Using images from the air, land and space, this work brings together dramatic natural and man-made events. It traces the path Hurricane Katrina took through New Orleans, and looks at the damage done to the presidential palace in Baghdad during the war in Iraq. It also provides a look at the effects our actions have on the planet.

Natural disasters, climate change, resource exploitation, and human development are all changing our planet at a relentless pace. Turn on the television, read any newspaper—one cannot avoid stories of the major changes that are taking place on Earth. Hurricanes and tornados in the Midwest, flooding along the coasts, melting of polar ice caps. What's going on? This book is an attempt to answer some of those questions. Written by leading experts, and using unique before-and-after satellite imagery to document what's taking place, Fragile Earth presents all of the changes that are occurring and what the likely outcomes for our planet will be. Different phenomena pose different risks. Natural phenomena, like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, landslides, and avalanches, and wild weather, like tropical storms, tornadoes, and massive dust storms, pose risks to local populations who cannot safely escape these sudden cataclysms. But there are also more subtle changes happening that can be just as destructive in the long run. Take, for instance, the parched earth—places where desertification, shrinking lakes and drying rivers, and drought are becoming prevalent. What are the long-term effects of these phenomena on human populations? Or the so-called "Big Thaw"—dwindling glaciers, polar ice cap changes, rising sea levels: what are the effects of these ever-increasing conditions? The question this book poses is simple: What is to be done? There are answers to these problems, if we become more focused on solving them. The expert contributors give some of those answers, including conservation of current resources as just one of many.

A New York Times New & Noteworthy Book One of the Daily Beast's 5 Essential Books to Read Before the Election A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change--including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben's work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change--its past, present, and future--taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben's seminal essay "The End of Nature," the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

Striking views of our changing planet show the extraordinary effects of man and nature. Each set of carefully selected before and after pictures is combined with detailed explanations allowing you to understand exactly what has happened to our planet in the past, and what is likely to happen in the future.