Climate’s Cliff
2015; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1177/0740277515591534
ISSN1936-0924
ResumoImage: Bernd ThallerMankind has managed to walk the Earth for at least 200,000 years without irrevocably fouling its nest. It has done so through repeated revolutions and wars, untold disease and pestilence, and a variety of natural disasters. Now, for the first time, we may be on the verge of rendering the planet itself uninhabitable. Or perhaps not, depending on your point of view. The broadest consensus suggests that mankind is poised on a climatic cliff, with indicators of major disruption to our biosphere reaching levels never before seen either in recorded history or buried in the deepest strata of the earth beneath our feet. This is the issue that we set out to explore in the Summer edition of World Policy Journal—how near the precipice are we, and what may lie over the edge, or beneath the morass into which we may be sinking.We begin with Big Question, a selection of thinkers from every continent reflecting on those with the most to lose from climate change in their nation or region. The pioneer environmentalist Lester R. Brown, founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute, whose 50 books have been translated into 40 languages, kicks us off with a remarkable look at how fossil fuels must give way to solar and wind. Our Timeline plots some of our most instructive and destructive environmental milestones against the rise in global temperatures. Meanwhile, our Anatomy feature examines three of the world’s driest nations, then probes three models of advanced water management. And Map Room charts the Arctic and new possibilities for militarization of the region, as shrinking ice shelves and warmer waters open new channels for trade. Subhankar Banerjee, a noted environmental scholar, looks at the “circumpolar north” in its new, ever-warmer configurations. Ted Andersen documents new efforts to hack another canal through Central America, across Nicaragua, and its potential environmental horror show. World Policy Journal then breaks new ground, publishing our first work of prose fiction by a remarkable Chinese scholar and novelist, Qiu Xiaolong, who examines China’s smog-filled air through the prism of the brilliant and perceptive Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Then, Israeli physicists David Andelman (not our own editor in disguise) and Guy Deutscher posit a nuclear future as the world’s best alternative to holding noxious carbon at bay. Finally, Japanese physicist Hiroshi Amano, who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics, tells our editor in a Conversation from Japan about the long path to the greatest step in illumination since the incandescent light, and the next breakthrough he’s working toward.Meanwhile, Poet-in-Residence Eliza Griswold invokes a Roman writer in her climate change refrain. In our Portfolio, French photojournalist Jeremy Suyker has managed to penetrate a colony of Iranian bodybuilders—a unique community in Tehran that says much about the way the ayatollahs treat some on the margins of society.Next we turn to India for two remarkable pieces. Ravi Krishnani examines the dilemma of women who are the target of online aggression on the subcontinent with nowhere to turn. Then Jas Singh unveils the dangers hidden behind India’s turn toward the religious right and the political ramifications of this shift. Aliza Goldberg pingpongs between Prague and Istanbul to profile the face of discrimination in two poles of Europe. Then Thierry Vircoulon has discovered the pivot of Africa—politically, geographically, and economically—in the challenging nation of Cameroon, independent since 1960 but just beginning to find its central role in a seething continent. Finally, in his Coda, World Policy Journal editor & publisher David A. Andelman postures how to feed a global population on the cusp of outstripping its bounds.
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