Conservation 2.0: Environmental Security - Ending the "War on Terra"
By Steven J. McCormick
President and CEO, The Nature Conservancy
The lessons from Easter Island several centuries ago are clear again today: When nature stops providing, people start fighting.
Gaza, Rwanda and Chiapas are all places where unremitting natural resource shortages and extreme environmental degradation have helped stitch a tapestry of violence, poverty and despair. And in Darfur, Sudan, and neighboring Chad, drought and deforestation have led to migration, resource scarcity and genocide.
While nature is not the immediate cause of war or human cruelty, environmental degradation — a “war on terra,” if you will — provides fertile ground for instability and conflict. Because wise management of natural resources improves the prospects for peace, conservation must become a pillar of U.S. national security policies. What should we do?
- The United States should call for the creation of a new global scientific body dedicated to producing timely and policy-relevant findings on the links among nature, human well-being and international security. The International Panel on Climate Change has helped us to understand climate changes’ causes, impacts and potential solutions far better today than we did a decade ago.
- The United States also needs to address the climate crisis, this century's number one threat to the natural world. As a first step, the new Congress should enact reasonable, mandatory domestic greenhouse-gas emission limits.
- Traditional measures of gross national product (GNP) fail to capture the value of nature to people. How nations steward their "natural capital" must become a part of national GNP figures.
- Finally, the United States needs to substantially increase its efforts to help poor nations safeguard the planet's natural capital. Since the late 1980’s, U.S. funding for global conservation has declined markedly as a percentage of U.S. foreign aid.
At no time in recent memory has the United States faced so many urgent threats, from Afghanistan to Iraq, the greater Middle East and elsewhere. We can reduce the risk of violence and conflict around the world — but only if we match our resolve in the war on terror with an understanding of and commitment to ending the "War on Terra."
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Comments: 6
As long as religions are allowed to propose holy wars against others and 'God's will' is used as the excuse for natural occurrences, there will continue to be incredible slaughters of humans.
Backward, poorly educated conservative Mullahs were sent world wide by rich potentates in the Arab world in order to preserve their own strangle hold on the wealth of their own nations.
Even our own Air Force was being invaded from within by a Christian warlord mentality.
We must move beyond this idea that God appoints man to wage His wars. As a colleague of mine once pointed out 'If you are talking to God, He is probably listening. If God is talking to you, you are probably crazy.'
And what does that say about our current fearless leader?
There is a small but significant segment of the Christian religion that believes in the coming Armageddon, return of Christ and Rapture so strongly that any attempt to preserve the earth is a waste of time. It's just a temporary place to hang our hat until the REAL, immortal life begins, strumming a harp on a cloud in Heaven.
These are the people I fear and loathe the most, because they have no interest in the environment, global warming, depletion of resources...or world peace. The more the Middle East is stirred up, the better. Some of them would even like to help God along by escalating the conflicts there. Is our president one of them?
There must be a better way to deal with Africa. I happen to be an animal lover and wait everyday to hear that the mountain gorillas are now extinct... not to mention all the lesser, but still cherished forms of live that share the earth with us. We need a global panel!!
easter island. In my viewpoint, based on reading the book "Collapse" by jared Diamond, the moral of Easter island is that if you destroy the living systems on which your survival depends, the only thing left to eat may be other humans. And you will eat them if you get Hungry enough. I am sorry if that is a bit gross, but I think that the lesson of Easter Island is an important one. Diamond is brilliant in his anyalysis. He notes that some analysts have pooh-poohed his theory of how it went down on Easter, saying that humans are not crazy enough to cut down the last tree on an island. He replies- sure they are. By the time you get to the last tree, trees are no longer economically significant items. And if you suspect that someone else is going to cut it down if you do not, you cut it down and use it for firewood, or for making spears to kill the other people who wanted to cut it down.
I'm not sure that our attitude towards petroleum is that different. Our attitude towards global warming is not that different either. Kyoto failed not because global warming is imaginary, but because we are unwilling to make a sacrifice before others make one first. That is not science, it is nationalistic economics.