World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has vowed that his institution will fight poverty and climate change, a claim that World Bank presidents have made for two decades. In reality, the Bank often has been hurting the very people it claims to serve by funding development projects and programs that warm the planet and destroy critical natural resources on which the poor depend. What explains this blatant contradiction?

Foreclosing the Future; The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction shows how the Bank’s failure to address the challenges of the 21st Century has implications for everyone in an increasingly interdependent world. Auhtor Bruce Rich depicts how the World Bank is a microcosm of global political and economic trends–powerful forces that threaten both environmental and social ruin. Rich shows how the Bank has reinforced these forces, undercutting the most idealistic attempts at alleviating poverty and sustaining the environment, and damaging the lives of millions. Readers will see global politics on an increasingly crowded planet as they never have before–and come to understand the changes necessary if the World Bank is ever to achieve its mission.

Join Bruce Rich–a lawyer and expert in public international finance who has studied the Bank’s role in the global environmental crisis for the last three decades–as he discusses how its failures embody the dysfunctions of global politics on an increasingly crowded planet. See Mr. Rich’s Facebook author page for more information and click here to purchase the book.

Co-sponsors: Teaching for Change, Friends of The Earth, Amazon Watch, Greenpeace, Center for International Environmental Law, Government Accountability Project, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Institute for Policy Studies’ Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, Sierra Club, Island Press, and Bank Information Center.