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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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