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On the Frontlines of Climate Violence
by Peter Schwartzstein
As a journalist on the climate security beat, Peter Schwartzstein has been chased by kidnappers, badly beaten, detained by police, and told, in no uncertain terms, that he was no longer welcome in certain countries. Yet these personal brushes with violence are simply a hint of the conflict simmering in our warming world.
Schwartzstein has visited ravaged Iraqi towns where ISIS used drought as a recruiting tool and weapon of terror. In Bangladesh, he has interviewed farmers-turned-pirates who can no longer make a living off the land and instead make it off bloody ransoms. Security forces have blocked him from a dam being constructed along the Nile that has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war. And he has heard the fear in the voices of women from around the world who say their husbands' tempers flare when the temperature ticks up.
In The Heat and the Fury, he not only puts readers on the frontlines of climate violence but gives us the context to make sense of seemingly senseless acts. As Schwartzstein deftly shows, climate change is often the spark that ignites long smoldering fires, the extra shove that pushes individuals, communities, and even nations over the line between frustration and lethal fury. What, he asks, can ratchet down the aggression? Can cooperation on climate actually become a salve to heal old wounds?
There are no easy answers on a planet that is fast becoming a powder keg. But Schwartzstein's incisive analysis of geopolitics, unparalleled on-the-ground reporting, and keen sense of human nature offer the clearest picture to date of the violence that threatens us all.
"Schwartzstein's vignettes of each troubled region are vibrantly narrated as he encounters indignant locals and has run-ins with menacing state security officials attempting to block his investigations into what they invariably consider a 'sensitive' subject. It's a riveting journey through a world running hot." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fascinating. In a mammoth reporting feat, Schwartzstein takes readers across the world to the frontlines of climate change – from the villages of the Sahel to Iraq's fight against jihadis, while always making sure to include nuance and context. I learnt a huge amount from this book." ―Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned
"Our hotter planet is, already, a harsher and more violent one. But why? And how? And how much worse might it get? Peter Schwartzstein's The Heat and the Fury is a richly reported, beautifully rendered, remarkably complex, and rewarding meditation on the interplay of planetary instability and human brutality—a landmark work on perhaps the essential question of our time." —David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth
Prisoners of Geography
This information about The Heat and the Fury was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Schwartzstein is an environmental journalist who reports on water, food security, and particularly the conflict-climate nexus across some thirty countries in the Middle East, Africa, and occasionally further afield. He mostly writes for National Geographic, but his work has also appeared in the New York Times, BBC, Foreign Affairs, and many other outlets. He is a Global Fellow with the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program, a TED fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Climate and Security.
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