Spirit in Action
Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change And The New Geography of Violence
Christian Parenti is the author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change & the New Geography of Violence, a powerful analysis of the historical, military, economic & other forces which combine with climate change to move us toward catastrophic convergence. Chistian is a contributing editor at The Nation with a Ph.D. in sociology.
- Broadcast on:
- 07 Aug 2011
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[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And my lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ My guest today for Spirit in Action is Christian Perente. He's just released a new and compelling book, The Tropic of Chaos, Climate Change, and the New Geography of Violence. The book is an incisive look at climate change and how it's mixing with established political, economic, cultural, and other forces to move us in the direction of catastrophic convergence. This is not a science book nor is it a fluffy feel-good book, nor is it baseless alarmism. It is the fruit of careful and methodical research and integration of ideas. Christian Perente is the author of four books, Lockdown America, The Soft Cage, The Freedom, and Tropic of Chaos. He is a contributing editor of The Nation magazine and has a PhD in sociology. Christian, thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you for having me on. Let's be here. I understand it's been pretty busy out there sharing the news that you've brought together in your Tropic of Chaos book. How busy has it been? Are you covering the whole country, the world? No, the book tour has taken me out to the west coast and then I'm doing some stuff on the east coast. It's been pretty busy, but it's been a lot of rage. Oh, yes, it's been busy, but that's a good thing. It's a real responsibility and honor to get this word out about how climate change is already causing violence. Now, here, as things are, that is not just a threat for the future, but a problem that already exists. I appreciate the opportunity to start a conversation about that with people in different places. Your book has massive implications for the whole world, and not just the USA. I think we tend to get USA-centric too often. And most of your analysis looks at how things are falling, how the chips are falling in the global south or in that area between the Tropic of Capcorn and Tropic of Cancer. Are you getting the word out to them too? Or maybe they just already know it and they realize what's going on? Well, many people realize something's going on. In my travels, in the global south, a lot of people had not heard of climate change. They knew that their region was suffering a drought, say, Kenya or Afghanistan or India or Brazil, but very often people have not heard of climate change. I mean, some people had, but realistically, the book is published in English, it's published in America and Canada and the UK. And so it's primarily for those audiences, not that I wouldn't like to get it out to other audiences, but, you know, realistically, that's what we just published in the book. Three, four weeks ago, and I'm an American writing in English for my cultural group, which is, you know, English speaking people in developed economies in the north. You know, there's a lot that needs to be thought about here. I mean, there's the issue of climate denial, around the science. I mean, I don't really get into science too much, but mostly what I'm trying to do with this book is break the discussion of climate change to break it out of its climate ghetto, which is a sort of the realm of scientists and certain select environmental activists. What I want to do is introduce climate change in an accessible way, not reintroduce, but reintroduce it into issues of development studies and security studies and the practice of development in the global south and security. So that's the goal, to sort of reinvigorate the climate discussion by bringing it into other discussions and saying, "Hey, look, look at the connections. Look how this issue is not just a select specialty issue for people who are interested in science and are interested in ecosystems and species and all that sort of stuff. This is about what you're looking at is how it is that kids in the Horn of Africa will get enough nutrition to get a decent education and the economy can develop, et cetera, et cetera. That changes an issue. If one's concern is war and peace and banditry and governance and the collapse or functioning of states and climate change is certainly an issue that has to be dealt with. That's the goal of the book, and I like to think it brings together these different discussions fairly well. Well, that's the amazing part about the book. I have to say it's fairly distressing, maybe even depressing, to go through how one thing has led to another and how this is leading to really massive catastrophe. You speak of catastrophic convergence as what's happening here. I'm tempted to talk about the individual places where you did the analysis, where you followed the, certainly climate's always part of the pie, but the economics, the history, the religion, the different clans that clash together to be part of the problem. But first, let's just talk about the overall picture about climate. One of the things you mentioned in the book is that before the Industrial Revolution, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you're drawing from a lot of their information. They said that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was only 280 parts per million. Now it's 390, whereas 350 is considered the breaking point. So we're over the tipping point already. We're into the danger zone. Well, we're into the danger zone where tipping points definitely can begin and may have begun. But yeah, climate science, the IPCC, which is a human convened clearing house for climate science, the purpose of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is to collate and vet all of the standard science on climatology and related fields. I remember a lot of this is not just in climatology, because