Parenti's Chapter Summary

Parenti attempt is to understand how we have gotten where we are today, with failing states, climate induced migrations, and counterinsurgency. He considers how "current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crisis of poverty and violence" a collision of "political, economic, and environmental disasters" he calls the catastrophic convergence (7). These problems are more than concurrent, they amplify and compound one another, expressing themselves in a variety of complex ways. For instance, Parenti begins his book asking what appears to be a straight forward question Who killed Ekaru Loruman? The skill of Parenti's analysis is that the final identification of the culprit comes only through successive …show more content…
As these leaders look at the "convergence of political disorder and climate change...they see an emerging geography of climatologically driven civil war, refugee flows, pogroms, and social breakdown. In response, they envision a project of open-ended counterinsurgency on a global scale" (10). There are ways in which we can mitigate and adapt to climate change. Mitigation requires immediate changes, reducing our reliance on coal-fired power plants, investing in clean energy solutions, and moving away from oil. Adaptations require both technical and political, technical meaning that we find ways of living with the damage we have wrought, building seawalls for example. Political meaning transforming our relationship with one another. This means "developing new ways of containing, avoiding and deescalating the violence that climate change fuels" (10). Importantly, Parenti critiques the politics of the armed lifeboat, of which even Bill McKibben is guilty of embracing, which responds to climage change by "arming, excluding, forgetting, repressing, policing, and killing" (11). We can see this in the US with growing xenophobia and immigration

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Dr. Parenti's Chapter Summary