Climate Change and Global Violence
The collision between climate change and violence is the subject of Christian Parenti’s impressive new book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.[2012] The guiding idea is what Parenti calls the “the catastrophic convergence.” By this he means something more geographically and historically targeted than a coming climate-triggered global war. Chaos focuses on a handful of developing countries where the author says climate change is amplifying previous crises with roots in the more climatically stable 20th-century. In this “belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet’s mid-lattitudes,” writes Parenti, “the current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence… one expressing itself through the other. The prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation are Cold War-era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.”
Early in the book, Parenti reviews the most important British and U.S. military documents, most dating to the mid-naughts, which discuss climate change in strategic terms. Among the earliest and most influential of these was a 2004 Pentagon-commissioned study stressing the likelihood that climate change would unfold in a non-linear way. The dark report laid out a future scenario in which “disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life.”
http://fpif.org/global_warming_global_violence/
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