How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia

| September 20, 2017 | Leave a Comment

Item Link: Access the Resource

Year of Publication: 2016

Publication City: New York, NY

Publisher: The New Press

Author(s): Stan Cox, Paul Cox

The age of natural disasters is coming to a close. Where we once saw spontaneous destruction from cyclones, floods, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes, and eruptions, we’re coming to understand the deeper connections between our choices and our catastrophes. But in spite of this knowledge, year by year, the wreckage is piling higher.

Just when we should be rushing to act against basic causes – the hijack of the atmosphere, the inequalities of risk – a strange and dangerous optimism has taken hold. It says that communities under threat simply need to learn the art of resilience, to adapt, and thereby to survive. To make such a prescription is to deny the human hand in disaster creation and to demand that the Earth’s beleaguered people absorb the rush of floodwaters and the crush of landslides so disaster can become just another sector of the economy.

In How the World Breaks, Stan Cox, author of the much debated and widely acclaimed Losing Our Cool, and his son, anthropologist and writer Paul Cox, question the current wave of thinking about disasters and resilience by taking it out of the realms of theory into the muck and ash of the world’s broken places. From the people living in the path of destruction, they learn that change is more than just adaptation and life is more than just survival. —HowTheWorldBreaks.com


The book can be purchased online from:

The New Press

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

You can check if it is available at bookstore near you with Indiebound, or at your local library.

Happy reading!

The views and opinions expressed through the MAHB Website are those of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect an official position of the MAHB. The MAHB aims to share a range of perspectives and welcomes the discussions that they prompt.