In Collapse
Description
This book takes a critical look at the idea of collapse, focusing on the relationship between accelerating climate risks and insurance. Insurance is a weathervane for the social impacts of unmitigated global environmental change, and it is pointing to rough times ahead: unstoppable rises in the cost-of-living and growing inequity and inequality, amidst intensifying extreme weather events. This book provides an authoritative and accessible investigation into the social and geographic dimensions of insurance in a changing world, to challenge notions of collapse and 'the end of the world' that are fatalistic and blind to inequality and inequity. It presents a new way of understanding collapse, and how to live well, in a changing world. The author argues that we must find language and ideas to accurately describe the current global trajectory and its uneven, unjust impacts. She explains that without critical understandings of notions like collapse, we will remain bereft of meaningful action and achievable goals.
Reviews / Votes
"In Collapse unsettles. Booth forces us to turn and face, head-on, the many discomfiting truths about living in and with climate breakdown. But it also clarifies and empowers. With their critical interrogation of collapse through the prism of insurance, we better know what worlds may be ending, which already have, and how to look for solidarity amidst the wreckage. The analysis here provides a powerful rethinking of what collective risk sharing and survival might mean and require." (Associate Professor Rebecca Elliott, Department of Sociology, The London School of Economics and Political Science)
"In this short but compelling book, Booth uses her profound understanding of how serious the diverse, lived realities of insurance are to explain why collapse works as a way of organising our thinking and reactions to the intertwined socio-ecological and geopolitical crises we are all facing." (Professor Liz McFall, School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh)
"Insurance is a clearly understudied part of finance in geography and social sciences in general, while it is crucial to understanding our relationships with each other and the environment, and hence our possible futures. In Collapse offers a uniquely broad, theoretically and empirically grounded, and intellectually provocative account on how to understand risk in space and time and how to act on this understanding." (Professor Dariusz Wójcik, National University of Singapore)
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Person
Kate Booth is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography, Planning, and Spatial Sciences at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is a human geographer and activist academic, and her research and teaching address socio-ecological inequity in the context of rapid and unprecedented global change.
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Happy endings.- Chapter 3. Insurance in a changing climate.- Chapter 4. Insurance collapse(s).- Chapter 5. What is collapse?.- Chapter 6. In collapse.