From the Publisher
"If you want to properly geek out on geopolitics and its relation to thinking about climate... this book is for you... Toal argues persuasively how geopolitics made the climate crisis inevitable and also provides some of our only routes out." — Richard Delevan, Books of the Year 2024, Wicked Problems (Substack)
"Toal's new book is a most welcome entry to the interdisciplinary and unconventional approaches to international security." — Burak Kadercan, Holiday Reading List 2024, War on the Rocks"This is a genuinely important book. Written in an accessible way for a broad audience while drawing on significant engagement with key literature, Toal manages to powerfully elucidate the realities of (international) politics as usual for the conditions of human existence." — Environment and Security"Helping to add context to situations like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Oceans Rise Empires Fall should be considered essential reading in political geography but is accessible enough to appeal to a general audience. What is perhaps most impressive about this book is the way that Toal is able to fit explanations of complex geopolitical theories and a discussion of how a critical geopolitical lens can be used to make sense of them within the context of environmental politics, all in just over 200 pages." — Journal of Geography"This is an excellent study of our helplessness in dealing with the planetary crisis, providing an answer to the question of why we are not coping and showing how the mental clichés in which we function contribute to this." — Nauka o Klimacie
Kirkus Reviews
2023-10-27
An academic assessment of the relationship between geography and the politics of nations.
Driven by an impetus to control and/or expand their territory and to influence what happens within and beyond their borders, “world powers use and abuse the earth,” writes geography professor Toal, author of Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus. To protect and enhance their sovereignty and boost their economies, nation-states exploit the land, oceans, air, and now outer space, and they do so in competition with other nation-states. The author argues that this struggle for resources, trade, political status, and territorial dominance—anchored in the modernist “dream of endless growth”—has made, and continues to make, Earth less habitable. Toal’s title, however, is not quite accurate. The author emphasizes climate change, while discussions of geopolitics and the issue of declining empires are effectively absent. Toal devotes most of the book to the intellectual origins of—and counter-arguments to—a geopolitical point of view, and he does so insightfully and with authority. Major figures in the text include the 20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder, the “Father of Geopolitics,” and the political theorist Carl Schmitt. Climate takes center stage only in the chapter on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine; the author uses the invasion as an example of how war, a major form of international competition, devastates the environment. Central to Toal’s discussion is his assessment of NATO’s efforts to expand its territorial, political, and economic influence, an institutional project that may have triggered Putin’s attempt to remake Russia as a great power. In conclusion, the author reflects broadly on how current geopolitical factors might be changed to halt their destructive climate consequences. As an optimist, he suggests that “when conditions are right and leaders courageous, great powers can and do cooperate.”
A convincing indictment of nation-states for crimes against the planet.
