In the past decade, environmental discourse in America has been wholly dominated by climate change. Americans are natural born world police – we cannot help looking for another West, another frontier. At the same time environmental theorists have struggled to define sociology or economics in their work, preferring to make natural resources the unit of analysis. Yet it is agreed that nature is invaluable, without a good justification.

As we have advanced towards urban life, we Americans have craved rural life and frontier life in our own – organic food and flannel shirts, however trendy, are call-backs to that world. But we are not the first urbanites to idealize and romanticize the outdoors. Manifest destiny was colored by a portrait of a grand landscape. For who and what has always been split between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian vision of economic society. The latter camp would see the forest for sawing trees to make houses, clearing land for agriculture and pasture, setting up new postal bureaus; the former would see the same, only much greener and less pavement.

Today in the New York times an op-ed piece pointed out neither Romney nor Santorum have even the slightest idea of either notion, completely lacking a sense of land in American history. In Romney’s case, having grown up in Michigan, the irony of singing ‘America the Beautiful’ at every chance is only too ironic. And Santorum follows the standard of his conservative base by promising to sell off all public land to the private sector, in a race to out-do anyone else’s plan for expansion.

Does this heinous proposal mirror the will of the American people? It is unclear. We are mostly an urban and suburban population now, and our concept of forests, open-space, and frontier are mostly dominated by forgotten ideals on one side, and polemical economic debates about labor and industry on the other. These have very little to do with the economic, developmental, or social reality of rural-urban geography. It is rarely in a company’s interest to build far away from cities and in uncleared land unless it is an extractive or polluting industry with no barriers to land use. Santorum’s ugly, thoughtless plan would certainly decimate the remaining pristine land we have left.

In the past several years, civil society in America has reawakened. There has been a massive shift in possibilities for renewal since the last major dip in our economy in the 1980s. While our global outlook is commendable, we must return to protecting our own backyard. It is folly to think that our greatest virtues are in protecting people elsewhere in the world without first taking stock of our own. As Egan points out in the article,

Gifford Pinchot, was the founder of the modern Forest Service. Pinchot was a rich man who spent his life advocating for places where “the little man,” in his parlance, would be king.

From a point of view where society’s merit is measured by how it treats its poor and vulnerable, protecting the environment is inherently not a matter of reducing pollution and protecting species in every which way possible, but negotiating development’s windy road to preserve what is possible to preserve for future generations of people, so that people have space to return to and seek out in times of need, not simply to fuel the middle class dream of owning land.

Today, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, President Obama cautiously declared, “we have overcome slavery and civil war, bread lines and fascism, recessions and riots, communism, and yes, we will survive terrorism.” Yet the psychological scars left from that day continue to split the country. Here I argue that beyond political malfeasance, understanding the realities of war can help us transcend this challenge.

Hinduism offers the oldest definition of just versus unjust war, one fought in the open, the other in secrete. The road to Iraq was paved with far more duplicity, conspiracy, and manipulation than Afghanistan. This is further emphasized by the military differences between the two wars: in Iraq, the major oversight of ignoring social relations in the country may have cost America a swift victory. Afghanistan, by comparison, was never an easy target because of its geography.

Yet the tangled intrigue of the Iraq invasion makes this kind of comparison difficult to the average person. For one thing it is too easy to focus attention on fantastic aspects – like WMDs – and ignore a simple interpretation.

George Tenet, then director of the CIA, has been criticized heavily for his famous remark to President Bush that the case for the existence of WMDs in Iraq was a “grandslam”. From the beginning the CIA and Pentagon fully denied the existence of any connections between Saddam Hussien and Al Qaeda, which was the original motive offered for invading Iraq. Rumsfeld and Cheney ignored this and ordered their own private investigation; they cherry picked allegations from tortured prisoners; at the time of invasion, 70 percent of Americans believed there in fact was a connection. Only in this climate of fear could the American public have been led into a fallacious war.

Fog of war, fear and uncertainty have immense effects on our well being and cohesion. Consider the opportunity costs of Iraq – what if that money and attention were spent domestically, would we have slipped into the current depression and unprecedented political bickering in Congress we now have? The failure to bring public figures to justice, despite such incredible evidence of their malfeasance, has likely reduced our sense of connection and trust in ourselves. Significantly, many schools have recanted from teaching civics course since 9/11. It is now essential to rediscover the virtuous image of America lost in past years. Some might shy away from discussing our role in war both just and unjust. But as the invasion of Mexico led Henry Thoreau to say, in 1940, “I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, neat at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”

Even today physical geography is a key factor determining military games. 

In the west, at an age when most security threats are theoretical, it is easy to lose an understanding of what war is. Killer drones and terrorism dominate recent analysis of war in the US, but the classic determinants of military strength have not changed. Geographical scale, terrain, and rural landscape still determine the outcome of many modern conflicts. As political science professor Stathis N. Kalyvas at Yale has argued, we are subject to an urban bias when it comes to reporting on and appreciating this fact.

