Books : Science & Nature : Popular Science : Environment & Ecology : Natural Disasters : General AAS

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Books : Science & Nature : Popular Science : Environment & Ecology : Natural Disasters : General AAS

• Volcanoes

  Peter Francis, Clive Oppenheimer

  
  
   

• Natural Hazards

  Edward Bryant

  
  
   

• Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

  Mike Davis

  
  
   

• Global Catastrophes: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

  Bill McGuire

  
  
   

• Earthshock: Hurricanes, Volcanoes, Earthquakes, Tornadoes and Other Forces of Nature

  Andrew Robinson

  
  
   

• The Return of Planet-X and Its Effects on Mother Earth: A Natural Disaster Survivor's Manual: Wormwood

  Jaysen Q. Rand

  
  
   

• Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters

  Jr, Ernest Zebrowski

  
  
   

• Nights of Ice: True Stories of Disaster and Survival on Alaska's High Seas

  Spike Walker

  
  
   

• A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know

  Bill McGuire

  
  Nothing lasts forever, and we are all going to die. Since we've lived with these givens all our lives, it's not really surprising that we enjoy books about the end of the world such as Bill McGuire's A Guide to the End of the World. Going all together would be so much more fun.

  McGuire's account of likely natural catastrophes is a splendidly integrated mechanism, relating rising tides to volcanic eruptions, eruptions to floods, global warming to local cooling--it's amazing we've lasted as long as we have (not sarcasm: fact).

  Of course, the boundary between the "natural" and the "man-made" disaster is (and has been, since we arrived on the scene) a grey area. The marked success of one species threatens extinction on all. The super-success of homo sapiens bodes ill, not only for individual species, but for the whole environment.

  And this, not surprisingly, is where McGuire's book starts to leave the rails. McGuire writes: "By wiping out the bulk of species that exist today, we are destroying much of the evolution's raw material and severely limiting the planet's ability to generate the species of the future." First, this is a classic piece of misdirection: we have not, as McGuire implies, destroyed the bulk of other species (although we may in the future). More important, its conclusion is plain nonsense. The mass extinction event at the end of the Palaeozoic Era (there have been four others in Earth's history already) wiped out something like 96 per cent of all species--yet life, far from being stunted, blossomed in the gaps, more various than ever before. McGuire would do better to argue that mass extinctions make room for new species to evolve! McGuire's book is a lively entertainment. But his breast-beating is hard to swallow. --Simon Ings

  
   

• The Buncefield Explosion

  
  
   

• Natural Disasters

  Patrick Leon Abbott

  
  
   

• Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis (Disaster Risk Management)

  Maxx Dilley, Uwe Deichmann, Robert S. Chen

  
  
   

• Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster (Routledge Physical Environment)

  Keith Smith

  
  
   

• A Chance in a Million?: Scottish Avalanches

  Bob Barton, Blyth Wright

  
  
   

• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

  Timothy Egan

  
  
   

• Coming Back Alive

  Spike Walker

  
  
   

• Global Catastrophic Risks

  
  
   

• The Coming Global Superstorm

  Art Bell, Whitley Strieber

  
  
   

• Down in New Orleans: Reflections on a Disaster

  Billy Sothern

  
  
   

• Philip's Guide to Global Hazards (Reference)

  Robert Kovach