While ecologists and environmentalists view the melting of the polar ice caps as a dire and threatening effect of climate change, many business and political leaders see emerging opportunity, as a result of newly accessible oil and gas fields. As the contributors to The Secure and the Dispossessed reveal, the ongoing environmental transitions raise a host of complicated questions about global assets and resources as well as dangerous opportunism.
 
The Secure and the Dispossessed gathers together essays by high-profile journalists, academics, and activists, including Christian Parenti, Nafeez Ahmed, and policy analyst Oscar Reyes. They offer a close and critical guide to questions about climate change, showing how they converge with questions about international security and global economic power, as new natural resources become available. This book is an essential guide to the key environmental and political debates which will shape future policies and elections: how managing the world’s supply of oil and gas can be squared with the environmental impact of our continued reliance on those very same fossil fuels.

An interconnected web of lives in one midwestern city captures the surprising humanity of people searching for their authentic selves amid the 1990s drug crisis.

Amy Taylor finds the inner-city streets around her high school vibrant and animated compared to the bland middle-class neighborhood where she lives with her career-driven mother. In these streets, she meets the people of the city, among them a wayward boy named Jonathan, a struggling drug dealer, and Paul Lewis, a documentary photographer who becomes Amy’s mentor. Under his inspiration, she attempts to capture their world through the lens of her camera.

From the multiple perspectives of Amy and the expansive group of people she meets, award-winning novelist Michael Henson presents a heartbreaking portrait of the effects the Reagan-initiated drug war had on the young.