Download Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence
Christian Parenti
Nation Books, New York
ISBN: 978-1-56858-600-7
295 pp
hardcover
Life (and, perhaps, human life in particular) tends to exploit environmental resources right up to and
even beyond the carrying capacity of that environment. The consequence of overshooting that carryingcapacity limit is natural selection; survival of the fittest, if you will. Populations are trimmed only to
return and again step over that barrier. Plus, carrying capacities expand and contract and populations
must respond or face extinction.
Among humans tooth and claw has often, but not always been supplanted by cultural evolutionary
safeguards and buffers. That cultural evolution is reflected in the formation of coercive governments
and the rule of law. The weak have been protected from the strong; communities have planned for the
future based on events of the past; and, humans have created an artistic, literary and scientific heritage
that transcends (but does not necessarily replace) nature.
When natural ecosystems near or exceed the limits of carrying capacity the causes are often evident and
the consequences readily predictable. Not necessarily so with the human race. In order to fully
understand historical context it is necessary to de-convolute cultural from environmental influences.
In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti provides dozens of examples of political and economic chaos which,
he claims, are somehow linked to global climate change. In a series of excellent vignettes he details,
most often from first-hand field experience, horror stories mostly concentrated between the Tropics of
Capricorn and Cancer: drought in Kenya; the failed state Somalia; poppies and drought in Afghanistan;
drought in Kyrgyzstan; the politics of water, glaciers and extreme weather in Kashmir; drought, cotton
& moneylenders in southern India; drought in Northeast Brazil slums of Rio; and, links between drought,
NAFTA and the drug wars of northern Mexico.
The strength of the links between political and economic collapse in the tropics, that he most often
presents as self-evident, are not always convincing and often superficial. The author provides
extensive notes and, within the limited context of the text (tropical conflict) the scholarship is thorough.
But, there is nothing new in the "solutions" that he offers at the end of the book.
Some left-insider, politically-motivated terminology (with frequent barbs aimed at the IMF & WB)
heavily used by the author in Tropic of Chaos may be unfamiliar and need definition; e.g., neo-liberalism
may mean something other than what he intends to the U.S. public (for that matter just what is the
"crisis of neo-liberalism"?)
Tropic of Chaos is, admittedly, not a book about the science of climate change - it's a political-science
text. However, even a social-science book could have provided a better link between climate change
and political and economic order. One thing the author does get right - "The climate crisis is not a
technical problem, nor even an economic problem; it is, fundamentally, a political problem."
Richard R. Pardi, Environmental Science, William Paterson University