Disasters Merging

from truthdig:




Disasters Merging

Posted on Sep 22, 2011
By Nomi Prins


“Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence”
A book by Christian Parenti


“Tropic of Chaos,” Christian Parenti’s epic new book, revolves around what the author refers to as catastrophic convergence, the “collision of political, economic and environmental disasters.” Catastrophic convergence is a culmination of the compounding and amplifying effects of adverse climate change, post-Cold War political violence and neoliberal economic philosophy.

Parenti, a meticulous writer and economist, uses a timeline and pan-geographic perspective to show how the first factor aggravates the latter two, like pouring gasoline on a raging fire. The combined effect causes the least protected people (such as the “climate change refugees”) the most amount of harm.

Parenti doesn’t debate whether global warming exists. He doesn’t have to—though he provides scientific and military-based evidence from a swath of sources. Parenti humanizes his information. He travels through equatorial regions that span Africa, Asia and Latin America—the Tropic of Chaos situated between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn—and meshes the experiences of individuals most affected by climate change and related catastrophic convergence, with historical and forward-looking implications.

Parenti begins with a poignant example of a young Kenyan man, Ekaru Loruman, who was shot through the head and left to die in the desert. Parenti explains how Ekaru’s death “in the heart of the pastoralist corridor—a region of mountains, savannas, marshes and deserts, straddling the borderlands of Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia”—is a direct result of the “violence that follows climate change.” Severe aridity caused a decrease in the number of cattle and an increase in the violent cattle raids that led to the killing. It is through Ekaru and his story, and others like him, that Parenti examines catastrophic convergence—from the individual to the global perspective, and back again. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/disasters_merging_20110922/

on reserve at my local library.