Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
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