Term Paper on "Conflict of Resources"

Term Paper 9 pages (3478 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

War for Resources

Chris Hedges (2001), a war correspondent, argues that war has continued through the ages because many human beings the world over live in a state of spiritual emptiness. Their lives lack meaning and purpose. And because of this emptiness, which they long to fill, they accept the myth that war is something grand and noble. There is a cause to uphold that is worth dying for. Without belief in this myth, nobody would join the military to do "the important work of defending our great country."

Without the myth that if threatened by an enemy, we have every right to kill, and if we are injured or die, our sacrifice is an honor and a privilege because it was for a just and noble cause, the government couldn't get Congress to appropriate the funds to back wars, or mount a campaign in the media to gain the support of people at home. No waves of nationalism would suddenly sweep over the people.

Others claim that war is "human nature" and human beings are predisposed genetically to violence. But if war is in our genes, why are not all of us always at war? How do some countries consistently stay out of wars? How do certain groups of people (Quakers, for example) live their whole life long without ever raising an aggressive hand to anyone? Peaceable cultures do exist, so not all human beings are aggressive. Aggression is not biologically determined; if it were, everybody would be aggressive. From their cultural environments, human beings learn to see violence as a way to solve problems.

There are many ways to look at war and many theories about why it continues. But until recently, not much attention was given to links between aggression and environmental stress; however, a large body of literature is now growing, which shows that damage to the environment often leads to conflict over resources and then to war.

Of course, everyone already knows that war damages the environment, particularly today. Because conflicts are not fought like they used to be -- in specific combat zones -- they get played out in everyday life where the consequences for civilians are devastating. In Iraq, for example, the sewage treatment equipment in Baghdad stopped working because the electricity went out after the invasion. Raw sewage and industrial waste went into the Tigris River and resulted in at least 200 hepatitis E cases and 5 deaths. Iraq's state of health, which was once robust, is now comparable to Yemen's and Afghanistan's with high infant mortality rates and reduced access to clean water (Brown, 2004). Moreover, "the military is the single largest polluter and waster of resources in the world. Acording to the Research Institute for Peace Policy in Starnberg, Germany, it is estimated that 10 to 30% of all global environmental degradation is due to military related activity" (Rosenberg, 2003).

Although we have known for a long time that war leads to environmental degradation, we have only recently become aware that environmental stress leads to war. Richard Matthew, an associate professor of international and environmental politics at the University of California, Irvine, argues in Conserving the Peace (2004) that the links between environmental stress and conflict can be distilled into four categories: unsustainable use of resources, inequitable access to resources, use of resources to finance conflict, and incompatible uses leading to conflict. These will be discussed in this essay.

Unsustainable Use of Resources

Coles (2004) puts it this way: "Most warfare may be blamed on a scarcity of limited resources, a trend that will continue to worsen unless steps are taken now" (p. 6). He argues that the only way to eliminate warfare is to provide adequate resources for everyone living on the planet and points out that many links exist between warfare and available resources. For example, he states, "it has long been documented that too many unmarried men in a society can lead to conflict (p. 6)." When resources are overexploited, lack of employment will make men too poor to support wives. Moreover, so-called ideological wars occur primarily in places with long histories of ecological stress and degradation -- in the Balkans, for example, the Middle East, Mexico, and Peru. These are places where resources are all used up, and according to Coles, this makes these places hotbeds of societal stress, poverty and conflict.

When a resource such as oil, for instance, is overused and in danger of running out, it can become the focus of foreign policy and a reason for going to war. Since the beginning of the twentieth century oil has been central to military power and to life in modern industrial society. A significant element of the U.S. power position relative to its rivals is having ample domestic oil supplies and control over access to foreign oil reserves (Painter, 2006). Petroleum access is a major foreign policy objective and has been since the 1920s. U.S. policy makers have worked consistently to help oil companies get and keep control of foreign oil reserves.

In his famous "Crisis of Confidence" speech, President Jimmy Carter warned (in 1978) that long-term energy dependence on foreign oil would be "one of constant conflict, ending in chaos" (Carter cited in "Breaking the Habit," 2006). As the appetite for oil has grown, so have U.S. exertions in the Middle East. Donald Rumsfeld argues that the U.S. now has no choice but to transform the politics, culture, and mores of the Islamic world. By a logical extension of this line of thought, the war (for control and access to oil) will not end with Iraq.

Big countries that are rich in natural resources (like oil, gold, cobalt, diamonds, coal) may become military targets. "Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged" ("The New American Century," 2004). The idea that Islamic radicals could pose a serious threat to our way of life, for example, would be preposterous if Americans were not addicted to oil and reliant on the Middle East to provide it. Take away the insatiable craving for oil, and "the notion that the United States should take it upon itself to forcibly change their way of life becomes absurd" (p. 11).

Inequitable Access to Resources

In Rwanda just before the war there started, groups of poor people were being forced to move onto land where the soil was marginal and the people could not sustain themselves. Farming households were frequently "resettled" from fertile flatland areas onto small plots of land that sloped steeply.

With a fast-growing population, plus conflict over farmland, the inequity was a "formula for disaster." From April until August, 1994, about one million Rwandans were massacred. Two million more fled their homes as refugees. The media presented the genocide as ethnic conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, but James Gasana (Rwandan minister of agriculture and environment) argues that "inequitable access to farmland based on ethnicity and resulting erosion in that mountainous country played a crucial role in the struggle. The ethnic tension was the fuse, not the explosive." (Global Resources: Abuse, Scarcity and Insecurity, 2004).

It's not just farmland where inequities abound. it's forest too:

According to the World Bank, forests worldwide contribute directly to the livelihood of 90% of the world's poorest 1.2 billion people, and where rules governing these people's access to nearby forests are unclear -- for example, when people, who have for generations collected firewood or fruit from a nearby forest, are confronted with new laws that ignore that traditional access -- researchers have found serious threats to health and stability (Global Resources, 2004).

In India thousands of people have been dispossessed by development projects. Big dams, for example, have forced between 33 million and 55 million people in India to leave their homes.

In the past two years there have been a series of incidents in which police have opened fire on peaceful protesters, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments -- by dams, mines, steel plants and other 'development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence (the New American Century, 2004).

Around the world incoherent resource management comes just before the violence erupts. In Afghanistan, for example, CARE International has warned that the country's currently unstable atmosphere is largely based on unregulated drilling of deep wells. Rich people can afford to drill deeper wells. When they draw water, the aquifer level goes lower -- below the reach of the shallower wells poor people drill and which they depend upon for their water. Unregulated drilling makes the drought of the past several years worse too. But perhaps the greatest… READ MORE

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