Climate Violence | Peter Schwartzstein

Planet: Critical

A hotter world is a more violent world.

Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist and researcher, and author of The Heat and the Fury which investigates the relationship between violence and climate change. He joins me to explain how a changing climate is creating pockets of violence in poor and rural communities around the world. Local and national governance failures are driving violence, with the changes to the earth's body being felt in our own.

Taking us all around the world, Peter explains the particular set of circumstances which generate violence, given communities often do their utmost to avoid clashing. Climate change alone does not brew violence, but combined with a loss of sense of self and an awareness of wealth disparity, people turn to extremes to protect themselves from further abandonment. We then turn this model on this West, hypothesising how violence could spring up in liberal democracies where increasingly people are feeling let down by their elected officials. Finally, we explore the trauma of watching the earth break down around us, and how people's minds are being lost with the stability we once knew and relied upon, inspiring behaviour that was also once previously unimaginable.

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