To take an example from last year, in an op-ed on Iraq in the LA Times (I can't find an online link, so this quote is from my copy), he talked about the decline of the Fertile Crescent (what we now call the Middle East and the cradle of civilization) and The erosion of Civilization
So how did Fertile Crescent peoples lose that big lead? The short answer is ecological suicide: They inadvertently destroyed the environmental resources on which their society depended. Just as the region's rise wasn't due to any special virtue of its people, its fall wasn't due to any special blindness on their part. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in an extremely fragile environment, which, because of its low rainfall, was particularly susceptible to deforestation.When you clear a forest in a high-rainfall tropical area, new trees grow up to a height of 15 feet within a year; in a dry area like the Fertile Crescent, regeneration is much slower. And when you add to the equation grazing by sheep and goats, new trees stand little chance. Deforestation led to soil erosion, and irrigation agriculture led to salinization, both by releasing salt buried deep in the ground and by adding salt through irrigation water. After centuries of degradation, areas of Iraq that formerly supported productive irrigation agriculture are today salt pans where nothing grows.
Once the Fertile Crescent began to decline for those environmental reasons, hostile neighbors helped speed the process. The original flow of power westward from the Fertile Crescent reversed in 330 BC, when the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great advanced eastward to conquer the eastern Mediterranean. In the Middle Ages, Mongol invaders from Central Asia destroyed Iraq's irrigation systems. After World War I, England and France dismembered the Ottoman Empire and carved out Iraq and other states as pawns of European colonial interests. As the end product of this history, the former world center of wealth, power and civilization is now poor in everything except oil. Iraq's leaders ensured that few benefits of that oil reached their people.
Iraq's decline holds a broader significance. Many other countries today face similar crippling environmental problems, including the deforestation, overgrazing, erosion and salinization that brought down the Fertile Crescent. Other countries already crippled or nearly so by such problems include Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Indonesia.
You may well detect a similarity between this list of looming environmental disasters and the CIA's list of overseas trouble spots, places prone to civil wars and violent regime changes ? places to which we often end up dispatching U.S. troops. Those two lists are related by cause and effect. When environmental damage makes people economically desperate, they are likely to suffer from poor health and short life spans, blame their governments, kill each other, end up with crazy leaders and seek to immigrate illegally to more favored landscapes.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Damn, Koranteng, there's a lot going on here - the writing is excellent and the information fascinating. The realtionship between environmental degradation and political decline/collapse makes an awful lot of sense.
I also agree that our media tends toward solipsism, though not more than most and certainly less than some.
I fear "we" (the West) sees parts of the world as beyond hope, as sinkholes beyond redemption - it is perhaps related to a "help those who can help themselves" mentality.
Thanks!
2 - Mac Diva
There are two solutions to Haiti's debacle. The first is immigration. That is what really frightens Americans, Koranteng. Though the country has absorbed millions of immigrants from Europe, an increasing number of Americans want to end immigration now that the color of most immigrants skin is darker than olive. The second solution is, of course, for France to pay Haitians the millions in reparations it owes them. That is what really frightens the French. I wish I could say I believe either solution will occur in my life time, but I don't.