that's actually an interesting point that climate denialists would like to bring up and say, "What's a climatology? There aren't that many climate scientists. How could there be thousands of people involved in the IPCC? There aren't that many climate scientists." But of course, all different sciences, not all but many sciences, border on and contribute to climate science. So biologists who study the way that some species responds to the acidity of sea water due to the absorption of CO2, or arborists looking at how trees grow, all these different fields that are not actually climate science contributes with all the natural sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, as well as actual climatology and climate modeling and meteorology. All these papers are vetted and examined by not only scientists, but government and industry. So in fact, the IPCC's process is quite conservative. I mean, it is not an advocate of the organization. It is not a bastion of hotheads. It is essentially the lowest common denominator of reasonable vetted scientific analysis and discovery. And so it's a very safe place to draw one conclusion from. It is the clearinghouse role international science that relates to climate change. And the IPCC does not itself produce science. That's the science produced by universities, by government, oceanography, and atmospheric institutes, such as NASA. So it wasn't actually the IPCC who discovered this, but there were two different groups of scientists, combinations of universities that drew two different core samples from the Greenland ice sheet. So the first of these was finally extracted in 1994 and analyzed, I believe it was extracted before that and then finally analyzed by 1994. But what they found then, because with the ice sheet in Greenland, you have something like the tree rings when you cut down a tree and look at the piece of wood. You have a year by year layering of the snowfall. And therefore, year by year record, you can count backwards from the present to the bottom and get a fairly accurate snapshot of the climological conditions by measuring, for example, the CO2 concentration in the ice bubbles. You know, there's actual air trapped in some of the ice. Then also, these are the various trace element sites, I mean, I'm not a scientist, so I don't understand to complete every mechanism. But anyway, what was confirmed were previously unconfirmed, more marginalized, or only tentatively confirmed hypotheses, that CO2 in fact had been below 280 parts per million or at 280 parts per million until the industrial revolution began. And then it then began to go up and up and up. Now, CO2 had been monitored in the atmosphere directly in Hawaii by an American scientist starting in the late 50s. And he would notice that there was a seasonal fluctuation in CO2 levels, and that it was clearly linked to the amount, you know, whether deciduous trees were hibernating in the Northern Hemisphere, whether they were actively producing oxygen and absorbing CO2. And what was measured from those real-time samples on was that we went from 315 parts per million when that monitoring in Hawaii began up to 390 parts now. And what was confirmed for the ice cores was that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had really been pretty much stable. It had bounced up and down, but had been pretty much stable at 280 parts per million for about 10,000 years before the industrial revolution. And then it begins to go up. And as you said, we're now at 390 parts per million. Scientists such as James Hansen of NASA believe that 350 parts per million is the threshold after which positive feedback loops are set off, and positive feedback loops have negative consequences. The positive refers to the causal flow whereby the effects of the original cause then compound to amplify the original cause. So an example of that would be the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic, which contains beneath it enormous amounts of natural methane. If the Arctic permafrost melts completely in them, all of that methane is released, climate change, global warming will become self-propelling and will accelerate radically because methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more powerful than CO2. So we're hitting some of those tipping points, and we're seeing methane beginning to be released. We're seeing the melting of the permafrost. But we're still at the point where we can rain in this process because the primary cause of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is human activity, the burning of fossil fuels. If we keep burning them and we have these tipping points and these positive feedback loops, then the primary cause of global warming might not be human activity. It might be the die-off of tropical force in Indonesia and the release of all the stored carbon in the feed logs. It might be the fact that the hole would become ice-free, and once they're ice-free, they're no longer reflecting back sunlight, but rather absorbing heat because open water is dark and absorbs heat, whereas ice is white and reflects heat. And so the effect of climate change, global warming, such as the ice-free Arctic, would then compound the problem by absorbing more heat. So what the verge is setting off those things and we really need to act now to cut emissions. But most of what my book is about is about the way in which climate change is already interacting, this is the first part of your question, is already interacting with pre-existing problems. Throughout the global south, you see that climate change rarely just affects people on its own, but usually what it does is it exacerbates and works through pre-existing crises, pre-existing problems, problems of violence and poverty and inequality. And so the catastrophic convergence, this idea that using the book is that climate change is merging with combining with and amplifying the legacy of the Cold War, the legacy of economic neoliberalism or radical free trade policies that have been pushed upon the government to the global south by the World Bank and the IMF over the last 30 years. So to take those each in turn, the