Showing titles in Human Geography

Just 70 years ago, the Gulf nation of Qatar was a backwater, reliant on pearl diving. Today it is a gas-laden parvenu with seemingly limitless wealth and ambition. Skyscrapers, museums and futuristic football stadiums rise out of the desert and Ferraris race through the streets. But in the shadows, migrant workers toil in the heat for risible amounts. Inside Qatar reveals how real people live in this surreal place, a land of both great opportunity and great iniquity.

Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis, despite contributing very little to it. For a long time, the crisis was portrayed as yet another injustice for Black people to care about, on top of the day-to-day oppression they face. In Black Climates, Selina Nwulu reframes the crisis to encompass our disconnection from each other and the world around us. She argues that the root of climate change lies in historical colonial violence and ongoing exploitation, making it inherently racist.

Mountains, meridians, rivers and borders; these are some of the features that carve up the world on our maps and in our minds. But geography is far less set in stone than we might believe and, over time, we have become experts at reshaping our surroundings. From the Qhapaq Ñan, South America's 'Great Road', and the Panama Canal to Mozambique's railways and Korea's sacred Baekdu-daegan mountain range, Samson explores how we mould the world around us. And how, as we etch our needs onto the natural landscape, we alter the course of history.

To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. This audiobook tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Here, economies are not concerned with the familiar stock market crashes, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages.

In 1968, a schoolteacher in Iowa divided her classroom by eye colour. Within minutes, ordinary children became tyrants. Within hours, their victims had forgotten how to read. The experiment lasted two days. The lesson it taught has haunted psychology ever since. Manmade Monsters: A Dangerous World traces a single, terrifying mechanism across five thousand years of human history. From the blood-soaked steps of Aztec temples to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

A vividly written and timely polemic tackling the burning injustices shaping British society today. ‘Intelligently written and powerfully argued.’ Paul Mason ‘Witty, scathing, and entertaining.’ Danny Dorling Journalist Sam Bright is a Northerner living in London. He is just one of the...

Environmental justice recognizes that environmental benefits and burdens should be distributed fairly, and that the people making policy decisions should incorporate the views of those most often harmed: people of color, Indigenous populations, low-income communities, and those who are underserved and disenfranchised for other reasons such as age, gender, or disability. It encompasses not only traditional environmental issues like clean air and clean water, but also social issues such as employment, nutrition, and access to health care.

Can Donald Trump really build that wall? What does Brexit mean for Ireland's border? And what would happen if Elon Musk declared himself president of the Moon? In Border Wars, Professor Klaus Dodds takes us on a journey into the geopolitical conflict of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of the world's best-known, most dangerous and most unexpected border conflicts from the Gaza Strip to the space race. Along the way, we'll discover just what borders truly mean in the modern world.

The creator of the hit podcast Tides of History offers a new look at humanity’s deep past, showing us how our world was built not by inevitability, but by trial and error on a global scale. There’s a familiar story about us humans: we went from hunting and gathering to farming, wandering...

Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving. It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies. Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a child's growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells. In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations.

We are currently experiencing the biggest humanitarian crisis of our time. Across the world, from Ukraine to Sudan to Mexico, people are forced to flee their homes every day due to conflict, climate change and persecution. And devastatingly, the scale of this crisis is only predicted to get worse: by 2050, 1 in 10 people on earth will be displaced. Having met and interviewed hundreds of people impacted by migration, charity founder Jaz O'Hara shares 31 remarkable and inspiring stories, from refugees to volunteers working on the frontline: ordinary people with extraordinary experiences.

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found - Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators - and surveys the science of human navigation.

Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.

A thirty-thousand-year history of the relationship between climate and civilization that teaches powerful lessons about how humankind can survive. Man-made climate change may have began in the last two hundred years, but humankind has witnessed many eras of climate instability. The results have...

One word binds us all: geography. We are all geographers, human beings who care about the places we think of as 'home' - our habitat. And yet we have lost touch with the connection between our actions and the state of the planet that we all share. We need a new myth, a new narrative that...

From the author of Turning to Stone, a mediation on the stories that rock can tell us about the deep history of our planet To many of us, the Earth’s crust is a relic of ancient, unknowable history. But to a geologist, the Earth’s crust, and every stone within it, is a richly illustrated...

The North Will Rise Again covers the colourful adventures of its inhabitants, the expansiveness and optimism that defines Northern culture, and the recurrent sense of failure and despair that is at the heart of one of the West’s most impoverished regions. By telling the story of the North in the last few decades, Alex goes in search of answers to some of the big questions at the forefront of British politics and society today.

An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women...

Reissued on the 10th anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the Earth. This impassioned plea for radical and life-renewing change is today still considered a groundbreaking work in environmental studies. McKibben's argument that the survival of the globe is dependent on a fundamental, philosophical shift in the way we relate to nature is more relevant than ever.

Have you been looking for a way to work on memorizing the world's countries and their capitals? Have you ever wanted a study buddy to read you questions, but don't have anyone around? Look no further. In this revolutionary new audiobook, you have a partner for your memorization practice without having to find someone to quiz you. Like verbal flashcards, World Geography Quiz: Countries of the World and Their Capitals (Geography Trivia) is here to be the partner to your study session, reading off questions to help you memorize the capitals, or quiz yourself for trivia.