With Climate, an Undercurrent of Violence

 

BookShelf: With Climate, an Undercurrent of Violence

“The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence”
By Peter Schwartzstein
Island Press, $32.00

Reviewed by Tom Henry

If you live in the Western Hemisphere, you might view climate change as a maddening, never-ending policy debate over science that’s distorted and suppressed by deniers as economic losses continue to mount from hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, drought and other disasters.

You likely know of subtle changes our ecosystems are undergoing with water quality, air quality, fish and wildlife species, trees, crop production and other facets of life.

But in Peter Schwartzstein’s wide-ranging and sweeping book, “The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence,” climate change is explained as the undercurrent for violence and, in some cases, war in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

It’s a bold, ambitious, incredibly researched and deftly written book that takes readers to Iraqi towns where ISIS exploited drought as a recruiting tool and weapon of terror and to Bangladesh, where farmers-turned-pirates opt for making money off ransoms because of worsening odds of making money off agriculture.

 

Improbable environmental peacekeeping

He writes about how climate-related impacts have been used to promote violence or instability in places such as Syria and Sudan.

One of the more hopeful anecdotes was in the West Bank and Gaza, which until recently served as an example of so-called environmental peacekeeping found in some of the world’s most improbable places.

It wasn’t so much because of mutual affection for the environment, but an informal understanding that neither side could afford to stress out resources more.

That, of course, all changed on Oct. 7, 2023, with the Hamas-led slaughter of Israelis and the inevitable response by Israel.

“After years of painstaking environmental cooperation, the fruits of these conservationists’ collective labors were suddenly in peril, the environment, temporarily at least, fading into irrelevance in the face of the hardest of security issues,” Schwartzstein wrote.

A Palestinian friend told him in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre he was in no mood to speculate what kind of a setback was in store for that region’s environmental efforts because, “I’ll tell you that this work is useless, even though I don’t necessarily believe that.”

 

Connecting planetary stress, political instability

Yes, there are parts of the book in which one might question if Schwartzstein is making some leaps.

But on the whole, the connections he makes between a hotter, stressed-out planet and political instability resulting in more violence, especially in parts of the world that are poor and politically unstable to begin with, make a lot of sense.

 

‘As climate change intensifies, more states

are waking to the possibility of disrupted

supply chains in the more politically and

economically fraught environment that

a warming world will likely bring.’

                             — Peter Schwartzstein

 

“As climate change intensifies, more states are waking to the possibility of disrupted supply chains in the more politically and economically fraught environment that a warming world will likely bring,” Schwartzstein wrote. “They are consequently reacting in ways that, through either ignorance or general disinterest in the well-being of others, are almost predestined to spark violence elsewhere.”

Poor countries exploited for rare earth minerals to help decarbonize the world are among the more vulnerable, he wrote.

In Russia, there have been mega-wildfires scorching land the size of Ireland in recent years. But efforts to combat them have been weakened by Russia’s redeployment of resources “to prosecute its war in Ukraine,” Schwartzstein wrote.

In the United States and other parts of the world, climate change is recognized as a national security threat.

“The reality is that this is just a big part of national security,” former CIA Director James Woolsey states in one of the book’s more memorable quotes. “People would say to me at certain environment or water conferences, ‘You’re CIA. Why are you here?’ But if you care about national security, you’ve got to care about this stuff, probably even more in the future.”

 

‘Erratic deviation from the known’

Climate change, of course, is impacting more than air, water and land.

In the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world that is spread across parts of India and Bangladesh, local farmers head into a tiger-inhabited forest to collect honey and other resources so that they can avoid pirates along the shoreline.

But they are running headlong into a tiger population “that appears more enamored of human flesh than any other in the world,” Schwartzstein wrote. Just in the Bangladeshi part of the forest, some 170 people a year might be killed by tigers, only a fraction of which are reported, he wrote.

In places such as Nepal, water is so scarce that residents pay 40 times as much to purchase it from tank operators as they were used to paying for water from a government-supplied pipeline. In Kathmandu’s slums and migrant-filled neighborhoods, tank operators “raise their rates accordingly” during the dry season because there is no access to the state water grid, Schwartzstein wrote.

In Africa, as in other parts of the world, climate change causes “an erratic deviation from the known” for farmers, he wrote.

“And while climate change figures prominently among the region’s woes, it is, again, the way climate aggravates long-standing nonclimate problems that can push people over the sometimes-fine line between peaceful frustration and out-and-out violence,” Schwartzstein wrote.

“The region, the world’s poorest, has been badly served by the legacy of divisive colonial rule, and then further stifled by conflict and mostly unsatisfactory governance thereafter. The lack of cash, the scale of fighting, and the failure to face up to climate stresses are naturally related,” he added.

 

Also at risk, the West

This book offers amazing insight into climate stresses in parts of the world that many Westerners know only superficially, if that. And in one of his final chapters, titled “The West and the Rest,” Schwartzstein makes a case for why this part of the world is not as immune to climate violence as many people believe.

Schwartzstein is an award-winning British-American journalist who has reported on water, food security and the conflict-climate nexus across more than 30 countries in the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world. He is, among other things, a global fellow with the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program, and a fellow at the Center for Climate and Security.

He’s also been chased by kidnappers, beaten by police and told, in no uncertain terms, that he is no longer welcome in certain countries, according to his publisher, Island Press.

This is his first book. It’s an important one.

Tom Henry is SEJournal’s BookShelf editor and a former board member for the Society of Environmental Journalists who created The (Toledo) Blade’s environment beat in 1993. His last review was of “My Summer With Ospreys: A Therapist’s Journey Toward Hope, Community, and Healing Our Planet.”

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 10. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.