legacy of the Cold War, in the global south, the Cold War was not so cold, it was frequently quite hot. And the USSR and the US fought proxy wars that had the effect of littering countries in the global south with cheap weaponry and lots of men who were trained in the arts of assassination, interrogation, smuggling and small unit combat terrorism. It also created massively traumatized and dislocated populations, people who had been forced to be moved by war. So it really ripped pieces of social fabric and seeded the terrain with the tools of violence and men trained in violence. The legacy of neoliberalism or radical free market economics has been to undermine the state and force it with a draw from economic activity. So across the global south states have privatized their utility companies, privatized their telecommunications companies, cut back on social services such as education and healthcare, cut back on economic support for small farmers and pastoralists, such as subsidized credit programs, agricultural extension programs, veterinary extension programs reaching out to pastoralists to help them make sure their animals are healthy in times of drought, et cetera, et cetera. Those policies of removing government from economic activity and leaving all problems to market solutions has resulted in increased poverty, but not just increased poverty, also increased inequality in many societies. And increased inequality is important because sociologists know that poverty alone doesn't cause violence, but it is inequality deprivation that has experienced in relationship to what others have or what one used to have or what could be relative deprivation that causes upheaval, be it crime or revolution or religious warfare. So you have not only increased absolute deprivation, you have increased relative deprivation due to this inequality in many countries in the global south. Another factor that you cite in the book related to this war, this struggle, what relative deprivation brings is that the nature of war has changed over the last century, whereas before war used to mean this army faces this army and most of the people dying were soldiers. That's not the way it's happening anymore. So this is playing all the more into the deaths of the local people in the global south, because we've weaponized them. Yes, colonialism and colonial conquest did involve a lot of abusive civilian populations, but throughout much of the 20th century from World War I on, the wars conducted by European countries generally have seen an increase in the number of civilians in effect compared to military casualties. That's only part of the problem. I mean, only part of the problem is the direct human rights impact of civilians being killed, but the other thing that happens with irregular warfare, counterinsurgency, which is the kind of the framework that many wealthy economies are developing as a management or an adaptation strategy to deal with the disruption of climate change because Pentagon takes this sign very seriously. The problem with counterinsurgency is that because it takes not terrain, but the population as an object, I mean, the government forces in an encounter insurgency already control the terrain, what they don't control the population, so they try to win the hearts and minds of people. And that means relocating people, indoctrinating and reindoctrinating people, torturing, interrogating people, turning elements of the civilian population into auxiliaries, paramilitary auxiliaries to the government forces. And the effect of all this is the traumatized population and in ripped pieces of social fabric and seed the society with the tools of war, people trained in smuggling interrogation, assassination and all that, and to flood the society with cheap weapons, cheap hand grenades and AK-47s and that sort of thing. And what you see in a lot of societies that were on the front lines of counterinsurgency, say for example in Central America, which was the front lines of American counterinsurgency from the late '70s through to the early '90s, the murder rate in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua is now equal to the death toll during come of the worst years of the war, but there's no war, there's no coherence to the violence, violence, there's no cause, but there is all this violence and continued social dislocation. And it's into that context that we now get flooding and drought and the trauma of extreme weather driven by climate change. You do such an excellent job in the book. And again, the book is Tropic of Chaos, Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence by Christian Parenti. Christian, in the book, you follow the chain of events so well. And again, it's pretty depressing because even though there was hope in certain areas of Africa or India or South America along the way, those structures have pretty much imploded upon themselves. And their situation is perhaps worse than ever. I don't know if that's accurate, true. I realize that a number of the advances that we've made have been part of the problem. One thing you talk very little about in the book is population. And population, of course, has grown and grown and grown. We've got vaccines and we've got other medical techniques to keep people alive. And unfortunately, populations have blossomed in areas where they weren't meant to blossom in deserts and so on. How much does population play in aggravating all of these situations? Well, it's tricky because, of course, it's not just population. It's not strictly a quantitative question. It's also a qualitative question. The carrying capacity of the planet isn't determined by the number of people who fly around a jet all the time and run their air conditioners and meet every day. The environmental footprint of a wealthy person is much, much bigger than the environmental footprint of a poor person. So, it's a tricky issue. Now, I'm not saying that population is not an issue. There are some on the left who, coming out of the 1970s, said that population was essentially not an issue. That this was, there was a right-wing discourse around population control that was a sort of