Those of us who have watched the process have said that the Earth Summit has failed ... Multinational corporations, the United States, Japan, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund have got away with what they always wanted ... the Summit has ensured increased domination by those who already have power. Worse still, it has robbed the poor of the little power they had. It has made them victims of a market economy that has thus far threatened our planet ... few negotiators realised how critical their decisions are to our generation. By failing to address such fundamental issues as militarism, the regulation of transnational corporations, the democratisation of international aid agencies and the inequitable terms of trade, my generation has been damned." - Wagaki Mwangi, Kenyan, Youth delegate to the Earth Summit

Halliburton'sArmy is the first book to show, in shocking detail, how Halliburton really does business, in Iraq, and around the world. From its vital role as the logistical backbone of the U.S. occupation in Iraq -- without Halliburton there could be no war or occupation -- to its role in covering up gang-rape amongst its personnel in Baghdad, Halliburton'sArmy is a devastating bestiary of corporate malfeasance and political cronyism. Pratap Chatterjee -- one of the world's leading authorities on corporate crime, fraud, and corruption -- shows how Halliburton won and then lost its contracts in Iraq, what Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did for it, and who the company paid off in the U.S. Congress. He brings us inside the Pentagon meetings, where Cheney and Rumsfeld made the decision to send Halliburton to Iraq -- as well as many other hot-spots, including Somalia, Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Guantámo Bay, and, most recently, New Orleans. He travels to Dubai, where Halliburton has recently moved its headquarters, and exposes the company's freewheeling ways: executives leading the high life, bribes, graft, skimming, offshore subsidiaries, and the whole arsenal of fraud. Finally, Chatterjee reveals the human costs of the privatization of American military affairs, which is sustained almost entirely by low-paid unskilled Third World workers who work in incredibly dangerous conditions without any labor protection. Halliburton'sArmy is a hair-raising exposéf one of the world's most lethal corporations, essential reading for anyone concerned about the nexus of private companies, government, and war.

This book discusses the dominant paradigms and controversies that shaped debate at the time of the Stockholm conference, and in the twenty years between Stockholm and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. It examines the challenges of international cooperation and institutional reform.

Since the end of the Cold War, environmental matters -- especially the international implications of environmental degradation -- have figured prominently in debates about rethinking security. But do the assumptions underlying such discussions hold up under close scrutiny? In this first treatment of environmental security from a truly critical perspective, Simon Dalby shows how attempts to explain contemporary insecurity falter over unexamined notions of both environment and security. Adding environmental history, aboriginal perspectives, and geopolitics to the analysis explicitly suggests that the growing disruptions caused by a carbon-fueled and expanding modernity are at the root of contemporary difficulties. Environmental Security argues that rethinking security means revisiting the question of how we conceive identities as endangered and how we perceive threats to these identities. The book clearly demonstrates that the conceptual basis for critical security studies requires an extended engagement with political theory and with the assumptions of the modern subject as progressive political agent. Viewed thus on a global scale, the environmental security discourse raises profoundly troubling political questions as to who we are and what kind of world we are collectively making in our efforts to be secure.

In The Climate War, Eric Pooley--deputy editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek--does for global warming what Bob Woodward did for presidents and Lawrence Wright did for terrorists. In this epic tale of an American civil war, Pooley takes us behind the scenes and into the hearts and minds of the most important players in the struggle to cap global warming pollution--a fight in which trillions of dollars and the fate of the planet are at stake. Why has it been so hard for America to come to grips with climate change? Why do so many people believe it isn't really happening? As President Obama's science advisor John Holdren has said, "We're driving in a car with bad brakes in a fog and heading for a cliff. We know for sure that cliff is out there. We just don't know exactly where it is. Prudence would suggest that we should start putting on the brakes." But powerful interests are threatened by the carbon cap that would speed the transition to a clean energy economy, and their agents have worked successfully to deny the problem and delay the solutions. To write this book, Pooley, the former managing editor of Fortune and chief political correspondent for Time, spent three years embedded with an extraordinary cast of characters: from the flamboyant head of one of the nation's largest coal-burning energy companies to the driven environmental leader who made common cause with him, from leading scientists warning of impending catastrophe to professional skeptics disputing almost every aspect of climate science, from radical activists chaining themselves to bulldozers to powerful lobbyists, media gurus, and advisors in Obama's West Wing--and, to top it off, unprecedented access to former Vice President Al Gore and his team of climate activists. Pooley captures the quiet determination and even heroism of climate campaigners who have dedicated their lives to an uphill battle that's still raging today. He asks whether we have what it takes to preserve our planet's habitability, and shows how America's climate war sends shock waves from Bali to Copenhagen. No other reporter enjoys such access to this cast of characters. No other book covers this terrain. From the trenches of a North Carolina power plant to the battlefields of Capitol Hill, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street, The Climate War is the essential read for anyone who wants to understand the players and politics behind the most important issue we face today.

Why is the United Nations not more effective on global environmental challenges? The UN Charter mandates the global organization to seek four noble aspirations: international peace and security, rule of law among nations, human rights for all people, and social progress through development. On environmental issues, however, the UN has understood its charge much more narrowly: it works for "better law between nations" and "better development within them." This approach treats peace and human rights as unrelated to the world's environmental problems, despite a large body of evidence to the contrary. In this path-breaking book, a leading scholar of global environmental governance critiques the UN's failure to use its mandates on human rights and peace as tools in its environmental work. The book traces the institutionalization and performance of the UN's "law and development" framework and the parallel silence on rights and peace. Despite some important gains, the traditional approach is failing for some of world's most pressing and contentious environmental challenges, and has lost most of the political momentum it once enjoyed. The disastrous "Rio+20" Summit laid this fact bare, as assembled governments failed to find meaningful agreement on any of the most pressing issues. By not treating the environment as a human rights issue, the UN fails to mobilize powerful tools for accountability in the face of pollution and resource degradation. And by ignoring the conflict potential around natural resources and environmental protection efforts, the UN misses opportunities to transform the destructive cycle of violence and vulnerability around resource extraction. The book traces the history of the UN's traditional approach, maps its increasingly apparent limits, and suggests needed reforms. Detailed case histories for each of the four mandate domains flag several promising initiatives, while identifying barriers to transformation. Its core implication: the UN's environmental efforts require not just a managerial reorganization but a conceptual revolution-one that brings to bear the full force of the organization's mandate. Peacebuilding, conflict sensitivity, rights-based frameworks, and accountability mechanisms can be used to enhance the UN's environmental effectiveness and legitimacy.

'Illuminating ... Earth of Sale is a fantastic primer for those looking for some historical perspectives on the environmental movement.' The Ecologist