Environment, Population, and Security

Environment as a National Security Problem?

Population and the Environmental Scarcity Model

(Robert Kaplan & Thomas Homer-Dixon)

The Political Ecology Approach

(Nancy Peluso & Michael Watts)

Competing Interpretations of Three Cases:

Chiapas, Nigeria, Sierra Leone

Implications of an Alternative Framework

“It is time to understand ‘environment’ for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.”

• Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet”, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994

Who Says Academics Have No Influence on Policy?

Kaplan and Homer-Dixon are “the beacons for a new sensitivity to environmental security.”

• Bill Clinton, President of the United States,1994

“Resource scarcities are a root cause of the violent conflicts that have convulsed civil society in Rwanda, Haiti and Chiapas… Professor Tad Homer-Dixon…warns that in upcoming decades, resources scarcities ‘will probably occur with a speed, complexity, and magnitude unprecedented in history.’”

• Timothy Wirth, Undersecretary of State, 1994

The United States should adopt “an aggressive environmental program because it is critical to the defense mission.”

• William Perry, Secretary of Defense, 1995

“The political and strategic impact of surging population, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, probably, rising sea levels in critical overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh – developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts – will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”– Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy”

The Basic Argument

"Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring…throughout West Africa and much of the undeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war....[I]t is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world."

- Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy”

Thomas Robert Malthus1766-1834

Causal Relationships: Kaplan

environmental degradation +

resource scarcity

population growth

+ WAR =

Causal Relationships: Homer-Dixon

Environmental scarcity (of renewable resources)– Degradation (supply-induced)– Increased demand (demand-induced)– Unequal resource distribution

Contributes to civil violence through:– Resource capture– Ecological marginalization

Which lead to social effects, such as:– Constrained agricultural production– Migration– Disruption of legitimate institutions

“Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling.”

- quoted in Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy”

Thomas Homer-Dixon

"Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases," International Security, vol. 19, no. 1 (1994)

"The Ingenuity Gap: Can Poor Countries Adapt to Resource Scarcity,"

Population and Development Review, vol. 21, no. 3 (1995)

Homer-Dixon’s Neo-Malthusianism

Social ingenuity, according to Homer-Dixon, consists of ideas applied to the creation, reform and maintenance of institutions "such as markets, funding agencies, educational and research organizations, and effective government." If operating well, "this system of institutions provides psychological and material incentives to technological entrepreneurs and innovators; it aids regular contact and communication among experts; and it channels resources preferentially to those endeavors with the greatest prospects of success."

Source: E. Barbier and T. Homer-Dixon, “Resource Scarcity, Institutional Adaptation, and Technical Innovation” (1996)

Central driving force: population growth

Solution: “social ingenuity”

How resource scarcity limits social ingenuity

• increased scarcity often provokes competitive action by powerful elite groups and narrow social coalitions to defend their interests or to profit from the scarcity through "rent-seeking" behavior

• severe scarcity sometimes causes social turmoil and violence, which can directly impede the functioning of ingenuity-generating institutions, such as markets

• resource scarcity often reduces availability of human and financial capital for production of ingenuity by shifting investment from long-term adaptation to immediate tasks of scarcity management and

mitigation.

Source: E. Barbier and T. Homer-Dixon, “Resource Scarcity, Institutional Adaptation, and Technical Innovation” (1996)

In other words…

Resource scarcity prevents social ingenuity from providing the solution to resource scarcity

Critique of Homer-Dixon (and Kaplan)

Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts, eds. Violent Environments (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001)

• Empirical: He does not demonstrate connections between dislocation and hardship, weakness of the state, and intergroup conflict

• Theoretical: He does not have a model of the conditions under which elites are able to “capture” resources and provoke violence (missing context of local and global political economy)

Kaplan: stories, but no explanation

• When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is.

• In the Ivory Coast the proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent.

• [In Guinea] hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry.– Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy”

So, what’s the explanation?

What is the main source of deforestation in West Africa?

a. Too many people cutting down the forests for fuel

b. Harvesting hardwoods for sale on international markets

Political Ecology: An Alternative Approach

• Broader consideration of environmental processes (not limited to scarcity):– Economic degradation associated with nonrenewable

resources– Environmental change associated with human

transformation of renewable resources– Environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and

preservation

Environmental scarcity or resource curse?

• Resource curse: An abundance of easily obtainable natural resources encourages internal political corruption, underinvestment in domestic human capital, and a decline in the competitiveness of other economic sectors

• Countries who suffer from this condition may be classified as rentier states – They derive all or a substantial portion of their

national revenues from the sale of indigenous resources to external clients

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

Environmental scarcity model:

Chiapas, MexicoConflict over land between ranchers and farmers

NigeriaEnvironmental damage due to overpopulation

Sierra LeoneOverpopulation leads to disease and war

What is missing from the “environmental scarcity” model?

According to the “political ecology” model:

– International dimensions

– Local dimensions

International Dimensions

Influence of global economic conditions

• NAFTA and Chiapas

(Mexico)

• Oil and Ogoniland

(Nigeria)

• Diamonds and Sierra Leone

International Dimensions

Transnational non-governmental organizations

• Mexico: Zapatismo and the anti-globalization movement

• Nigeria: Ken Saro-Wiwa and environmentalism

• Sierra Leone: Executive Outcomes and Sandline International

Local Dimensions

Chiapas

• complicating the rancher-campesino divide

• pro- and anti-government campesinos

• a religious dimension?

http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=119585&keyword=&phrase=

http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=116905

Local Dimensions

Nigeria• Federalism and the “shallow history of

nationalist construction” (Watts)

• Secessionism and the Biafra example

• Ogoni culture and tradition = territorial claims = threat to central control of oil revenues

http://artactivism.members.gn.apc.org/photos/ogoni.htm

Local Dimensions

Sierra Leone

• kimberlite vs. alluvial diamond mining

• affects character of villages, prospects for stability or perpetual conflict

Kimberlite mining

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/mining.html

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.cranestodaymagazine.com

Alluvial mining

http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/diamonds/images/trommel.jpg

http://www.africa-photo.com/gallery/bolesch/kindersoldaten/page8.htm

Implications of

an alternative framework

• International responsibility

• Local commonalities

• Transnational possibilities

International responsibility

• Dependence on “strategic” minerals

• Propping up warlords through approving sale of national assets

• Depending on warlords for security of transport

Local commonalities

• Secessionist movements are often driven by demands for more local control over resources

• Warlords don’t always become statesmen

• Armies often sell weapons to their “enemies”

Transnational possibilitiespossible solutions to resource scarcity

besides Homer-Dixon’s “social ingenuity”

• Solidarity movements

• Consumer boycotts

• Human-rights activism

http://artactivism.members.gn.apc.org/photos/pinkfairy.htm