malthusian agenda. And we should reject that and make the point that it was distribution, not population, that was the issue. A small minority of the population of the planet having so many resources and wasting them was the key environmental issue, not that there were so many people. Because most people on the planet really don't eat that much meat and don't drive cars. But the fact of the matter is that development in this context and through the industrialized development means that more and more people do want some meat and do want a vehicle. So, population is an issue, but when talking about population control, and you're right, I don't deal with it in the book because there's a lot I don't deal with because there's just too much to deal with ultimately for one book. But I think it's important to really always keep in the foreground of a population discussion the inequality of consumption and the fact that not everybody has an equal impact, that one rich person in the United States is equal to thousands and thousands of poor fishermen and farmers in a place like Africa or Latin America or Asia. So there shouldn't be a punitive aspect to population, but really what are we talking about, if we're going to be realistic about this, we're talking about family planning, we're talking about women's rights, we're talking about access to birth control and abortion. And this being a religious show I think that's actually very important to bring up. I mean that's crucial, I mean one in my opinion cannot have a concern around population if you do not also recognize a woman's right to choose and to have control over her body. So those are the core issues within the population discussion. It's about women's rights politically, economically and over their own bodies. So there's a way in which the population discourse could be harnessed within development to enhance the rights of women in the global south, but currently, I mean the US government doesn't think in those terms. I don't believe it gives any money to family planning. The religious right has really pushed back very, very aggressively on that front and damaged the agenda considerably. And it's sad because it does multiply her in a lot. What you're talking about in the book is how these multiplier effects, how one influence in terms of economics or one influence in terms of kleptocracy or one influence in terms of irrigation, how all these come together. To produce this looming disaster. One of the things that I find kind of interesting, and I'm not sure if you know the answer internationally, there's certainly areas which are suffering from greater and greater amounts of drought. And you talk about a number of those areas in your book. In some of them, the annual rainfall is actually greater than it used to be, but there's long periods of drought with sudden flooding and terrible disasters that way. Overall, on the globe, does global warming mean less rainfall across the globe, or does it just mean in specific areas? No, I mean, generally, it means what the climate model seemed to indicate, and there's some contradictory. If it means growing desertification, but actually increased rainfall in a lot of places, the atmosphere being warmer holds more energy and more moisture, there's more evaporation. And there's generally increased rainfall, maybe not generally, but in many places, even places that suffered desertification, there's increased overall precipitation. So I opened the book in the Horn of Africa, which is now suffering and drought. I was there two years ago doing my research, and the experience on the ground is one of tremendous drought. You walk along the Somali border and through these regions, it's unbelievably desiccated. They haven't had rain in the eastern parts of Kenya, northeastern parts of Kenya, along with Somali border for years, several years, two or three years of life in there. Other parts further west, equally, maybe not quite as dry, very, very dry, but they had had drought punctuated by a freak flood. So if the rain comes all at once, like in a matter of a season's amount of rain in two days and then watches away, that can only exacerbate the drought. And when I spoke with the meteorologist in Kenya, what they've charged showed was actually an increase in precipitation over the last two to three decades, even though there's a growing desertification and growing water scarcity. And it's because the cycle of the rain is totally out of whack, and there's more frequent, intense deluges where lots and lots of rain comes all at once, or rain comes at the wrong time. So, yeah, it's not as simple as more or less rain, you know, more rain, but at the wrong time and in the wrong form can actually compound desertification by stripping away topsoil that moisture retaining plants need. Yes, and by the way, I did live in Africa, I was in West Africa in the late 1970s, I was in the Peace Corps, and I visited a couple of times since, including two Kenya and two Rwanda, I was in Rwanda just three years ago. So I do see on the ground some of these changes happening myself, but to take the global picture is what you do so well by looking at all these different spots on the globe and tracing their history. One of the things that I think is part of any big picture is the ideas of boundaries, and sometimes those boundaries are, this is the nation that's facing the other nation, but like when you're talking about the boundaries between Afghanistan and Pakistan, there's people, or the tribe, if you will, Pashtun people who are on both sides of that arbitrarily drawn border. So these are all are part of the forces that are causing a destruction of society, and therefore making a society as ill-prepared for the consequences of climate change coming. You want to talk about a couple of the instances of that just to flesh out what I'm talking about here. What you're talking about is the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the idea of the book came to me while I was in Afghanistan researching the opium trade, the opium poppy, which is the source plant for heroin, and Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's heroin. And I did a series of these stories in different places over different years, and OEAT the farmers would say, "Well, one reason we grow this crop is because it's very drought resistant, and at first I didn't even know there was this drought in Afghanistan." Well, it turns out that Afghanistan has been suffering the worst drought in living memory to coincide with the whole NATO occupation there, and opium poppy uses one-fifth the amount of water that wheat uses. So, given the drought conditions, it is really the only crop that many of these farmers can grow and make any money on. Now, one side in the war, the U.S. NATO led occupation, and the cars like government attacked poppy. The other side, the Taliban, defend the farmers right to grow poppy. For one year, right before 9/11, when the Taliban were in power, they prohibited poppy growing, but it was only for one year. People are confused sometimes because of that fact. I think that the Taliban are like anti-opium poppy, but under their government, it was legal, kept to this one year, and as an insurgent force, they protect poppy growing. And the Taliban are a postune ethnic movement as much as they're a religious movement, and they straddle the border that you're describing posturing Pakistan and Afghanistan. So, it occurred to me that one aspect of this war, along with the religious ideology and ethnic ideology that might motivate a young man to fight on the side of the Taliban, was this economic fact, this interest that the young soldiers of the Taliban might have, which is that that's the side in the war that defends his family's right to grow the only crop that, given the drought, is actually economically feasible. So, it was from that that I decided to look into other aspects of that, but then it was also a perfect example of this idea of the catastrophic convergence. It's not that climate change caused the war in Afghanistan, by any means, but it's exacerbating it. The prehistory of the current moment in Afghanistan is highly complex, and it doesn't really involve the issue of free trade so much. Some places that's more an issue like Mexico, free trade is really the issue in Afghanistan, the Cold War, the hot proxy subsides of the Cold War was really the issue. And so, the struggle between Afghanistan and Pakistan over that border goes back 100 years, back when Pakistan was basically British India, and there was a conflict over that border, then Pakistan becomes an independent state in 1947. That issue with the border continues Pakistan is feeling threatened by India, and it cultivates these Pashtun irregulars, some of who later become the anti-Soviet Mujahideen, and then some of the very same ones become Taliban, essentially. Goebboudin Hekmatyar, who is referred to loosely as a Taliban, his party is a Hespili Islami, and it has its origins in Afghanistan in the 1960s. He crosses the border into Pakistan and picks up the gun before the communist coup in Afghanistan. He picks up the gun against Da'ud, who is a nationalist, republican nationalist, who overthrows the king in 1973 in Afghanistan. Goebboudin Hekmatyar has been essential in the anti-Soviet Jihad and receives a lot of American money. He then aligns with the Taliban after the fall of the Taliban regime, so that's just one example of this colonial border creating an antagonism that continues on through different iterations of state formation, and is now being exacerbated by climate change. Because the Pashtun farmboys who flocked to, I mean, I was actually did that original research in Guadak, which is Hespili Islami territory. I mean, so the Taliban forces there, the insurgent forces are, they're not actually Taliban, as in Questasura, Taliban, following Molot Omar, they follow Hespili Islami and Goebboudin Hekmatyar. And a lot of that is going to be complex to pick up on first listen, and they'll probably better absorb some of the complex history and relationships if they pick up a copy of Tropic of Chaos, climate change and the new geography of violence. It's by Christian Parenti, and Christian is with us here today for Spirit in Action, a Northern Spirit Radio Production website, northernspiritradio.org. Come to the site to listen to the full archives of the past six years, including our Song of the Soul program and other recordings. Likewise, you'll find a place to leave comments. I'd really like to hear from you, and there are links to my guests. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeat, and my guest today can be found via his website, Christian Parenti.com, or follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. Back to you, Christian. One big question that I have is that you said you didn't have the idea for the book when you were traveling over there in Afghanistan. Then what the heck were you doing traveling there in the middle of a very unsafe area at a very insecure time? I was reporting for the Nation magazine. I had reported from Afghanistan and Iraq for a number of years, and I was reporting on the conditions in Afghanistan and, you know, doing different stories about corruption and economic development and security and whatnot. And one of them was, well, a series of several times that did stories about opium eradication, the opium-poppy economy. And so it was during my time working in Afghanistan. I was in and out of there from 2004 to 2008. I actually made a film that was on HBO for Fixer, taking a large model, Mox Bondi. Some listeners might have seen. So yeah, it was out of that reporting that this larger idea came, and I actually had a book contract to write a book about Afghanistan, which I gave back to money and canceled the contract. Because I realized I wanted to write this book about climate change in war. This was much more pressing. Can you talk a little bit about where your passion for this comes? I mean, obviously, you could have written your book in Afghanistan, and you could have brought in money. So if it's just in terms of making money off a book, you could do that. Clearly, you're driven by the issues involved here. Where does that come from in your life, in your big picture view of the world? I don't know exactly. I