From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophethe belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planets midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient climate fascisma political hardening of wealthy states is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

About the Author

Christian Parenti is a contributing editor at The Nation and an investigative Fellow at The Nation Institute. The author of Lockdown America, The Soft Cage and The Freedom, he writes for numerous publications including Fortune, Playboy, Conde Nast Traveler, Salon, Mother Jones and The London Review of Books. Parenti completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics in 2000 and has been an Open Society Institute Senior Justice Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.