties of diluted bitumen and those of other commonly transported crude oils warrant modifications to the regulations governing spill response plans and cleanup. Given the nature of pipeline operations, response planning, and the oil industry, the recommendations outlined in this study are broadly applicable to other modes of transportation as well.

Valuing Oil Spill Prevention

Valuing Oil Spill Prevention
Author: Richard T. Carson
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2013-11-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1402028644

This book documents a contingent valuation study for a significant environmental good: preventing the likely injuries from oil spills on the coast of Central California. It functions as a 'how-to' guide by documenting design, administration, and analysis of such studies, to reduce the long lead time which characterizes most economic damage assessments. The book includes a CD-ROM containing a wealth of additional material: data, questionnaires, transcripts and more.

Michigan Salvage

Michigan Salvage
Author: Lisa DuRose
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2023-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1609177274

Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.