Tropic of Chaos: Climate Wars and the New Geography of Violence

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.