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Web Exclusive – Extended Interview with Christian Parenti

As the planet’s atmosphere is more and more overloaded with carbon dioxide emissions, and extreme weather events around the world become a near-daily occurrence, the question of how the future will play out is often raised. Scientists have modeled the physical outcomes of global warming for years, constantly refining their models to incorporate runaway processes and new variables. However, the political future of a warmer planet is not often enough a topic of discussion. In his newest book, Tropic of Chaos, writer and analyst Christian Parenti explores the potential future of the global regions in and around the earth’s equator – between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. He does so by examining history, in particular the West’s dangerous imposition of neo-liberal economic models that privatized and crippled whole economies, and pervasive militarism that is increasingly restricted to counter-insurgency and the “social mutilation” it engenders. Parenti shows how existing poverty and violence, when intersecting with the effects of climate change, can have profound and deadly impacts on the world. Wealthy nations who imagine they can stave off the worst outcomes of an unpredictably chaotic future, are erroneously imagining themselves to be immune. Parenti surveys the political situations in Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Mexico in painting a picture of what we can expect if green house gas emissions are not curbed immediately.

GUEST: Christian Parenti, 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. His earlier books include Lockdown America, The Soft Cage, and The Freedom. His latest book is Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence