Tag: Book reviews

No Rain in the Amazon

U.S. writer Nikolas Kozloff aims to give a voice to the peoples of the Global South in his new book No Rain in the Amazon. At the same time, as indicated by the sub-title How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet, he warns that what happens in the Amazon affects us all, wherever we live.

In this book the South is mainly Peru and Brazil. For the purposes of the book Kozloff traveled throughout the two countries, speaking with government officials, experts, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples. A specialist in Latin American affairs, Kozloff is not a scientist but is well acquainted with current climate science.

He has a lot to tell as he develops his major themes. Among them: climate change is already being experienced in the region and taking effect on poorer people’s lives; it poses further threats for them in the future; the Amazon forests are threatened by climate change, particularly drought; they are also severely threatened by the deforestation caused by humans; loss of Amazon forest is global in its impact because of the vital part it plays in the global environment; the Global North is complicit in deforestation and must help stop it.

In Peru the melting of glaciers carries serious implications on many levels, from  irrigation for farming and water for pack animals through to the long term threat to the water supply to Lima, a city of 7 million built on a desert.  Unpredictable and testing weather patterns are emerging in some regions. The Andean cloud forests, which carry out a vital hydrological function as well as maintaining extraordinary biodiversity, are under threat from climatic change as clouds condense at higher altitudes. Kozloff considers the drastic effects of El Nino events on Peru, including outbreaks of cholera and dengue, and points to the IPCC expectation that El Nino-like conditions are expected to become more frequent with continued global warming.

Kozloff doesn’t constantly enter scientific caveats when assigning the effects of climate change on the lives of poorer people. It’s reasonable that he doesn’t: the cumulative picture is strong, and he’s not arguing the scientific case but giving a voice to people whose plight is being ignored. He comments on the extreme inequalities whereby, in general, the people who are most at risk from global warming live in the nations that have contributed the least to the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They also, like Peru, tend to be among the poorest and hence ill-equipped to deal with the changes they are facing.

Turning to the Amazon Kozloff points out that it contains about one-tenth of the total carbon stored in land eco-systems and recycles a large fraction of its rainfall. Drawing on the expertise of much-cited Brazilian scientist Philip Fearnside he explains how El Nino-driven drought is threatening the forest. The warming of sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic may also be linked to Amazonian droughts. Climate change is responsible for these enhanced threats. And of course the effects are not just local. Tropical rainforest literally drives world weather systems. The billions of dollars needing to be provided by the rich nations to tropical countries to sustain forests are an important and necessary insurance policy.

But the Amazon is threatened by more than climate change.  Deforestation as a result of human activity is the focus of a major section of the book.  Kozloff sets the scene for his survey by pointing out that the relentless slashing and burning of tropical forests is now second only to the energy sector globally as a source of greenhouse gases.  Powerful political and economic forces within Brazil are pushing deforestation, but the Global North is complicit  in the destruction. The affluent nations, acting through large financial institutions, fund destructive tropical industries and buy up the tropical commodities that are hastening the day of our climate reckoning.

The cattle industry accounts for 60 to 70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon. Kozloff recounts some of the brutal realities of ranching and its “insidious alliance” with politicians. Land ownership is often unclear and plagued by corruption. Poor workers can labour in conditions amounting to virtual slavery.  An activist like Sister Dorothy Strang who worked on behalf of landless farmers and advocated for sustainable development projects was eventually simply assassinated. She was an “agitator” who had only herself to blame for her death, said a local cattle ranchers’ leader.  The Brazilian state seems hopelessly compromised by powerful agricultural interests and finds it hard to police the Amazon and control deforestation. But financial institutions in the Global North, like the World Bank, provide key investment backing to the ranching explosion. Northern companies purchase leather, beef and other products and consumers buy them. Blame is shared.

The depressing news doesn’t end with cattle. Kozloff moves on to soy and its reach into the Amazon and the Brazilian cerrado, which covers one-fifth of the country and is the world’s most biologically rich savannah.  Soy monoculture liberates carbon from the soil of the cerrado and its advance also displaces cattle farming into new forest development.

Kozloff acknowledges that there are problems with the Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Forest Degradation progamme (REDD), not helped by the blocking by the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand of moves to incorporate protections for indigenous peoples into the programme. But he sees it as “the only game in town right now that makes preserving forests more economically valuable than cutting them down”. Which is the nub of the matter.

Kozloff is not impressed by the “clean energy” initiatives being pursued in Brazil, hydro-electric dams for electricity and biofuels from sugar cane for transport. Apart from the population displacement and road building associated with dam-building, the dams in forest areas lead to vast emissions of methane from the decaying vegetation.  Ethanol from sugar cane has been one of Brazil’s apparent success stories, but it involves destruction of the coastal Atlantic rainforest, one of the world’s top five biological hotspots. The nasty hell of debt-slavery operates in many sugar cane plantations. American agribusiness giants are now rushing to set up shop in Brazil to help greatly expand the industry. Much of the growth may be outside the rainforest, as officials claim, but it is planned to be within the cerrado.

If the Global North wants to avert yet further climate change, Kozloff says, it needs to get serious about the transfer of truly green technologies, particularly wind, solar, and waves. He points to the need for a “Manhattan Project” scale development of alternative clean energies, and the sharing of the new technologies with tropical nations such as Brazil. There’s little sign of such transfer taking place.  Indeed before Copenhagen the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to ensure that the negotiations would not “weaken” US intellectual property rights on wind, solar, and other green technologies.

Full of interesting accounts though it is, the book is hardly a cheering read. Not because nothing can be done for Peru and Brazil by way of mitigation and adaptation but because it is by no means clear that the Global North is ready and willing to provide the necessary assistance. Nevertheless Kozloff presses the case for action convincingly.

Note: There’s a Democracy Now interview with Nikolas Kozloff relating to his book here on YouTube. (It’s in two parts.)

[Buy through: Fishpond, Amazon.com, Book Depository.]

Eaarth

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can’t be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage.”

Bill McKibben’s words occur on the final page of his newly published book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. The misspelling indicates a planet still recognisable but fundamentally changed. A planet that he first warned about over twenty years ago in his earlier book, The End of Nature.

McKibben is an activist as well as a writer. He led the 350.org campaign last year. 350 parts per million is the level James Hansen and other scientists consider the upper limit of a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. McKibben’s team adopted that figure to spearhead their internet-based campaign which saw public actions in many parts of the world in the lead-up to the Copenhagen conference. Nothing happened at that conference to suggest that the world is about to take the necessary steps to avoid dangerous climate change. Eaarth recognises that we are heading to a world different from that in which civilisation has developed.

It won’t be a better world. We can expect a planet “with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.” McKibben considers the process well under way. He says we may, if we’re very lucky and very committed, eventually get atmospheric carbon dioxide back down to 350 parts per million, but great damage will have been done along the way, on land and in the sea. There’s no longer any escaping that. He’s unrelenting as he lists why. Disparate data points such as the higher susceptibility of Chinook salmon to parasites, or the advancing ocean at a beach in North Carolina, or the more flourishing growth of ragweed, are part of the picture. So are the numerous stories of poor people who are grappling with new uncertainties in the seasons and rains that can no longer be counted on. But the rapid changes in huge physical features are the most telling. They are completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilisation. Here he includes the melting Arctic ice cap, the loss of Greenland ice, the acidifying and rising oceans, the more powerful hurricanes, the melting inland glaciers of the Andes and the Himalayas, the drying rainforest of the Amazon, the dying boreal forests of North America. They are big trends; once they get rolling we can’t stop them.

The growth paradigm won’t help, sympathetic though McKibben is to green growth advocates like Friedman and Gore. He realises this is “a dark thing to say, and un-American” but proceeds to make his case. Infrastructure, already neglected, is imposing steadily rising costs. Recovery from flooding is enormously expensive. Insurance costs are climbing. Endless expansion spells all kinds of trouble, including wars over climate change-affected resources. He looks back to the book Limits to Growth commissioned in 1972 by the small group of European industrialists and scientists known as the Club of Rome. The book was translated into 30 languages and sold 30 million copies. But it was before its time. He quotes from a 2002 ad from Exxon Mobil: “In 1972, the Club of Rome published ‘Limits to Growth,’ questioning the sustainability of economic and population growth….The Club of Rome was wrong.” Not wrong, McKibben rejoins, just ahead of the curve. “You can ignore environmental problems for a long time, but when they catch up to you, they catch up fast.” Basically, he says, the book was right. “You grow too large, and then you run out of oil and the Arctic melts.”

Scientists have not exaggerated our environmental woes; they’re more likely to have understated them. We are in deep trouble. The question is how to survive what is coming at us. McKibben proposes words to help us think usefully about the future. Durable, sturdy, stable, hardy, robust. “Squat, solid, stout words.” The racehorse, fleet and showy, has to become the workhorse, dependable and long-lasting. In place of expansion and growth we need maintenance and repair. The transition from a system that demands growth to one that can live without it. In this context he speaks of dispersing resources, of tilting back from heavy centralisation towards lower levels of government and smaller societies. On a tougher planet community needs to come back into its own. “We are going to need to split up, at least a little, if we’re going to avoid being subdued by the forces we’ve unleashed.”

He pursues this theme into the essentials of our future: food, energy, and the internet. Industrially farmed monocultures may produce impressive results to begin with, but their success is outweighed by the productivity of small farms. He disagrees with those who claim that only industrial farming can provide the food the growing population will need. Even World Bank economists now accept that redistribution of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity. The US Department of Agriculture reports that according to its latest census smaller farms produce more food per acre, whether measured in tons, calories or dollars. New information, new science and new technologies are further assisting this productivity. He instances a large organic farm in upstate New York: “…we substitute observation, management, planning, and education for purchased inputs.” Resilience is the word McKibben uses to describe smaller scale farming, such as the resilience “which comes with three dozen different crops in one field, not a vast ocean of corn or soybeans”. He is, of course, an advocate of the consumption of locally produced food wherever possible.

He’s also an advocate of the local and dispersed when it comes to energy production. Energy conservation is the first. step. After that, he considers that the potential of locally produced energy via wind turbines and solar panels and biomass is underestimated. He quotes one study which showed that half of all American states could meet their energy needs entirely within their borders, and most could meet a significant percentage.

The internet looks the odd man out in this localising process. In some respects it is. It ensures that we are never stifled by the local or out of touch with the major information sources we need. But it is decentralised, and also it can be used for local purposes, for which use he offers several examples. It was crucial in the 350.org campaign which mobilised the localised demonstrations last year.

McKibben writes with great verve. His book is packed with real life stories and illustrations. There is nothing stolid about his presentation. Indeed the vigour and aptness of his prose can sometimes have the reader temporarily forgetting the utter seriousness of the situation he confronts. But he means it when he says: “The Holocene is staggered, the only world that humans have known is suddenly reeling.” The hunkering down process he urges is presented not as a preference but as a necessity if we are to avoid the threat of total collapse in the hard times ahead.

There is urgency in McKibben’s writing, but he doesn’t clobber the reader. His book is reasonable and engaging, an invitation to discussion and consideration. It merits both, as a serious contribution to the most fundamental issue of our time.

Life in the Hothouse

“Wetlands are wastelands” was the explanation the chair of a local trust in my city gave for opposing a grant to a wetlands restoration project. He’s a rabid climate change denier and hence unlikely to read Melanie Lenart’s recently published book Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change. If he did he would discover how wrong he was. Not that he needed wait for her book: it has been evident for many years that wetlands are vital to ecological health. So are forests, which play an equal part in Lenart’s explanation of how Gaia, or, if you don’t like metaphor, the complex interacting system of the biosphere, responds to maintain a temperature within a range suitable for life. A scientist with a background in journalism, Lenart is well placed to provide a coherent account for the general reader of the work of a host of researchers who have explored some of the intricacies of response to warming in Earth’s ecosystems.

She opens with an interesting account of hurricanes as both a symptom of global warming and one of its cures. A warmer world is likely to mean they are more intense. She considers them from the perspective of their cooling function, helping to shift heat away from the tropics. Their destructive power, which is clearly pictured, paradoxically boosts plant life in the sea and on land through sediment stirring and transfer and so aids the drawing down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They also contribute to carbon sinks by burying logs, soil and sediment in landslides, the ocean, and anywhere they can better escape decay.  In these respects they are one of Gaia’s natural defences to rising temperatures.

A chapter on circulation patterns explores many of the ways in which precipitation has increased in warmer climates in the past and considers the contribution of such features as the Hadley circulation between the equator and the sub-tropics. The comparative dryness of the ice ages came as a surprise to climatologists. The evidence Lenart adduces spanning the ice ages to ancient hothouses makes it clear that global precipitation rates increased as the climate warmed. This she sees as helping boost a Gaian response to changing climate, namely increased plant growth.

There follows a survey of carbon dioxide uptake by plants and trees and how various forests fared in past climates.  More carbon dioxide has meant more growth.  More precipitation and more warmth has helped that growth. The contribution of plant life in taking carbon dioxide from the air is significant.  The world’s trees alone hold nearly as much carbon as the atmosphere. In this way life becomes part of the Gaian attempt to regulate temperature.

Soils and wetlands also soak up excess carbon dioxide. Wetlands’ special talent for this is related to their remarkable productivity combined with their slow decay rates. Decay stalls in stagnant waters, including the decay of organic material from far and wide that ends up in wetlands because of their low-lying position.  The world’s soils are considered by some researchers to hold three times the amount of carbon in the vegetation growing on them. Lenart explains in detail how this happens, with coal being the prime example of the process in the distant past: carbon well sequestered until we started to extract and burn it.

Weathering is the final process Lenart considers as another method by which Earth balances its carbon dioxide ledger. It takes place over a long term and is perhaps not likely to be of much assistance in dealing with our present problems, but it’s a fascinating sequence she describes as nature’s version of acid rain works to break down rocks with a resultant carbon storage in the sea – for limited periods in the case of limestone, but more permanently in the case of basalts and granites, at least until it becomes volcano fodder.  Weathering speeds up in hot, humid climates, pulling more carbon dioxide out of the air when there is more than usual there.

I’ve scratched the surface of chapters that are packed with interesting detail about both past and present.  Lenart does an excellent job of pulling together information from numerous studies, often updated by direct communication with the experts involved, and building it into a sustained overall picture. The story is enlivened by some of her own direct experience in forest and desert. The good science writer or journalist is able to render the general reader this service in a way that the specialists engrossed in their work would be harder put to provide.

The book’s strands come together in a chapter titled systematic healing. Lenart fully subscribes to the recognition that our use of fossil fuels must be drastically cut. She’s not suggesting any alternative to that. Her particular interest is rather in how we can also work with the natural systems her book has been describing to help moderate the warming and soften the severity of its impacts. She acknowledges that is difficult in our current economy where the bottom line ignores environmental costs and overlooks environmental services. In fact the services provided to humans by wetlands and forests, including urban forests, go well beyond carbon counting. Urban forests provide shade and evaporative cooling valuable in times of elevated heat.  She refers to the efforts in Chicago to plant rooftops and increase ground tree and shrub planting as an example other cities might follow. Urban greenery not only cuts heat, but provides habitat for birds and other wildlife, insulates against noise, offers recreational possibilities and reduces air pollution including carbon dioxide. There is even some evidence that it cuts crime!

Forests on a larger scale  promote rainfall. Forests and wetlands slow down winds. Wetlands absorb storm surge and slow flooding rivers. They also purify water. Biodiversity and genetic diversity are greatly assisted by wetlands and estuaries. These and many other services are additional to the carbon capture contribution made by forests and wetlands, the protective shield a warming planet produces. Our current experiment is to interfere with the development of these natural protective processes. We are lowering biomass, lowering water tables, lowering the quantities of weathering product reaching the sea through extensive development, logging, groundwater pumping, and river diversion.

Lenart metaphorically shudders at the thought of some of the geo-engineering fixes being proposed. Why build artificial trees to chemically remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, she asks, when Gaia can make trees that provide food and shelter, sunscreen and windbreaks, and flood-control and drought-prevention services even while collecting carbon dioxide and other pollutants? She looks to a variety of forest and wetland restoration projects to restore these key systems. The more we can count on forests and wetlands to stabilise the carbon dioxide drawdown, the less pressure we put on oceans to take up the gas and thus increase their acidity. And the more we pull down greenhouse gases into forests, their soils and wetlands, the less need the planet will have for cooling hurricanes and floods. Life gets better at all scales when we boost Gaia’s natural defences.

Prosperity without growth

Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet

I paused for a while wondering whether a review of a book on sustainable economics had a place in a website devoted to climate change. But only briefly. One can’t worry about climate change for long without considering the economies which have given rise to it and wondering how they will survive under the low-carbon regime which they must now adopt.  Anyway carbon emissions figure frequently in the course of Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. Published last year it was based on a report he wrote earlier in the year as Economics Commissioner of the Sustainable Development Commission, the UK Government’s independent watchdog. Increasingly climate change has imparted a new urgency to sustainability thinking. It sits as one of many issues, but it underlines the seriousness of the need to come to grips with the finitude of the planet.

The prosperity Jackson writes of is our ability to flourish as human beings. It transcends material concern. It has to do with such matters as physical and mental health, access to education, relationships and sense of community, meaningful employment and the ability to participate in the life of society. He argues that in the developed countries we can (and must) have such prosperity without the economic growth paradigm that currently rules our thinking.

Jackson recognises the difficulties of the situation we have landed ourselves with.  On the one hand growth is unsustainable, at least in its current form. The burgeoning consumption of finite resources and the heavy costs being imposed on the environment are accompanied by profound disparities in social well-being.  But on the other hand “de-growth’ is unstable, at least under present conditions. Declining consumer demand leads to rising unemployment, falling competitiveness and a spiral of recession. It adds up to a dilemma, but one which we must face and think through.

Some economists place hope in our being able to decouple economic growth from growth in physical inputs and environmental impacts.  Capitalism’s propensity for efficiency figures strongly in these scenarios. Jackson doesn’t think either the historical evidence or the basic arithmetic of growth can support the decoupling notion.  The deep emission and resource cuts needed can’t be achieved without confronting the structure of market economics.

He takes a closer look at this structure. The engine of growth is driven by the ability of the profit motive to stimulate newer, better or cheaper products and services through a continual process of innovation and ‘creative destruction’. This is matched by expanding consumer demand for these goods. A complex social logic drives this demand. Consumer goods have come to play a symbolic role in our lives.  Somehow, beyond the simple material needs they meet, they can become vehicles for our dreams and aspirations, however much they fail in delivering. The economic structure thus combines with our nature to “lock us firmly into the iron cage of consumerism”.

What we need, claims Jackson, is a new ecological macro-economics.  It will still include a strong requirement for economic stability, but it will add conditions that provide security for people’s livelihoods, ensure distributional equity, impose sustainable levels of resource throughput and protect natural capital. New variables need to be brought into play to complement and affect those already part of economic thinking. They will reflect the energy and resource dependency of the economy and the limits on carbon. They might also reflect the value of eco-system services or stocks of natural capital. Ecological investment will be important, and will mean revisiting the present concepts of profitability and productivity and harnessing them to longer term social goals. He urges the abandonment of the infatuation with increasing labour productivity in favour of high employment in low-carbon sectors.