mean, I think, you know, I was raised in Vermont, and so I was raised in mostly in Vermont. And on the coast of Maine, I was raised close to the land and worked fishing on oyster farms and as a lobsterman, you know, as a teenager. And I always felt connected to the landscape and to nature. And I mean, I remember the first time I heard about climate change was I was 17. I found a book in -- I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in that there was this box of books late at night that was hitting on the street abandoned. And one of the books was the Club of Rome's book, Limits to Growth, published in 1972. It's one of the first books to really theorize about climate change, peak oil, all this stuff. Not that I actually -- I have a rather elaborate and serious critique of the notion of peak oil. I think we're going to run out of atmosphere before we run out of oil, and that's y'all. Anyway, so this book, as a title, Limits to Growth, you know, sort of got me thinking about it systematically. And also, with the town I'm from in Vermont -- in Vermont is near Brattleboro, and there's a nuclear power plant, atomic power plant outside of that town. And I was opposed to that and had protested that as a teenager. And so I'd always been concerned about environmental issues and about climate change. They just came together kind of, obviously, in my mind, but it was clear that human civilization is living on borrowed time. I mean, we're burning, thoughtful fuels. You know, we're digging up the past, the bones of dinosaurs and spitting them back out into the atmosphere. And in the process, we're turning the atmosphere to a condition akin to when dinosaurs run to the earth, when there were crocodiles and palm trees in the North Pole. So we are dangerously tampering with the natural systems upon which we depend, and it's very clear to me that one of the primary effects of that was going to be political violence, expressing itself in a once removed fashion as religious violence, ethnic violence, some sort of crazy, irredentist struggle to get back a piece of land or whatever. But that if you look into it, there's very frequently environmental stresses driving these kinds of desperate and crazy maneuvers by insurgents and leaders and police forces and fanatic demagogic leaders. Could you toss in Christian a little bit about your religious spiritual background? With a name like Christian, I think that must carry some weight. Well, it's interesting. You'd be surprised. My father is actually a Marxist who was kind of red-baited, active academia, and he's not religious at all. He was raised Roman Catholic, but he was not religious. He's maybe a bit spiritual. And my mother is from a Quaker family, primarily a kind of Quaker and Methodist, I think, and a Scottish Irish. She's sort of spiritual. She's essentially a Buddhist. And my father is essentially not spiritual or religious, though, you know, the fact matters of Marxism is kind of a religious framework for many people. I am essentially not very spiritual and not very religious. I'm actually, no offense to your listeners or the show. I'm increasingly critical of religion. I went through a phase of seeing religion as just an ideology like any other, but I mean, there's a lot of good work that's done by religion, but I'm very worried about the role of religion in politics today. And then at least, and in this country, and I think it is, in fact, I know you're making a distinction between spirituality and religion, but I am kind of caught. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the question of organized religion. It does so much good in many ways, but also it is a major institutional support system for an embrace of irrationality. And that is fundamentally what's at the core on the basis of the fanatical positions of the Republican Party right now. Now, I mean, that's not the fault of progressive Christians, and there are plenty of progressive Christians. I know that. But there's something about this, like, tolerance for faith that allows these Republicans a certain reading space. They believe these things as well. They're totally irrational, you know. These people don't even understand what defaulting on the debt will do. Anyway, I don't mean to be criticizing religion too much, but I'm actually -- so I'm not that -- I'm not that religious. Am I spiritual? I'm not sure I'm not spiritual. I suppose if I am spiritual at all, it'll be some sort of half-baked Zen Buddhism that sort of believes -- I mean, I don't -- I don't believe that there is an afterlife. And I don't believe that there is a supreme being, but that doesn't undermine a sort of spirituality of ethics. You know, that I think that in a way, that kind of belief that there is no afterlife, and that there is no kind of organizing principle to the universe, is in a way incredibly invigorating and terrifying, but, like, exciting, that, like, what that means is that life right here right now is all there really is. And so I bet, you know, I suppose, a religious tradition that addresses itself to that dance's Zen Buddhism, which is like trying to be completely present with whatever it is, and like to be engaged and non-attached. Not checked out as attached, but engaged but non-attached, prepared to focus on the moment constantly, but not in some sort of denial-ridden, hedonistic, present-oriented way. So, you know, that's kind of a jumbled answer, and I didn't mean to take too much of a swipe at religion there. Actually, I don't have any problem with any of the comments that you made. They make a lot of sense to me. And I did want your feedback. I'm assuming in some of these areas, certainly, religion becomes the mechanism by which you fire up one side or the other, justifying why they're going to wipe out one another. Of course, you can do that without religion. Of course, Stalin is one of the greatest mass murders of all the history that I know about, and he was an atheist, right? So, it's possible to build up some ideology which justifies wiping out someone else. Did you see that particularly at play in any of the places you went to? Was it particularly strong? Well, there's