Climate Realism

Climate Realism PDF Author: Lynn Badia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429766521
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

Climate Realism

Climate Realism PDF Author: Lynn Badia
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429766521
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change. In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate. This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

Realism and the Climate Crisis

Realism and the Climate Crisis PDF Author: John Foster
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 152922327X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Hope must be mixed with realism in our approach to the climate emergency, and in this book philosopher John Foster presents a revolutionary approach to our pressing need for a habitable human future.

Security and Climate Change

Security and Climate Change PDF Author: Mark Lacy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134347375
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
This new book explains why the international community has responded with a sense of fatalistic passivity to climate change. It presents a distinct critique of realism through the study of this topic, commonly overlooked in international relations. The author argues that the realist view rests on a dangerous contradiction; far from delivering security it serves to limit the way we think about the new generation of risks we face. The book also provides a detailed case study evaluating US climate politics under the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Climate and Crises

Climate and Crises PDF Author: Ben Holgate
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351372939
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse makes a dual intervention in both world literature and ecocriticism by examining magical realism as an international style of writing that has long-standing links with environmental literature. The book argues that, in the era of climate change when humans are facing the prospect of species extinction, new ideas and new forms of expression are required to address what the novelist Amitav Gosh calls a "crisis of imagination." Magical realism enables writers to portray alternative intellectual paradigms, ontologies and epistemologies that typically contest the scientific rationalism derived from the European Enlightenment, and the exploitation of natural resources associated with both capitalism and imperialism. Climate and Crises explores the overlaps between magical realism and environmental literature, including their respective transgressive natures that dismantle binaries (such as human and non-human), a shared biocentric perspective that focuses on the inter-connectedness of all things in the universe, and, frequently, a critique of postcolonial legacies in formerly colonised territories. The book also challenges conventional conceptions of magical realism, arguing they are often influenced by a geographic bias in the construction of the orthodox global canon, and instead examines contemporary fiction from Asia (including China) and Australasia, two regions that have been largely neglected by scholarship of the narrative mode. As a result, the monograph modifies and expands our ideas of what magical realist fiction is.

The New Map

The New Map PDF Author: Daniel Yergin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698191056
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
A Wall Street Journal besteller and a USA Today Best Book of 2020 Named Energy Writer of the Year for The New Map by the American Energy Society “A master class on how the world works.” —NPR Pulitzer Prize-winning author and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin offers a revelatory new account of how energy revolutions, climate battles, and geopolitics are mapping our future The world is being shaken by the collision of energy, climate change, and the clashing power of nations in a time of global crisis. Out of this tumult is emerging a new map of energy and geopolitics. The “shale revolution” in oil and gas has transformed the American economy, ending the “era of shortage” but introducing a turbulent new era. Almost overnight, the United States has become the world's number one energy powerhouse. Yet concern about energy's role in climate change is challenging the global economy and way of life, accelerating a second energy revolution in the search for a low-carbon future. All of this has been made starker and more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic and the economic dark age that it has wrought. World politics is being upended, as a new cold war develops between the United States and China, and the rivalry grows more dangerous with Russia, which is pivoting east toward Beijing. Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping are converging both on energy and on challenging American leadership, as China projects its power and influence in all directions. The South China Sea, claimed by China and the world's most critical trade route, could become the arena where the United States and China directly collide. The map of the Middle East, which was laid down after World War I, is being challenged by jihadists, revolutionary Iran, ethnic and religious clashes, and restive populations. But the region has also been shocked by the two recent oil price collapses--and by the very question of oil's future in the rest of this century. A master storyteller and global energy expert, Daniel Yergin takes the reader on an utterly riveting and timely journey across the world's new map. He illuminates the great energy and geopolitical questions in an era of rising political turbulence and points to the profound challenges that lie ahead.

Climate Leviathan

Climate Leviathan PDF Author: Joel Wainwright
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786634317
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
**Winner of the 2019 Sussex International Theory Prize** Despite the science and the summits, leading capitalist states have not achieved anything close to an adequate level of carbon mitigation. There is now simply no way to prevent the planet breaching the threshold of two degrees Celsius set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. What are the likely political and economic outcomes of this? Where is the overheating world heading? To further the struggle for climate justice, we need to have some idea how the existing global order is likely to adjust to a rapidly changing environment. Climate Leviathan provides a radical way of thinking about the intensifying challenges to the global order. Drawing on a wide range of political thought, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann argue that rapid climate change will transform the world's political economy and the fundamental political arrangements most people take for granted. The result will be a capitalist planetary sovereignty, a terrifying eventuality that makes the construction of viable, radical alternatives truly imperative.

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times PDF Author: Alison McQueen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107152399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccol- Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.

Climate Change and the Nation State

Climate Change and the Nation State PDF Author: Anatol Lieven
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190090189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The climate emergency is intensifying, while international responses continue to falter. In Climate Change and the Nation State, Anatol Lieven outlines a revolutionary approach grounded in realist thinking. This involves redefining climate change as an existential threat to nation states - which it is - and mobilizing both national security elites and mass nationalism. He condemns Western militaries for neglecting climate change and instead prioritizing traditional but less serious threats. Lieven reminds us that nationalism is the most important force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. The support of nationalism is therefore vital to legitimizing the sacrifices necessary to limit climate change and surviving and the effects of it (some of which are now inevitable). This will require greatly strengthened social and national solidarity across lines of class and race. Throughout, Lieven draws on historical examples to show how nationalism has helped enable past movements to implement progressive social reform. Lieven strongly supports plans for a "Green New Deal" in the USA and Europe. In order to implement and maintain such changes, however, it will be necessary to create dominant national consensuses like those that enabled and sustained the original New Deal and welfare states in Europe. Lieven criticizes sections of the environmentalist left for hindering this by their hostility to national interests, their utopian political naivet , their advancement of divisive cultural agendas, and their commitment to open borders. Radical and timely, Climate Change and the Nation State is an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that if unchecked will threaten the survival of Western democracies and every organized human society.

Realism and Democracy

Realism and Democracy PDF Author: Elliott Abrams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415628
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
This book makes a realpolitik argument for supporting democracy in the Arab world, drawing on four decades of policy experience.

The Climate Swerve

The Climate Swerve PDF Author: Robert Jay Lifton
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620973480
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
Longlisted for the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing "Well worth the read. . . . [A] prescient handoff to the next generation of scholars." —The Washington Post From "one of the world’s foremost thinkers" (Bill Moyers), a profound, hopeful, and timely call for an emerging new collective consciousness to combat climate change Over his long career as witness to an extreme twentieth century, National Book Award-winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual Robert Jay Lifton has grappled with the profound effects of nuclear war, terrorism, and genocide. Now he shifts to climate change, which, Lifton writes, "presents us with what may be the most demanding and unique psychological task ever required of humankind," what he describes as the task of mobilizing our imaginative resources toward climate sanity. Thanks to the power of corporate-funded climate denialists and the fact that "with its slower, incremental sequence, [climate change] lends itself less to the apocalyptic drama," a large swathe of humanity has numbed themselves to the reality of climate change. Yet Lifton draws a message of hope from the Paris climate meeting of 2015 where representatives of virtually all nations joined in the recognition that we are a single species in deep trouble. Here, Lifton suggests in this lucid and moving book that recalls Rachel Carson and Jonathan Schell, was evidence of how we might call upon the human mind—"our greatest evolutionary asset"—to translate a growing species awareness—or "climate swerve"—into action to sustain our habitat and civilization.