“Surviving Climate Change: the struggle to avert global catastrophe” review

“Surviving Climate Change: the struggle to avert global catastrophe” review

Surviving Climate Change

ed David Cromwell and Mark Levene
Pluto Press, 2007

This, the first multi-authored book from Crisis Forum, set up for the study of crises in the C21st (www.crisis-forum.org.uk), is for those who want to read about what is really going on around the politics of climate change. Governments and business keep reassuring the public they are going to fix the problem. This book brings together some leading activists who disagree. They expose the inertia, denial, deception – even threats to our civil liberties – which comprise mainstream responses from civil and military policy makers, and from opinion formers in the media, corporations and academia.

Climate change is a pressing reality. From hurricane Katrina to melting polar ice, and from mass extinctions to increased threats to food and water security, the link between corporate globalization and planetary blowback is becoming all too evident.

An epochal change is called for in the way we all engage with the climate crisis. Key to that change is Aubrey Meyer’s proposed ‘Contraction and Convergence’ framework for limiting global carbon emissions. This book, which also includes contributions by Mayer Hillman and George Marshall, is a powerful guide to how mass mobilisation can avert the looming catastrophe.

Dr Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at Southampton University, Crisis Forum co-founder and Director of the “Climate change and violence” project. He gave MAW’s 2009 Remembrance Sunday lecture at the Imperial War Museum.