always some sort of, like, you know, if you strip out the specific content and you look at the forms of these violence and radical movements, I mean, they're sort of always the same, whether it's Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, or Stalin, and the truth in a better society, or white supremacy, and leaving strong for the Germans. I mean, you know, the specific set of ideas at the heart of any kind of totalitarian, armed, fanatical, intolerant, expansionist movement, it's always the same form, right? It's like leaders, absolute beliefs that are not questioned, claims to truth, right? Whatever it is, whether it's secular, like whether it's progressive communism, or like reactionary traditional racism, or whether it's like religious, it's always like the same fundamental truth claim as who co-put it, that the leaders of the movement, the center of the society, be they priests, or intellectuals, or political leaders have a lock on truth, and therefore that justifies their abuse of people who don't accept the story, whatever it is, right? The specific content of the belief is ultimately less important than the form that the power structures take of armies, surveillance, pogroms, files, interrogations, admissions of truth, sacred texts, right? They could be like the works of the leader, or they could be like the Bible, or they could be the Quran and the Shura, or they could be whatever. It's the same general patterns. Despotism, war-making, and fanaticism are not the problems of one set of ideas, or another set of ideas. They are the form that leadership cliques use to mobilize masses and mobilize societies against one another, and they have done so in the same fashion throughout history, which is to make claim on truth that then justifies this obvious abuse of other people's bodies, which violates the basic kind of empathetic experience one might have. That looks horrible, pulling someone's fingernails at them. How could this be done? Well, because they don't believe, they don't know, they oppose the truth, and we have to do this evil thing to them, because ultimately at the end of this evil bloody process comes, whatever, religious nirvana, or, you know, world socialism, or the master race gets all the movement needs, and wipes out those who are destroying the human race through their Slavic genes and Jewish genes or whatever it is. Whatever the specific set of ideas are genocidal, militaristic, state building, and war-making projects, use the same forms and fill in specific actual ideas, and the ideas are almost like the finishing touches, the specific ideas on what is ultimately a politics of power, and bodies, and resources. And I just want to make clear, this isn't just by reading books that you've come up with the idea that this is how it works. Even on the ground in many of these places, including extended periods, for instance, in Afghanistan and so on. Yeah, I mean, I've hung out with religious guerrillas, and communist guerrillas, and police forces, and prisoners, and paramilitaries, and civilians, and they've seen this stuff over 20 years call most of the continents of the world. Does it leave you with much hope that we can get this together? I mean, the need for mitigation and adaptation that we have to do in order to deal with climate change, this has to be based on somehow as peoples, as large groups of people, working together for a common good. I have a sense that you're not real optimistic about our ability to do that, particularly because when you look at what's happening in the United States right now, with the deadlock on just passing a budget and just being able to pay for our bills, there's pretty much doubt that if the world's premier democracy, if we can't work together, then how are the places that have been so deeply damaged and ravaged by abusive histories? How are they going to ever get it together? Are you optimistic? Can you offer some optimistic little glimpses of the future? Well, let's say this. I have reasons for optimism. I offer, at the end of the book, very, very concrete, very, very realistic reasons for optimism. Now, am I optimistic? That's a different question. I try to be optimistic. But there are things that can happen right now in this country to radically reduce emissions without getting Eric Cantor or John Boehner to change their worldview and suddenly believe in the science that has already proven that climate change is real. So, some of those things are the EPA has the obligation to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This is because activists sued the EPA beginning in the late 1990s and fought all the way until 2007 when the Supreme Court finally said, "Yes, the EPA is obliged to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the primary one being carbon dioxide." So that means that this is all under the Clean Air Act of 1970, which previously was regulating SO2, for example, which causes acid rain, sulfur dioxide. The parameters of the Clean Air Act are that if air pollution is dangerous to human health, the EPA must regulate it. So the struggle was to prove that CO2 and other greenhouse gases harm human health. They do, boom, of course, as it has to happen. The Bush administration does nothing. The Obama administration comes in and finds the start following the law. And it points in the new head of the EPA, Sheila Jackson, a woman who's not so bad, even though the EPA has been fairly anemic under Obama, and has begun to issue rules based on that Supreme Court ruling, which is that they now have to include greenhouse gas emissions like what comes out of smoke stacks and get coal-fired power plants and natural gas-fired power plants. Those have to be regulated by the EPA under the 1970 Clean Air Act. So they then have to promulgate and design a whole set of rules for how that works. You know how you apply this to oil refinery, how you apply this to a gas plant, how you apply it to a coal plant. They've been dragging their feet on issuing these rules. They're about 30 rules waiting to be issued. And if the EPA were very robust in how it issued these rules, it could effectively impose a carbon