Dr. Michel Gueldry

Monterey Institute of International Studies – GSTILE

460 Pierce Street

Monterey, CA 93940

paskal, Cleo. Global Warring. How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-62181-7. Pp. 280. $27.00.

In this ambitious yet highly accessible book, journalist Cleo Paskal examines how current and coming geophysical changes will affect geopolitical and geoeconomic balances and power relations on a global scale. Her straightforward rationale should engage even environmental skeptics: “our environment is the foundation upon which we graft all other infrastructures.” In fact, “our transportation system, cities, defensive capabilities, agriculture, power generation system, water supply” and many others are “all dependent on a stable environment” (10). Accordingly, she sets out to demonstrate that “[e]nvironmental change is a sustained and pervasive attack on the status quo” (238) and that what used to be considered “constants” (notably climate, sea and ground levels, waterways, coastlines, and resources availability) must be recast as “variables” (56) if we are “to minimize the geopolitical, economic, and security fallout” (11). The core of her case is that environmental “variations” (239), either slow or sudden, do not affect just local situations; they are game changers for the international system. She articulates this broad connection as either principal or secondary causation: at times she sees substantial climate change and other environmental stresses directly “affecting a careful balance and leading to conflict” (12) and other global changes, at others she sees “smaller degree[s] of environmental variations” yielding “larger implications” by exacerbating “existing problems” (14, see also 40).

In chronicling what she considers “the growing influence of Asia in world affairs and the West’s attempts to maintain its current geopolitical position” (18),