Cataclysms

Cataclysms PDF Author: Laurent Testot
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022660926X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
Humanity is by many measures the biggest success story in the animal kingdom; but what are the costs of this triumph? Over its three million years of existence, the human species has continuously modified nature and drained its resources. In Cataclysms, Laurent Testot provides the full tally, offering a comprehensive environmental history of humanity’s unmatched and perhaps irreversible influence on the world. Testot explores the interconnected histories of human evolution and planetary deterioration, arguing that our development from naked apes to Homo sapiens has entailed wide-scale environmental harm. Testot makes the case that humans have usually been catastrophic for the planet, “hyperpredators” responsible for mass extinctions, deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification, and unchecked pollution, as well as the slaughter of our own species. Organized chronologically around seven technological revolutions, Cataclysms unspools the intertwined saga of humanity and our environment, from our shy beginnings in Africa to today’s domination of the planet, revealing how we have blown past any limits along the way—whether by exploding our own population numbers, domesticating countless other species, or harnessing energy from fossils. Testot’s book, while sweeping, is light and approachable, telling the stories—sometimes rambunctious, sometimes appalling—of how a glorified monkey transformed its own environment beyond all recognition. In order to begin reversing our environmental disaster, we must have a better understanding of our own past and the incalculable environmental costs incurred at every stage of human innovation. Cataclysms offers that understanding and the hope that we can now begin to reform our relationship to the Earth.

Cataclysms

Cataclysms PDF Author: Laurent Testot
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022660926X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Get Book Here

Book Description
Humanity is by many measures the biggest success story in the animal kingdom; but what are the costs of this triumph? Over its three million years of existence, the human species has continuously modified nature and drained its resources. In Cataclysms, Laurent Testot provides the full tally, offering a comprehensive environmental history of humanity’s unmatched and perhaps irreversible influence on the world. Testot explores the interconnected histories of human evolution and planetary deterioration, arguing that our development from naked apes to Homo sapiens has entailed wide-scale environmental harm. Testot makes the case that humans have usually been catastrophic for the planet, “hyperpredators” responsible for mass extinctions, deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification, and unchecked pollution, as well as the slaughter of our own species. Organized chronologically around seven technological revolutions, Cataclysms unspools the intertwined saga of humanity and our environment, from our shy beginnings in Africa to today’s domination of the planet, revealing how we have blown past any limits along the way—whether by exploding our own population numbers, domesticating countless other species, or harnessing energy from fossils. Testot’s book, while sweeping, is light and approachable, telling the stories—sometimes rambunctious, sometimes appalling—of how a glorified monkey transformed its own environment beyond all recognition. In order to begin reversing our environmental disaster, we must have a better understanding of our own past and the incalculable environmental costs incurred at every stage of human innovation. Cataclysms offers that understanding and the hope that we can now begin to reform our relationship to the Earth.

Cataclysms

Cataclysms PDF Author: Dan Diner
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299223531
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Cataclysms is a profoundly original look at the last century. Approaching twentieth-century history from the periphery rather than the centers of decision-making, the virtual narrator sits perched on the legendary stairs of Odessa and watches as events between the Baltic and the Aegean pass in review, unfolding in space and time between 1917 and 1989, while evoking the nineteenth century as an interpretative backdrop. Influenced by continental historical, legal, and social thought, Dan Diner views the totality of world history evolving from an Eastern and Southeastern European angle. A work of great synthesis, Cataclysms chronicles twentieth century history as a “universal civil war” between a succession of conflicting dualisms such as freedom and equality, race and class, capitalism and communism, liberalism and fascism, East and West. Diner’s interpretation rotates around cataclysmic events in the transformation from multinational empires into nation states, accompanied by social revolution and “ethnic cleansing,” situating the Holocaust at the core of the century’s predicament. Unlike other Eurocentric interpretations of the last century, Diner also highlights the emerging pivotal importance of the United States and the impact of decolonization on the process of European integration.

Cataclysms

Cataclysms PDF Author: Michael R. Rampino
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544871
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
In 1980, the science world was stunned when a maverick team of researchers proposed that a massive meteor strike had wiped the dinosaurs and other fauna from the Earth 66 million years ago. Scientists found evidence for this theory in a “crater of doom” on the Yucatán Peninsula, showing that our planet had once been a target in a galactic shooting gallery. In Cataclysms, Michael R. Rampino builds on the latest findings from leading geoscientists to take “neocatastrophism” a step further, toward a richer understanding of the science behind major planetary upheavals and extinction events. Rampino recounts his conversion to the impact hypothesis, describing his visits to meteor-strike sites and his review of the existing geological record. The new geology he outlines explicitly rejects nineteenth-century “uniformitarianism,” which casts planetary change as gradual and driven by processes we can see at work today. Rampino offers a cosmic context for Earth’s geologic evolution, in which cataclysms from above in the form of comet and asteroid impacts and from below in the form of huge outpourings of lava in flood-basalt eruptions have led to severe and even catastrophic changes to the Earth’s surface. This new geology sees Earth’s position in our solar system and galaxy as the keys to understanding our planet’s geology and history of life. Rampino concludes with a controversial consideration of dark matter’s potential as a triggering mechanism, exploring its role in heating Earth’s core and spurring massive volcanism throughout geologic time.

