Against the Seas
Saving Civilizations from Rising Waters
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Narrated by:
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Susan Ericksen
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By:
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Mary Soderstrom
About this listen
The scenario we are facing is scary: within a few decades, sea levels around the world may well rise by a meter or more as glaciers and ice caps melt due to climate change. Large parts of our coastal cities will be flooded, the basic outline of our world will be changed, and torrential rains will present their own challenges. But this is not the first time that people have had to cope with threatening waters, because sea levels have been rising for thousands of years, ever since the end of the last Ice Age. Stories told by the Indigenous people of Australia and the Pacific coast of North America, and those found in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as Roman and Chinese histories all bear witness to just how traumatic these experiences were. The responses to these challenges varied: people adapted by building dikes, canals, and seawalls, by resorting to prayer or magic, and, very often, by moving out of the way of the rushing waters.
Against the Seas explores these stories as well as the various measures being taken today to combat rising waters, focusing on five regions: Indonesia, Shanghai, the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, the Salish Sea, and the estuary of the St. Lawrence River. What happened in the past and what is being tried today may help us in the future, and, if nothing else, give us hope that we will survive.
©2023 Mary Soderstrom (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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In this inspiring manifesto, an internationally renowned ecologist makes a clear case for why protecting nature is our best health insurance, and why it makes economic sense.
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Amazing
- By Lars Pardo on 11-21-24
By: Enric Sala
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Water in Plain Sight
- Hope for a Thirsty World
- By: Judith D. Schwartz
- Narrated by: Tia Rider
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Water scarcity is on everyone's mind. Long taken for granted, water availability has entered the realm of economics, politics, and people's food and lifestyle choices. But as anxiety mounts - even as a swath of California farmland has been left fallow and extremist groups worldwide exploit the desperation of people losing livelihoods to desertification - many are finding new routes to water security with key implications for food access, economic resilience, and climate change.
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Crucial solutions
- By Shane Emanuelle on 07-25-19
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A Furious Sky
- The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes
- By: Eric Jay Dolin
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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With A Furious Sky, Eric Jay Dolin has created a vivid, sprawling account of our encounters with hurricanes, from the nameless storms that threatened Columbus's New World voyages to the destruction wrought in Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. Weaving a story of shipwrecks and devastated cities, of heroism and folly, Dolin introduces a rich cast of unlikely heroes and puts us in the middle of the most devastating storms of the past, none worse than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which killed at least 6,000 people, the highest toll of any natural disaster in American history.
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Good start but went political at the end.
- By thebreeze on 03-24-21
By: Eric Jay Dolin
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The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks
- Tales of Important Geological Puzzles and the People Who Solved Them
- By: Donald R. Prothero
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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The Story of the Earth in 25 Rocks tells the fascinating stories behind the discoveries that shook the foundations of geology. In 25 chapters, Donald R. Prothero recounts the scientific detective work that shaped our understanding of geology, from the unearthing of exemplary specimens to tectonic shifts in how we view the inner workings of our planet.
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More about scientists than science
- By Aunt Vee on 06-14-20
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The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated
- The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late
- By: Thom Hartmann, Neale Donald Walsch - associate editor
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 18 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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While everything appears to be collapsing around us - ecodamage, genetic engineering, virulent diseases, water shortages, global famine, wars - we can still do something about it and create a world that will work for us and for our children's children. The inspiration for Leonardo DiCaprio's feature documentary movie The 11th Hour, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight details what is happening to our planet, the reasons for our culture's blind behavior, and how we can fix the problem.
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One of the Most Important Books of our Time
- By Jana on 04-24-20
By: Thom Hartmann, and others
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Island on Fire
- The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World
- By: Alexandra Witze, Jeff Kanipe
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Laki is Iceland's largest volcano - and its most fearsome. Its eruption in 1783 is one of history's great untold natural disasters. Spewing out sun-blocking ash and then a poisonous fog for eight long months, the effects of the eruption lingered across the world for years. It caused the deaths of people as far away as the Nile and created catastrophic conditions throughout Europe.
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Interesting and Pertinent Topic!
- By Catherine Puma on 01-23-22
By: Alexandra Witze, and others
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Overheated
- How Climate Change Will Cause Floods, Famine, War, and Disease
- By: Andrew T. Guzman
- Narrated by: Fleet Cooper
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Deniers of climate change sometimes quip that claims about global warming are more about political science than climate science. They are wrong on the science, but may be right with respect to its political implications. A hotter world, writes Andrew Guzman, will bring unprecedented migrations, famine, war, and disease. It will be a social and political disaster of the first order.
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A must read!
- By Ted on 03-22-15
By: Andrew T. Guzman
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Atlantic
- Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring.
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Starts Better Than it Finishes
- By Ray on 12-18-10
By: Simon Winchester
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The Gulf
- The Making of an American Sea
- By: Jack E. Davis
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 20 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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When painter Winslow Homer first sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, he was struck by its "special kind of providence." Indeed, the Gulf presented itself as America's sea - bound by geography, culture, and tradition to the national experience - and yet, there has never been a comprehensive history of the Gulf until now. And so, in this rich and original work that explores the Gulf through our human connection with the sea, environmental historian Jack E. Davis finally places this exceptional region into the American mythos in a sweeping history that extends from the Pleistocene age to the 21st century.
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Decolonize gulf history
- By Jesse Carr on 05-02-18
By: Jack E. Davis
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Earth
- An Intimate History
- By: Richard Fortey
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 18 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with Mt. Vesuvius, whose eruption in Roman times helped spark the science of geology, and ending in a lab in the West of England where mathematical models and lab experiments replace direct observation, Richard Fortey tells us what the present says about ancient geologic processes. He shows how plate tectonics came to rule the geophysical landscape and how the evidence is written in the hills and in the stones. And in the process, he takes us on a wonderful journey around the globe to visit some of the most fascinating and intriguing spots on the planet.
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Random Geology Verbose History Jumbled Tours
- By Herbert S. on 12-10-21
By: Richard Fortey
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Tambora
- The Eruption That Changed the World
- By: Gillen D'Arcy Wood
- Narrated by: Tom Pile
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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When Indonesia's Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, it unleashed the most destructive wave of extreme weather the world has witnessed in thousands of years. The volcano's massive sulfate dust cloud enveloped the Earth, cooling temperatures and disrupting major weather systems for more than three years. Amid devastating storms, drought, and floods, communities worldwide endured famine, disease, and civil unrest on a catastrophic scale.
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An unexpected pleasure
- By Anonymous User on 09-04-16