Climate Change and International Politics (ePub)

Accustomed to understanding security primarily a matter spatial exercise in distancing and boundary making on the part of states and their military alliances to secure borders and institutions from outside threats, the nations of the world have so far given a short shrift to the gravity of environmental degradation as a factor or catalyst of intrastate or interstate conflict, or at worst, a security threat to entire humanity until the shafts of retaliatory responses of the infuriated climate change to the cloddish and brutish power of the rich industrialized nations to destroy it by its emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, pointed toward man menacing with funereal and cascading consequences of global warming. Thus, climate change, which has so far been on the fringe of human concern, or in American President's view a myth or a hoax, has catapulted into the center stage of great political flare up among the nations of the world on the issue of apportioning the responsibility on rich industrialized nations or the populous South to mitigate the dangers of climate change, which seems to be mired in the contradiction between North's advocacy of inequity in having uncontested access to the atmosphere as carton sinks, and equity while disabusing the atmosphere of the carbon debris. Not walking on trodden furrows, this book expatiates on the desideratum of a paradigm shift from faith in the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe to a faith in the profundity of Eastern wisdom and new insights presently found in science, which see both nature and human beings as warp and woof woven beautifully into the divine tapestry.