An important focus in the book “Boomtown. Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast”is how the gap between the people affected by change in local environments and the people in charge is growing even wider.
Eriksen examines how the logic of big industry and the state compete with that of the individual, local communities and ecology, revealing the current crisis of political legitimacy across the world.
Gladstone embodies many of the contradictions of the overheated world: prosperous yet polluted; growing and developing yet always on the precipice of uncertainty.
Read more in this interview in The Ecologist:
Industrialism and ambivalence on the Queensland coast
In Sapiens:
How Globalization has broken the Chain of responsibility
The fieldwork was conducted as part of UiO’s large research project “Overheating” that focused on the three crisis of globalization.