This revised edition accounts for recent developments including Brexit, the 2015 migration crisis across Europe, efforts to build a border wall between the US and Mexico, growing isolationist and nativist sentiments, demands for indigenous homelands, transnational protest movements, Russian cross-border incursions, and insurgencies and rebellions across much of North Africa and Southwest Asia.

Ken Jennings takes readers on a world tour of geogeeks from the London Map Fair to the bowels of the Library of Congress, from the prepubescent geniuses at the National Geographic Bee to the computer programmers at Google Earth. Each chapter delves into a different aspect of map culture: highpointing, geocaching, road atlas rallying, even the unreal estate charted on the maps of fiction and fantasy. Jennings also considers the ways in which cartography has shaped our history, suggesting that the impulse to make and read maps is as relevant today as it has ever been.

From the Here be dragons parchment maps of the Age of Discovery to the spinning globes of grade school to the postmodern revolution of digital maps and GPS, Maphead is filled with intriguing details, engaging anecdotes, and enlightening analysis. If you're an inveterate map lover yourself--or even if you're among the cartographically clueless who can get lost in a supermarket--let Ken Jennings be your guide to the strange world of mapheads.

In the tradition of Carl Sagan and John McPhee, a bracing cerebral voyage past intergalactic hoopla and backwoods retreats. --Kirkus Reviews

Originally published in 1978, The Starship and the Canoe is the remarkable story of a father and son: Freeman Dyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist who dreams of exploring the heavens and has designed a spaceship to take him there. His son George, a brilliant high school dropout, lives in a treehouse and is designing a giant kayak to explore the icy coastal wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Author Kenneth Brower describes with stunning impact their lives and their visions of the world. It is a timeless tale framed by modern science, adventure, family, and the natural world.

This book is what every frustrated parent needs. Its innovative approach combines colorful diagrams and illustrations with step-by-step explanations, making geography easier to understand than ever before.

Covering all the core subjects for 10-16 year olds, from oceans and volcanoes to climate change and population growth, this invaluable guide allows parents and kids to work together to understand even the trickiest topics.

You will both soon be experts in map reading, plate tectonics, data handling, and much more.

Explore the pages of this great geography book for kids to find:

- Concepts of human and physical geography, including fieldwork skills, are made simple, with clear text and step-by-step explanations.
- Covers not just aspects of physical geography and human geography, but presents practical skills necessary for succeeding in the subject.
- Stimulates children's interest in geography, maps, geological features, and human interaction
- All content reviewed by educational consultants.
- Provides key support for developing geography skills at home alongside school studies

Fully revised and updated for 2023, Help Your Kids with Geography is guaranteed to build confidence, reduce stress, and make even the most difficult aspects of this subject simple, clear, and accessible.

This book is a beautifully illustrated guide to Palestine, Arabia, and Syria, with information on the countries' landscapes, people, and cultures. It includes numerous photographs and illustrations that bring the region to life. This book is perfect for armchair travelers and anyone interested in the history and culture of the Middle East.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In this Very Short Introduction Bill McGuire takes a fresh look at our sometimes perilous planet, and evaluates the causes and consequences of what used to be thought of as 'natural' hazards through the prism of planetary heating and the continuing destabilising of our climate.

Our world has always been a dangerous and deadly place, and storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic blasts have taken an enormous toll on lives and livelihoods throughout recorded history and before. In the past, such events were regarded first as acts of God, or gods, and later as simply a consequence of hazardous natural phenomena that are a normal part of how our planet works. In recent decades, however, this picture has changed. Relentless global heating, arising from the 2.4 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere as a result of human activities, has completely altered the 'natural' hazard landscape. There has long been a debate about whether - due to the influence of societal and economic factors - there is such a thing as a truly natural disaster. Now, the debate has moved on to whether or not the hazards that cause them can any longer be described as entirely natural. Our damaged climate has driven an explosion of extreme weather, which has become ever more apparent in recent years via the super-charging of storms, floods, heatwaves and wildfires. The fingerprints of global heating can be detected even in individual events that would have been extremely unlikely to have happened, or even been impossible, in its absence. Meanwhile earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions continue to plague communities and take lives, while even here there are links with a changing climate that have the potential to magnify their occurrence and impacts.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Don't Know Much About Geography by New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis is a fascinating and fun exploration of our planet.

Geography is the hub from which other disciplines radiate: meteorology, ecology, geology, oceanography, demographics, cartography, agricultural studies, economics, and political science.

In addition to presenting geographical trivia that'll impress your friends, Davis explores 21st-century topics of global concern, including the role of the Internet and technology in transforming the lives of people around the world, how so-called developing nations develop, sustainability, and the debates over climate change and evolutionary science.

This completely revised and updated version of Don't Know Much About Geography is an entertaining and illuminating grand tour of planet Earth.

