“There are two problems for our species’ survival—nuclear war and environmental catastrophe," says Noam Chomsky in this new book on the two existential threats of our time and their points of intersection since World War II.
While a nuclear strike would require action, environmental catastrophe is partially defined by willful inaction in response to human-induced climate change. Denial of the facts is only half the equation. Other contributing factors include extreme techniques for the extraction of remaining carbon deposits, the elimination of agricultural land for bio-fuel, the construction of dams, and the destruction of forests that are crucial for carbon sequestration.
On the subject of current nuclear tensions, Chomsky revisits the long-established option of a nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, a proposal set in motion through a joint Egyptian-Iranian General Assembly resolution in 1974.
Intended as a warning, Noam Chomsky and Laray Polk's Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe is also a reminder that talking about the unspeakable can still be done with humor, wit and indomitable spirit.
VIDEO:
Check out a clip of Noam Chomsky speaking with Laura Flanders on GritTV, backstage at the Left Forum conference in New York on June 8, 2013.
Collected in
The Best of Noam Chomsky
Laray Polk is a multimedia artist and writer. Her articles and investigative reports have appeared in the Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, and In These Times. As a 2009 grant recipient from The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, she exposed a radioactive waste disposal site in Texas situated in close proximity to the Ogallala Aquifer.
Born in Philadelphia in 1928, NOAM CHOMSKY is known throughout the world for his political writings, activism, and for for his groundbreaking work in linguistics. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955, Chomsky gained recognition in academic circles for his theory of transformational grammar, which drew attention to the syntactic universality of all human languages. But it is as a critic of unending war, corporate control, and neoliberalism that Chomsky has become one of the country’s most well known public intellectuals. The 1969 publication of American Power and the New Mandarins marked the beginning of Chomsky’s rigorous public criticism of American hegemony and its lieges. Since then, with his tireless scholarship and an unflagging sense of moral responsibility, he has become one of the most influential writers in the world. Chomsky is the author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Edward S. Herman), Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, and over one hundred other books. To this day Noam Chomsky remains an active and uncompromising voice of dissent.
