VVI Research Meetings 2022-2023
Intersecting Global Trends: antidemocracy and anti-environmentalism
- Date
- Wednesday 12 April 2023
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- B0.30
This talk explores the connections between a global rise of antidemocratic politics and the escalation of climate change, manifested through catastrophic wildfires. As political leaders and big business work together in the pursuit of profits and power, anti-environmental policies have become essential political tools enabling the rise of extreme right governments. Exploring this process through fires in Australia, Brazil and California in recent years, I argue that wildfires facilitated by far-right leaders connect the political erosion of liberal democracy with the corrosion of the environment, in turn threatening the collective future of humanity.