From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe–the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"–a political hardening of wealthy states– is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.
As temperatures rise, climate change is increasingly expressing itself in human politics through greater violence, social breakdown and spreading state failure; acclaimed war correspondent Christian Parenti reports from the frontilines of a new age of climate wars. Across the Global South, climate change is breeding war, banditry and social breakdown. As temperatures rise, glaciers melt, droughts intensify and extreme weather becomes more frequent, climate change is increasingly expressing itself in human politics as greater violence, humanitarian crisis, social breakdown and spreading state failure. From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the new era of climate war has begun. In "Tropic of Chaos", award-winning journalist and author Christian Parenti travels through the frontlines of this gathering catastrophe. Combining vivid on-the-ground reportage with incisive sociological and historical analysis, Parenti lays out the raw facts: climate change is already beginning to express itself as poverty, hunger, migration, civil war, massive slum urbanisation, and the collapse of weak states. Parenti locates the geography of this crisis as running along the old north-south axis of empire.The front lines of the calamity are that belt of economically and politically battered post-colonial states girding the planet's mid-latitudes. Already the Pentagon and its European allies are planning a militarized adaptation for this new world.