Losses from environmental hazards have escalated in the past decade, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple postevent response. There is a noticeable change in policy, with more emphasis on loss reduction through mitigation, preparedness, and recovery programs. Effective mitigation of losses from hazards requires hazard identification, an assessment of all the hazards likely to affect a given place, and risk-reduction measures that are compatible across a multitude of hazards. The degree to which populations are vulnerable to hazards, however, is not solely dependent upon proximity to the source of the threat or the physical nature of the hazard-social factors also play a significant role in determining vulnerability. This paper presents a method for assessing vulnerability in spatial terms using both biophysical and social indicators. A geographic information system was utilized to establish areas of vulnerability based upon twelve environmental threats and eight social characteristics for our study area, Georgetown County, South Carolina. Our results suggest that the most biophysically vulnerable places do not always spatially intersect with the most vulnerable populations. This is an important finding because it reflects the likely "social costs" of hazards on the region. While economic losses might be large in areas of high biophysical risk, the resident population also may have greater safety nets (insurance, additional financial resources) to absorb and recover from the loss quickly. Conversely, it would take only a moderate hazard event to disrupt the well-being of the majority of county residents (who are more socially vulnerable, but perhaps do not reside in the highest areas of biophysical risks) and retard their longer-term recovery from disasters. This paper advances our theoretical and conceptual understanding of the spatial dimensions of vulnerability. It further highlights the merger of conceptualizations of human environment relationships with geographical techniques in understanding contemporary public policy issues.

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Super-resolution optical microscopy is opening a new window to unveil the unseen details on the nanoscopic scale. Current far-field super-resolution techniques rely on fluorescence as the read-out1–5. Here, we demonstrate a scheme for breaking the diffraction limit in far-field imaging of non-fluorescent species by using spatially controlled saturation of electronic absorption. Our method is based on a pump-probe process where a modulated pump field perturbs the charge-carrier density in a sample, thus modulating the transmission of a probe field. A doughnut shape laser beam is then added to transiently saturate the electronic transition in the periphery of the focal volume, thus the induced modulation in the sequential probe pulse only occurs at the focal center. By raster scanning the three collinearly aligned beams, high-speed sub-diffraction-limited imaging of graphite nano-platelets was performed. This technique potentially enables super-resolution imaging of nano-materials and non-fluorescent chromophores, which may remain out of reach for fluorescence-based methods.

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so called pea-souper fogs in London in the early 1950s, and the other of ecosystem management in Florida's Everglades. In the final chapter, Whitehead considers the psychology of the Anthropocene and considers how patterns of human behavior in everyday life might be modified to become more environmentally sustainable. He explores how patterns of environmentally transforming behavior have been molded by Fordist economics, ideologies of religion and science, and finally the supposed rationality of economic pragmatism. From individuals to broader society, Whitehead then considers various ways that policy has been employed to bring about behavior change in individuals and across society at large.Through a series of empirically rich and comprehensively, theoretically tethered chapters, Whitehead's text demonstrates the way human activity has fundamentally transformed great swathes of the global environment. Rather than offer a pronouncement as to whether the Anthropocene title should be conferred on the current geological era, a task he his happy to leave to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, Whitehead's interest is instead in advocating the recognition of Anthropocene thinking around human and environment relations not just at the global scale, but also in various local settings where they play out. He does this well, though in this respect the argument is not particularly novel; for instance, it is now more than twenty years since Bruno Latour noted that in merely opening a newspaper one could see the various ways culture and nature are churned together in local, day-to-day, settings. Where Whitehead's work excels, however, is in its accessibility and its comprehensiveness. Written in plain but accurate language, undergraduate students may easily approach the text, and the carefully selected illustrative material, impressively rich in absorbing content, further hooks the already engaged reader.-OLIVER ZANETTI, Open University HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE FORGOTTEN COAST OF MISSISSIPPI.