Contents Notes |
Introduction : Been there, done that, and all I got were these lousy extinctions -- Part One : The USS Sieve : how environmental change is drilling holes in the ship of state. The coming storm -- -- Part Two : The new geopolitical icebergs : or, how the North was lost. Life on the no longer permanent permafrost -- The global economy : waiting for the ship to come in -- A short history of modern geopolitics, as seen from the deck of a ship -- The great cold rush of '08 -- -- Part Three : Precipitating change in Asia and beyond : how China, India, and the West are trying to make friends in interesting times. Today's weather : intolerable with periods of uninhabitable -- The story so far -- Interesting times, narrowing options -- -- Part Four : The turbulent Pacific : how rising sea levels could wash away whole countries and swamp the global ship of state. Building a geopolitical ark -- Drawing lines in the water -- Fighting over Atlantis -- Conclusion : Weathering change. "In a perfect storm, the environment, the global economic system and geopolitics are all undergoing rapid, uncontrolled change. In the same way that the climate is in a state of flux, exhibiting erratic behavior before settling into a new norm, in the wake of the global economic crisis, many of the assumptions about the Western economic system have been destroyed, which leads to some troubling questions: How vulnerable is the United States to more devastating hurricanes like Katrina? What will the opening of the Arctic mean for Russian access into North American waters? Will China's lack of clean, fresh water undermine its global ambitions? Will India's increasingly erratic monsoon affect its economic growth? This book takes a hard look at these questions. The author identifies problem areas that are most likely to start wars, destroy economies and create failed states. Examining the most likely environmental change scenarios, she illuminates the ways in which they could radically alter human existence. A fascinating tour through our uncertain future, it also offers a controversial new way forward for the global economy and the worldwide environmental crisis."--Jacket. |