Book review: Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

By ARTHUR WESTING
14 July 2011

Some 200 years ago Benjamin Franklin noted that nothing is certain except for death and taxes. Today Franklin could readily have been additionally certain of the inevitability of two further events of sad note, namely armed conflicts and global warming. In his latest book, impassioned investigative journalist and courageous war correspondent Christian Parenti attempts to connect those two additional certainties of armed conflict and global warming by describing and interpreting events he has witnessed which suggest that the anthropogenic climate change now in progress is already leading to ever greater amounts of social unrest, totalitarianism, violence and armed conflict. His case histories cover a wide range of on-site investigations in a number of seriously troubled regions especially within Afghanistan, Brazil, Congo (former Zaïre), Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Pakistan and Somalia. These countries are the nucleus of what he has termed the “Tropic of Chaos,” a wide geographic belt defined by him as straddling the Equator between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Parenti explains that his book is an attempt to understand the catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence and climate change — in his view this convergence for the first time brings together that trilogy of most colossal events in all human history. In short, the author is convinced that climate change has already become (to lean on military jargon) an active threat multiplier, and with much worse to come. It might thus be useful to consider for a moment what is known about the three pernicious phenomena on which the author builds his case: (a) As to climate change, there is no longer any doubt of its occurrence; its clear recognition since the mid-1960s; its ever growing seriousness, especially to the global biosphere, both terrestrial and marine; and its anthropogenic origin (cf. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). (b) As to violence, this trait has been a continuing and uninterrupted failing of humankind since the earliest beginnings of our species. In more recent decades, the worldwide frequency of armed conflicts, both major and minor, has held reasonably steady or even declined a bit; and, moreover, no correlation has as yet been established between increased violence and environmental deterioration or global warming (cf. the Uppsala University Institute of Peace and Conflict Research; also the Peace Research Institute, Oslo). Additionally, the worldwide status of political rights and civil liberties has actually been improving a bit over the course of recent decades (cf. Freedom House). Perhaps this book will serve to put on guard the institutions responsible for tracking those trends to be alert to the possibility of the correlations being suggested by the author. (c) As to poverty, this characteristic of humankind has also been widely prevalent over the millennia. And, sad to say, in the Third World (the author’s Global South), poverty has been in recent decades becoming ever more serious and widespread (cf. World Bank data on Gross National Income [GNI] per capita). […]

FOR LOVE OF BOOKS: The troubling convergence of poverty, violence and climate change via The Oil Drum