The Heat and the Fury
On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
“Schwartzstein’s vignettes of each troubled region are vibrantly narrated as he encounters indignant locals and has run-ins with menacing state security officials attempting to block his investigations into what they invariably consider a ‘sensitive’ subject. It’s a riveting journey through a world running hot.” -- Publishers Weekly, starred
As a journalist on the climate security beat, Peter Schwartzstein has been chased by kidnappers, badly beaten, detained by police, and told, in no uncertain terms, that he was no longer welcome in certain countries. Yet these personal brushes with violence are simply a hint of the conflict simmering in our warming world.
Schwartzstein has visited ravaged Iraqi towns where ISIS used drought as a recruiting tool and weapon of terror. In Bangladesh, he has interviewed farmers-turned-pirates who can no longer make a living off the land and instead make it off bloody ransoms. Security forces have blocked him from a dam being constructed along the Nile that has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war. And he has heard the fear in the voices of women from around the world who say their husbands’ tempers flare when the temperature ticks up.
In The Heat and the Fury, he not only puts readers on the frontlines of climate violence but gives us the context to make sense of seemingly senseless acts. As Schwartzstein deftly shows, climate change is often the spark that ignites long smoldering fires, the extra shove that pushes individuals, communities, and even nations over the line between frustration and lethal fury. What, he asks, can ratchet down the aggression? Can cooperation on climate actually become a salve to heal old wounds?
There are no easy answers on a planet that is fast becoming a powder keg. But Schwartzstein’s incisive analysis of geopolitics, unparalleled on-the-ground reporting, and keen sense of human nature offer the clearest picture to date of the violence that threatens us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There are fewer and fewer forms of instability... that are not at least partly connected to climate," asserts journalist Schwartzstein in his eye-opening debut. Drawing on more than a decade of reporting, Schwartzstein surveys "vulnerable landscapes" around the globe where climate change has acted as an intensifier of violence. Examples include Syria, where drought was a factor in triggering a civil war in 2011 ("Bad rains, bad government, bad times. We could not continue," one herder succinctly explains) and Bangladesh, where piracy is on the rise as farmers whose farmlands are being despoiled by increased flooding venture into "lawless" coastal marshes to fish and forage, where they are vulnerable to robbery and kidnapping. Schwartzstein highlights areas where the potential for future violence is high (including the Nile river basin, where shrinking water reserves could lead to war between Egypt and Ethiopia) and emphasizes that developed nations are already experiencing global warming's violence-intensifying effects (he points to studies showing that European women are more vulnerable to domestic abuse during heat waves). Schwartzstein's vignettes of each troubled region are vibrantly narrated as he encounters indignant locals and has run-ins with menacing state security officials attempting to block his investigations into what they invariably consider a "sensitive" subject. It's a riveting journey through a world running hot.