Colonial Cataclysms

Colonial Cataclysms PDF Author: Bradley Skopyk
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 081654137X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The contiguous river basins that flowed in Tlaxcala and San Juan Teotihuacan formed part of the agricultural heart of central Mexico. As the colonial project rose to a crescendo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Indigenous farmers of central Mexico faced long-term problems standard historical treatments had attributed to drought and soil degradation set off by Old World agriculture. Instead, Bradley Skopyk argues that a global climate event called the Little Ice Age brought cold temperatures and elevated rainfall to the watersheds of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacan. With the climatic shift came cataclysmic changes: great floods, human adaptations to these deluges, and then silted wetlands and massive soil erosion. This book chases water and soil across the colonial Mexican landscape, through the fields and towns of New Spain’s Native subjects, and in and out of some of the strongest climate anomalies of the last thousand or more years. The pursuit identifies and explains the making of two unique ecological crises, the product of the interplay between climatic and anthropogenic processes. It charts how Native farmers responded to the challenges posed by these ecological rifts with creative use of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds, environmental engineering, and conflict within and beyond the courts. With a new reading of the colonial climate and by paying close attention to land, water, and agrarian ecologies forged by farmers, Skopyk argues that colonial cataclysms—forged during a critical conjuncture of truly unprecedented proportions, a crucible of human and natural forces—unhinged the customary ways in which humans organized, thought about, and used the Mexican environment. This book inserts climate, earth, water, and ecology as significant forces shaping colonial affairs and challenges us to rethink both the environmental consequences of Spanish imperialism and the role of Indigenous peoples in shaping them.

Cataclysms on the Columbia

Cataclysms on the Columbia PDF Author: John Eliot Allen
Publisher: Ooligan Press
ISBN: 1932010319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
"Cataclysms on the Columbia" chronicles the geological research that led to the discovery of powerful prehistoric floods that shaped the Pacific Northwest.

Cataclysms?

Cataclysms? PDF Author: Norma Hickox
Publisher: Book World/Blue Star
ISBN: 9781881542285
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In the mid 80's, predictions of catastrophic earth changes surfaced and the word went out that our days on Earth were numbered. Hickox, too, received such messages, but then, her visions began to change and she discovered that she was not seeing visions of the future, but of the past! Cataclysms ...a Must read for everyone concerned about the coming days of darkness!

Cataclysm!

Cataclysm! PDF Author: D. S. Allan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591438144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 651

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Book Description
Follow this multi-disciplinary, scientific study as it examines the evidence of a great global catastrophe that occurred only 11,500 years ago. Crustal shifting, the tilting of Earth's axis, mass extinctions, upthrusted mountain ranges, rising and shrinking land masses, and gigantic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes--all indicate that a fateful confrontation with a destructive cosmic visitor must have occurred. The abundant geological, biological, and climatological evidence from this dire event calls into question many geological theories and will awaken our memories to our true--and not-so-distant--past.

The Adam and Eve Story

The Adam and Eve Story PDF Author: Chan Thomas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781884600012
Category : Bible and geology
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This is the Book of the Century! At LAST someone - this time a basic research scientist - has come forth with proof of cataclysms, which are worldwide supersonic inundations such as Noah's flood. They were discovered by great men such as Andre DeLuc, Baron Georges Cuvier and Guy de Dolomieu, and have remained unsolved mysteries ever since. Now the author takes you through thrilling solutions of finding the process of catclysms, their timetable, and the derivation of trigger, a 20-year search. Truly, CATACLYSMS LEAVE NO ONE UNTOUCHED! He describes the next cataclysm in awesome detail plus the deterioration of civilization and the escalation of crime before the next cataclysm. It just so happens that the author's scientific prediction of the next cataclysm agrees with clairvoyants Nostradamus', Cayce's, and Scallion's predictions. Never before have facts been presented in such a spine-tingling, inspiring fashion; and never have so many secrets been unlocked in one book. This is the most stirring subject, written in the most intriguing, engrossing, and exciting style ever. You will remember this exceptional book for years! Available from: Bengal Tiger Press, Drawer 1212, South Chatham, MA 02659; Tel: 800-431-4590; FAX: 508-432-0697.

Cataclysms and Earth History

Cataclysms and Earth History PDF Author: Richard J. Huggett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book explores the development of ideas about enormous floods, both gradual and catastrophic, and the role of floods in fashioning the Earth's surface. Floods of immense size are recorded in ancient myths and classical writings. Renaissance scholars believed that sea shells found on mountains were relics of Noah's Flood, and natural philosophers during the Restoration and Enlightenment proposed elaborate theories of the Earth which accounted for a universal Deluge. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, field evidence suggested that there had been several grand cataclysms during the course of Earth's history, the most recent of which was identified with the Noachian Cataclysm. In the nineteenth century too, a gradual inundation of continents was proposed, an idea which was taken up by proponents of marine regression and transgression cycles. During the present century the notion of marine transgression has been refined. Recently, the possibility of catastrophic flooding has again been raised. The author traces the developments of each of these theories and provides a comprehensive bibliography of the exploration of these ideas through the centuries.

Quakes, Eruptions, and Other Geologic Cataclysms

Quakes, Eruptions, and Other Geologic Cataclysms PDF Author: Jon Erickson
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438109695
Category : Earth sciences
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Covers earthquakes, floods, dust storms, meteor showers, volcanoes, landslides, glaciation, and mass extinctions.