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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
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Society & Social Sciences

THE HEAT AND THE FURY

Peter Schwartzstein

On the Frontlines of Climate Violence

As a journalist on the climate security beat, Peter Schwartzstein has been chased by kidnappers, badly beaten, detained by police, and told, in no uncertain terms, that he was no longer welcome in certain countries. Yet these personal brushes with violence are simply a hint of the conflict simmering in our warming world.

Schwartzstein has visited ravaged Iraqi towns where ISIS used drought as a recruiting tool and weapon of terror. In Bangladesh, he has interviewed farmers-turned-pirates who can no longer make a living off the land and instead make it off bloody ransoms. Security forces have blocked him from a dam being constructed along the Nile that has brought Egypt and Ethiopia to the brink of war. And he has heard the fear in the voices of women from around the world who say their husbands' tempers flare when the temperature ticks up. He not only puts readers on the frontlines of climate violence but gives us the context to make sense of seemingly senseless acts. As Schwartzstein deftly shows, climate change is often the spark that ignites long smoldering fires, the extra shove that pushes individuals, communities, and even nations over the line between frustration and lethal fury. What, he asks, can ratchet down the aggression? Can cooperation on climate actually become a salve to heal old wounds? There are no easy answers on a planet that is fast becoming a powder keg. But Schwartzstein's incisive analysis of geopolitics, unparalleled on-the-ground reporting, and keen sense of human nature offer the clearest picture to date of the violence that threatens us all. Peter Schwartzstein is a British-American journalist and environmental consultant. He writes about regional environment and geopolitical issues, with a focus on water, the conflict-climate nexus, and food security. His work regularly appears in National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, and the BBC. His work has also been published by The Atlantic, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, WIRED, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, Politico, Le Monde Diplomatique, NPR, Outside, Quartz, and The Daily Beast, among many other outlets. His award-winning reportage has been supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, the Rory Peck Trust, the Society for Environmental Journalists, and the Earth Journalism Network. He was selected as a TED fellow in 2020.

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Book Published 2024-09-01 by Island Press

Comments

Never has a book on the climate crisis been so thrilling and so rich in adventure. Beautifully written, darkly comedic in places, and with a keen ear and eye for detail.[it] carries warnings for us all of distant crises that will not be contained as the planet's climate calamity worsens.

All too often, journalists in war zones are confined to exploring the immediate violence around them. In this deeply reported book, Peter Schwartzstein does something different, investigating how climate change can not only exacerbate inequity and instability, but how it also interacts with other drivers to foment future conflict. This book is a real contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between climate and violence.

A remarkable feat of both reporting and storytelling. This book is an essential documentation of how and where we've gone so wrong, and yet also one that offers some hope for resolutions. Schwartzstein's writing deftly builds to a crescendo of climate-driven conflict and instability, told with equal amounts of rigor and humanity.

The heat will move us. It will rearrange growing seasons and supply chains, building codes and property values, immigrant streams and national identities. And the hotter it gets, science shows, the more violent we get. Few people understand the local safety and global security implications of this like Peter Schwartzstein and even fewer have the intrepid reporting chops to take us around the world with gripping evidence and lessons learned. On an overheating Earth, where the most prepared will suffer least, this is a must-read.

Our hotter planet is, already, a harsher and more violent one. But why? And how? And how much worse might it get? Peter Schwartzstein's THE HEAT AND THE FURY is a richly reported, beautifully rendered, remarkably complex, and rewarding meditation on the interplay of planetary instability and human brutalitya landmark work on perhaps the essential question of our time.

Fascinating. In a mammoth reporting feat, Schwartzstein takes readers across the world to the frontlines of climate change from the villages of the Sahel to Iraq's fight against jihadis, while always making sure to include nuance and context. I learnt a huge amount from this book.