tax and raise the price of burning coal to get electricity. If there was a carbon tax, because what happens, say, you can only burn coal if you can find a way to do it cleanly, otherwise you pay these fines. Which means that you either quote down the coal-fired power plant or you pay these fines. Which then means that it's much more profitable to try and sell clean electricity. And one of the issues that the clean tech sector is facing is that it doesn't have enough demand because the dirty old technology is still too cheap, like coal-fired electrical power. So the EPA could, you know, without getting any vote through Congress or the Senate could impose really strict rules if it had the guts to issue proper rules and resist the pushback from Republicans. That would really help spur on the development of clean energy like wind and solar and hydroelectric power. The other thing the government could do right now without having to get the Republicans to go along with this to suddenly believe in the science that they're invested in denying would be to use its purchasing power to help jumpstart the clean tax sector. The federal government has the largest single vehicle fleet in the US economy, the largest fleet of buildings in the US economy, and it's the largest single energy consumer in the US economy. Now a lot of that is the military, but even if you leave the military out it's a huge consumer of energy, lots and lots of buildings. It has 450,000 buildings, mostly large office buildings. The post office alone has 140,000 vehicles. So together the federal government, plus all of the states, constitutes more than one-third of the US GDP, and progressives don't like to talk about that because that's the right wing talking point. They like to misrepresent the Obama administration as socialist, and it's anything but socialist. But there is a fact there that there's something in the mixed economy in this country, and we shouldn't brace that. So the federal government is going to buy electricity for all these buildings, and it is going to buy vehicles for its institutions. No matter what, it doesn't have to go and ask for special money to do that. It's going to do that if the federal government used its purchasing power to buy clean energy retrofitted buildings by electric vehicles, established charging stations for those vehicles, that would be positive in two ways. First of all, it would directly cut the carbon footprint of the federal government, and if the state followed suit of the public sector in the United States. But it would also create economies of scale for the burgeoning clean tax sector, which is currently kind of like stalled out and not growing and not able to make innovations and cut costs because it doesn't have markets, it doesn't have demands. So if the federal government came up with a schedule to buy wind and solar power, that would ensure and stimulate the investment in producing wind and solar power. Likewise, if it committed itself to buying electric vehicles, that would stimulate the production in electric vehicles and battery technology. Of which there's currently none in the US, there's one battery plant in Michigan that survives on the $30 million federal loan, but most electric batteries are made in South Korea and China. And the Asian economies are taking the science for this stuff seriously and are actually moving very rapidly to embrace clean technology in China in particular. So those are the things that could happen. I mean, I'm optimistic because it's not technologically impossible and it's not economically impossible to make the transition that we need to make. There's also tons of money. You know, this whole debt discussion is ridiculous. If we let the bushier tax cuts expire, that would take care of a lot of the problem. If we returned to the Clinton near tax increases, where the top marginal tax rate went from, I believe, 35% to 38%. I mean, remember, Clinton left office running a surplus and having paid down the deficit. So that wasn't moving things back to a 90% tax rate on the top 10% of earners, which once upon a time we had in this country. So some pretty mild little changes. There's tons of money for the government. I mean, the military budget has grown from 490, 60 something billion when Bush came in to now it's up to 700 billion. There's tons and tons of money. But more to the point, if the private sector is going to have to lead with proper government encouragement, corporate America is sitting on more uninvested cash, according to the Federal Reserve, than any time since 1956. They're just sitting on it waiting for hues as to what the next profitable thing is to invest in. They bid up housing prices, that bubble burst, they're bidding up commodities like grain prices and metal prices. If it was clear that the government was going to be the first and major consumer of clean power and electric vehicles, there would be plenty of money flowing in to meet that demand. So it's not an economic problem, not a technical problem. We have the technology. It's a political problem. But because it's not an economic and not a technical problem, I'm optimistic. I think that's a good note to leave us on. Christian, I thank you for all your years of service, over seas, reporting in places which are really difficult. You've seen a lot of misery and distress firsthand. And for you to bring it back to us and yet to leave us with some hope that we can go in a good direction is a valuable thing to do. Again, we've been with Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos, Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. Thanks again so much for joining us Christian. Thank you for having me on. I enjoyed the show. Thank you for your spirit in action. Thank you for joining us Christian Parenti. Thank you for joining us Christian Parenti. The promise of this new world will be mine. I am throwing off the cares most of you. To listen to and inconvenient truths that I need to move, I need to wake up. I need to shake up. I need to speak out. Something's got to wake up. I'm in a sleep that I need to wake up now. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)