Excellent resource for parents and teachers who want to introduce geographical concepts to children during outdoor time. There is a graduated series of lessons in each of the six sections (Study of the Sky, Weather Observation, Plans and Maps, Heights and Contours, Land and Sea, Human Geography) so you can draw inspiration from all of them, no matter the age of your children. Exercises range from simple ones like figuring out where north is from the position of the sun to more complex tasks like making a map to scale using a surveyor's chain like the one pictured on the cover. Numerous suggestions for recording observations over the course of a year are included.

The growing concern about global environmental change and human impacts on the planet has led to the emergence of a broad field of study on the 'sustainability' of human societies. The term's common usage can be traced back to the advent of the Earth Summit in 1992 when 'sustainable development' was broadly embraced by the international community as an ostensibly win-win proposition for economic development, social inclusion, and ecological conservation. Yet both the natural science underpinnings and the social implications of a quest for sustainability have been diffuse. There is a need for a coherent synthesis which draws out key themes from both natural and social analysis of the concept.

This Very Short Introduction begins by introducing the concept of sustainability and how it has developed. The central chapters consider four key concepts crucial to sustainability: a) material and energy flows in consumption and production; b) technological interventions for a sustainable society; c) tipping points, and resilience in natural and social systems; and d) renewability and circularity in the economy. In the concluding chapter, Saleem H. Ali explores political means of managing anthropogenic change for a more sustainable society.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Lies of the Land examines the often-overlooked artistic roots of mapmaking practice in early modern France, offering an original perspective on discourses of accuracy and their relationship to the pictorial origins of modern mapmaking.

Until the seventeenth century, most mapmakers in France were painters. Schooled in techniques of drawing and perspective--and in the careful study of nature that we associate with early modernity--they also learned the more expressive and imaginative Mannerist forms that dominated French painting in this period. Their maps draw on conventions of both painting and mapmaking to create beautiful, informative, and persuasive images for a wide variety of contexts and purposes. In this book, Camille Serchuk explores the strategies these cartographers deployed to weave together accuracy, ornament, and artifice in maps at all scales. Looking beyond the techniques of measurement and perspective, Serchuk shows how painterly interventions framed and manipulated the appearance and reception of cartographic objects.

Lies of the Land is an important new assessment of the character and status of early modern cartography that challenges binary distinctions between art and science and between decorative and epistemic images. It will appeal especially to art historians and historians of sixteenth-century France as well as scholars of map history.

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation's past.

All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. In Mapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map.

Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit-saturated with maps and graphic information-grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

The Very Short Introduction explains the historical development of the field of biogeography, its fundamental tenets, principles and tools, and the invaluable insights it provides for understanding the diversity of life in the natural world. As Mark Lomolino shows, key questions such as where species occur, how they vary from place to place, where their ancestors occurred, and how they spread across the globe, are essential for us to develop effective strategies for conserving the great menagerie of life across our planet.

ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

New to This Edition
*Discussions of Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2; the growth of unmanned aerial systems; mobile data collection; current directions in climate change detection, fire monitoring, and disaster response; and other timely topics.
*Additional cases, such as river erosion; the impact of Hurricane Sandy on Mantoloking, New Jersey; and Miami Beach as an exemplar of challenges in coastal communities.
*Revised throughout with 60% new material, including hundreds of new full-color figures.
*New chapters on remote sensing platforms, agriculture, and forestry.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.

We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Profit -- getting more out of something than you put into it -- is the original genius of homo sapiens, who learned how to unleash the energy stored in wood, exploit the land, and refashion ecosystems. As civilization developed, we found more and more ways of extracting surplus value from the earth, often deploying brutally effective methods to discipline people to do the work needed.

Historian Mark Stoll explains how capitalism supercharged this process and traces its many environmental consequences. The financial innovations of medieval Italy created trade networks that, with the European discovery of the Americas, made possible vast profits and sweeping cultural changes, to the detriment of millions of slaves and indigenous Americans; the industrial age united the world in trade and led to an energy revolution that changed lives everywhere. But when efficient production left society awash in goods, a new sort of capitalism, predicated on endless individual consumption, took its place.

This story of incredible ingenuity and villainy begins in the Doge's palace in medieval Venice and ends with Jeff Bezos aboard his own spacecraft. Mark Stoll's revolutionary account places environmental factors at the heart of capitalism's progress and reveals the long shadow of its terrible consequences.

Discover the existential threats facing 50 unique places across the globe and the possible solutions that may save them from vanishing forever.

Learn more about endangered places across all seven continents, from natural wonders like the rainforests of Borneo and the Great Barrier Reef to cultural icons like the Giza pyramids and New York City.

Begin by understanding the background of each place, including key characteristics, history, and ecological or cultural significance, before going on to explore the problems that threaten the site. From rising sea levels and droughts to unchecked tourism, war, and civil unrest - and in many cases a combination of factors - readers will understand the complex and nuanced challenges facing these places. Each profile also includes a section on possible solutions. In some cases, these measures and programs are already being implemented, while in others individuals and governments will need to act quickly before it's too late. Curated lists of further readings at the end of each entry point readers to additional resources and act as a gateway to more in-depth study.