Climate Crisis and Climate Realism
October 29, 2015
When: Thursday Oct 29th, 7pm
Where: Friends House, 60 Lowther Avenue, Toronto
Mass migration, civil war, banditry, imperial military adventures — all these are current responses to the climate crisis. These and other impending dislocations from climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence in “catastrophic convergence†that demands immediate action and longer-term social change. What is the relation between the reformist project of short-term emissions redactions and a longer-term struggle to create a sustainable political economy?
Christian Parenti, journalist and professor at New York University, will discuss these and other questions in a public lecture that draws from his current research into economic and environmental history and upon his book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence which involved years of travel and reportage in conflict zone and climate frontlines around the world.
Christian Parenti has a PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics and is a professor in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. His latest book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (2011), explores how climate change is already causing violence as it interacts with the legacies of economic neoliberalism and cold-war militarism.
Christian’s three earlier books are The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2005), The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (2002), and Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000/2008).
Sponsored by: Centre for Social Justice, Socialist Project, Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York, Rising Tide Toronto | Facebook event