We will need to be weaned from our dependence on consumerism, but he provides evidence that a less materialistic society will be a happier one and a more equal society a less anxious one. Greater attention to community and participation in the life of society will reduce the loneliness and unsocial behaviour which has undermined the well-being of the modern economy.

He argues that there is a clear case today for an increased role for government.  We have already seen an acceptance of this in relation to the 2008 financial crisis. The principal role of government is to ensure that long-term public goods are not undermined by short-term private interests and to deliver social and environmental goods. This role has been diminished by the need in the growth economy to support the consumerism which keeps the economy afloat.

Jackson is leery of revolution, but he proposes steps through which to build change. They fall under three main categories. First, changing the limits. Here he writes of caps on resources and emission, considers the contraction and convergence model, discusses emissions trading schemes and ecological taxes and emphasises the need for support for ecological transition in developing countries.

The second category of steps for change is fixing the economic model. The ecological macro-economics discussed above will lower expectations for labour and capital productivity and account for the value of natural capital and ecosystem services. Ecological investment in jobs, assets and infrastructure will include retrofitting buildings, advancing renewable energy technologies, redesigning networks such as the electricity grid, building public transport infrastructure, maintaining and protecting ecosystems, developing public spaces.  There will be increasing financial and fiscal prudence, including regulation of financial markets.  A Tobin tax on international currency transfers may be considered. Banks will be required to hold higher asset reserves. National accounts will be revised to be more robust than the present rough and ready GDP.

The third category is changing the social climate. Working time may be reduced. Systemic inequality will be tackled. Better measurements of prosperity will be found. Social capital will be strengthened. The culture of consumerism will be carefully dismantled.

Utopia? No, he says firmly. A financial and ecological necessity.

In a final chapter he faces the question of whether this spells the end of capitalism. Certainly growth would be slowed – labour-intense activities mean slower productivity growth, and ecological investment means a lower and longer return on capital. There would also be a larger role for the public sector in taking some ownership stake in the longer-term less productive investments. But capitalist economies often have elements of public ownership.  There is a wide spectrum of possibilities in a capitalist system.  There’s no need to polarize the debate.

I thought the book was splendid. Jackson’s writing is lucid and well organised. He has a gift for the telling sentence. (It was not altogether surprising to discover that in addition to his academic life he is a professional playwright for BBC radio.) He is cautious and sensible, not pretending that the transition to low growth is a doddle.  But he holds firmly to the conviction that it can be made and that the society which emerges will be better than the one we currently inhabit.

Global Warring

Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map

Geopolitics don’t stop because climate change and other environmental pressures confront the global society.  Cleo Paskal in her book Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map offers little hope of human societies setting aside their differences to confront the common threat. Not that she’s sceptical of climate change – quite the opposite – but as a Chatham House Fellow she has a lively sense of how rooted we are in our perceived national and economic interests and how that may play out as climate change begins to bite. It won’t preclude co-operation, but it won’t exactly facilitate it either.

The first section of her book looks at the internal vulnerability of the US and other Western countries to environmental change. The West is foolish to consider itself relatively insulated from the worst effects. Katrina was a good example of the unpreparedness of the US for the sort of environmental crises likely to become more common. Damages were estimated at more than $100 billion, in a year when the spending on the Iraq war amounted to $87.3 billion. The US is not preparing itself adequately. The key organisation, the US Army Corps of Engineers failed in New Orleans. The Corps is used by politicians to steer jobs and money to their constituents, and lacks executive-branch oversight. The National Flood Insurance Program, which steps in when private insurers deem areas too risky to cover, is resulting in people continuing to live in hurricane pathways and flood zones. The military is not trained to manage repeated major domestic disasters. Voters are not made aware of some of the already unavoidable impacts of environmental change.

