What does climate change have to do with armed conflicts erupting throughout the developing world? In his new book TROPIC OF CHAOS: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE NEW GEOGRAPHY VIOLENCE, Christian Parenti argues that a new era of climate war is upon us.
Extreme weather brought on by global warming is unleashing cascades of unrest and violence from Africa to Asia to the Americas—across a belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial states straddling the planet’s mid-latitudes, the “tropic of chaos.” On this episode of Locus Focus, Christian Parenti talks with host Barbara Bernstein about the catastrophic convergence of colliding political, economic and environmental disasters unfolding in the wake of the accelerating climate crisis.
Christian Parenti is a contributing editor at The Nation, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting scholar at the City University of New York. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from the London School of Economics. The author of Lockdown America, The Soft Cage, and The Freedom. Parenti has written for Fortune, The New York Times, Los AngelesTimes, Washington Post, Playboy, Mother Jones, and The London Review of Books. He has held fellowships from the Open Society Institute, Rockefeller Brother Fund and the Ford Foundation; and has won numerous awards, including the 2009 Lange-Tailor Prize and “Best Magazine Writing 2008” from the Society for Professional Journalists. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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