Ep 7 - "The Storm State" with Christian Parenti

GMU Cultural Studies Colloquium

In the seventh episode of the "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture" podcast series from GMU Cultural Studies, Richard Todd Stafford talks with Christian Parenti, who has written about climate change in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, and elsewhere. Parenti is an associate professor of economics at John Jay College of CUNY. Among others, he's the author of the book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence and is working on books about Alexander Hamilton as a political theorist and about the state as an environment-making force. Stafford and Parenti discuss the role of the state in climate adaptation and mitigation.

This podcast series is associated with George Mason University Cultural Studies' Colloquium Series. This year's series is called "Capitalism, Climate Change, and Culture." The industrial revolution liberated human beings from the cycles of nature — or so it once seemed. It turns out that greenhouse gases, a natural byproduct of coal- and petroleum-burning industries, lead to global warming, and that we are now locked into a long warming trend: a trend that will raise sea levels, enhance the occurrence of extreme weather events, and ultimately could threaten food supplies and other vital supports for modern civilization. This podcast series examines the cultural and political-economic dimensions of our ongoing, slow-moving climate crisis. We engage experts from a variety of fields and disciplines to ask questions about capitalism and the environment. How did we get into this mess? How bad is it? Where do we go from here? What sorts of steps might mitigate the damage — or perhaps someday reverse it? At stake are deep questions about humanity’s place in and relationship to nature — and what our systems of governance, production, and distribution might look like in the future.

— Roger Lancaster, Colloquium Organizer

Learn more about the Cultural Studies Program at GMU: http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu

Learn more about Christian Parenti: https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/christian-parenti

Music: Kevin MacLeod "Acid Trumpet," used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.