Europe too has its set of problems. The UK government is far ahead of the pack when it comes to assessing specific climate impacts such as flooding, but is so far not tackling them.  Food and energy security are looming as major problems.  Given the existing vulnerabilities in the developed world she finds it unsurprising that stability may soon hinge on the environment.  Her complaint throughout the section is that shortsighted, narrow policies are undermining a home front threatened by climate and other environmental change. Those policies are also eroding the West’s position in the global balance of power.

Paskal devotes the next section of her book to changes in the Arctic environment. They may be a tragedy for the people trying to live there, but others see opportunities for resource extraction and for the much shorter transportation routes opening up for travel between the Atlantic and the Pacific.  The Russian Northeast Passage has been clearing faster than the Canadian Northwest passage, providing Russia with a head start and bringing Russia and Asia much closer to each other. Melting in the frozen tundra poses infrastructure problems, some of which may be eased by a switch from pipelines to tankers. However most of her attention is focused on the Northwest passage and the failure of the US to support Canada’s bid for control over it. She sees the US preference for an international strait as bound up with the ambiguity with which the US has long regarded their northern neighbour, and thinks it runs the risk of destabilising the West. Until Canada’s claim to the Passage is recognised and defendable it is difficult for Canada to talk to other countries, including Russia, on an equal basis about the orderly development of the opportunities offered by the Passage.  Instability threatens as a consequence.

The book moves to a lively section on the Asian giants India and China. Both face very serious environmental threats and both are likely to play an increasingly strong geopolitical role globally.  Paskal differentiates the two countries’ handling of environmental problems. India benefits from grassroots initiatives but lacks cohesive central support. However with good management the author sees the possibility of India ending up more resilient to environmental change than many other great powers, including China. The Chinese Communist Party applies its massive levers of state to challenges, sometimes without a real grasp of on-the-ground realities; it has political will but lacks ground-level information to assess the real vulnerabilities and flexible and innovative policies to counter them.  Increasingly both countries will, like the West, try to shore up home deficiencies by securing resources and geopolitical support from abroad. If the two countries muddle along allowing their competing interests to interfere with critical issues such as environmental change, there will be economic, political and security costs for everyone, including the West. Paskal considers various loose alliance arrangements which would avoid this. She has worked in India and puts some hope in the West discovering more respect for India and more ways of cooperating with her than heretofore. That’s her preferred path towards stability in a time of change.

What of the states which disappear beneath the rising sea?  In a section partly given to political discussion of the manoeuverings of the powers for influence in Pacific nations Paskal asks whether the ocean territory of drowned states can remain in the ownership of their dispersed population.  She discusses the possibilities in international law, which she acknowledges at base is largely a matter of international politics. Bangladesh has already achieved a fixed coastline under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Retaining ownership of the exclusive economic zone by those whose homeland has disappeared could soften the impact of relocation, allowing the refugees to come into a new home as a kind of state within a state with something to offer their host, rather than as downtrodden and dislocated. The Maldives and India is offered as an example which could work to the benefit of both.

This is a book about adaptation to environmental change. Not that the author is ruling out mitigation of worsening effects, but she recognises that the impacts already being felt or in the pipeline represent a pervasive attack on the status quo. It is her view that no country is prepared.  Sudden shocks can find the developed nations among the most wanting of protective measures. She compares the shambles of Katrina in the US with the way Mumbai coped with a great flood around the same time, and the relatively successful evacuation procedures in China in the summer of 2006 when eight typhoons hit the southeast coast. Nations can learn from one another.  Economies which don’t have the political will and don’t come up with good basic engineering, long-term planning, and sustained funding, will suffer. More environmentally adaptive countries will rise, as will countries with less expensive infrastructures that can take hits and still stay functional, like India.

Paskal’s book is spirited and interesting. Her background in journalism probably contributes to the light touch with which she conveys some potentially heavy geopolitical material.  Her insistence that climate and other environmental change demands a much higher level of preparedness than we have yet seen is plain commonsense for anyone understands the changes that are currently well under way.  Her perceptions of how those changes will also help shape future geopolitical developments are worth attention, though I can’t help fearing that the disruptions may be more profound than she or any of us would wish.