How will coastal cities survive if the planet's ice sheets continue to melt? Many of the world's biggest metropolises are located along coastlines, and more than 50 percent of the world's population lives within 120 miles of the sea. "The age of the disaster is also the age of the city," Ashley Dawson writes in Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (Verso, 2017). "If today's cities are one of the major drivers of climate chaos, they are also its principal victims."

There are few notes of optimism in this sobering account of how planetary urbanization has put us on a collision course with the natural world. Cities are an epicenter of extreme economic and social injustice, both of which are exacerbated by extreme weather. "Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy showed that urban disasters deepen the grooves of already-existing social inequality," Dawson writes.

The author delivers a withering critique of how cities use land zoning to place waste facilities and other forms of toxic manufacturing in low-income communities of color. Meanwhile, the human folly of trying to control nature, and the unintended consequences thereof, could not be more evident in Dawson's encyclopedic account of why Louisiana's wetlands are disappearing and how urban development on top of landfill turned New York's Jamaica Bay into a "sewershed." 

Talk of "climate resilience" and abandoning fossil fuels for clean energy is admirable, Dawson agrees. But it's not enough. The calamities wrought by climate change must compel us toward a greater sense of ecological justice and community. It may be "a long-term process," he writes, "in which a more just and ecologically sustainable society, based on genuine human needs, begins to come into view."

This article appeared in the January/February 2018 edition with the headline "Cities on the Brink."