Climate Crisis and Climate Realism: A Public Talk with Christian Parenti

Climate Crisis and Climate Realism: A Public Talk with Christian Parenti
Thursday, October 29, 2015 - 7:00pm

Location

Friends House
60 Lowther Avenue (Bloor & Avenue)
Toronto, ON
Canada
43° 40' 13.1952" N, 79° 23' 54.5352" W

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 in 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).

The talk is free, donations are welcome. The space is accessible.

Sponsored by: Socialist Project, Centre for Social Justice, Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York, Rising Tide Toronto