In Vietnam the persistence of guerrilla warfare is forever associated with the image of the jungle. Two agents of the U.S. government offered their superiors two conflicting reports about the progress of the war – one positive and one negative – and their explanations were clear: the former had focused on urban informants, whereas the latter had gathered information from rural hamlets.

Likewise today in Afghanistan the Taliban is impervious to attack, nestled in the Kush mountains. Rough terrain makes a landscape more impassable, the poppy fields more undetectable. But the true power of rebellion lies in spatial scale. Insurgency is unique from terrorism because the insurgents control or draw support from the local population, whose culture is relatively unaffected by the national capital. It is nearly impossible to cast a full net of psychological control on the whole population unless we were to come at them with ten times the normal troop size (which in Afghanistan is 100,000×10).

When America entered Afghanistan, its objective was to root out Al Queda. Intelligence has helped bring that victory within reach. For all the criticism of America’s world policing as the vernier of democracy, the Weekly Standard reports that a UN report last year found 76% of all civilian deaths were attributable to the Taliban. America’s impact is increasingly ambiguous. War continues for the Afghan people, though many are happy for America to leave them to their own devices. One wonders how the exit from Afghanistan will be portrayed. Will we declare victory, or acknowledge the ambiguity of our exit?

With the bad news coming out of the Sahel, donors are right to balk at current aid methods (see BBC News, July 19th: ‘David Cameron defends UK’s foreign aid program’). Why didn’t the people of the Sahel achieve a radical change to their lifestyle and situation fifteen years after the last major famine? The answer may with economists like Hernand de Soto, who has been more associated with urban issues than food security. For the past fifty years, conventional development, from the World Bank to its critics, has attempted to create food security, stability, and growth by assisting rural places. Yet agrarian households tend diversify and migrate away from agriculture to escape subsistence vulnerability over time, such that short run cycles of vulnerability can be a double-edged sword, stimulating adaptation. Outdated explanations of vulnerability based on low aid and colonialism ignore the stunting role of local governments in this typical process. Examining the issue necessitates reassessing what Amartya Sen tried to argue earlier, that access and capacity cannot be created by control. 

The Land Debate: Seeing through the frontier

Land law is a naturally powerful tool. Most problematic developing countries exist in between the rural spectrum of frontier and urban, and evidence shows that urbanization and wealth are very closely linked. Over time it is natural for societies to cluster, but the only way such a thing is possible is under some form of liberal, open development. The spatially explicit dimensions of development are misunderstood. In human geography the design and synthesis of multiple case studies is always a primary concern. Because indigenous people are often the test for a country’s quality of human and land rights, In recent years environmental scholarship has drawn mostly from ‘natural laboratories’ of frontier environments rather than the real agricultural landscapes occupied by most peasants. In the frontier, life is quick, and ecology rules. Yet this kind of system characterizes the Amazon better, for example, than Sub Saharan Africa, which is densely settled, and where resourceful land is suddenly, increasingly insufficient. For example Renault said in 1998 that Nigeria’s land scarcity was totally unprecedented.

An 8000 year old settled agrarian landscape, the Ethiopian Highlands have one of the densest rural populations in the world

Over time population-land pressures, movement, transition, and other pressures drive agrarian change. For the past 10,000 years most societies have surmounted spatial resource challenges, Billsborrow and Okoth-Ogendo (2002) note. Synthesizing several classic economic thinkers into one model describe four reasonable, spatially explicit population-territorial ‘phases’ in this development. (1) At low rural densities people can negotiate land tenure; (2) they then push into the frontier or adversely posses more land; (3) once land is truly inaccessible, they come to intensify labor and change technology; (4) and finally they change reproductive behavior or migrate. Of course these ‘phases’ can overlap. For example because peasants don’t want to face drudgery, they will avoid migrating initially, but will do so to avoid conflict with their own kind.

Later stages are less amenable to human control, at higher scales, and the changes associated with them are more aggregate, cultural, and almost universal. While settled, dense societies are more settled and stable, these transitions are increasingly risky. A good example from food security: it is now recognized that the devastation of drought depends directly on the degree to which people’s coping strategies have been whittled away over time (Reynolds 2007). Peasants are generally efficient at spreading risk in the transition period by diversifying into petty trades and labors or sharing (Barret and Biggs 2001) – and research now shows that Africans acquired half their income off farm in direct response to vulnerability (Bryceson 2002). This is a step by step process of adjusting livelihoods and applying energy and capital in new directions, something often credited to women, who take the most care in ensuring a diversified portfolio for their families. Land, above all, represents the crucial investment and question of whether a family will begin to migrate elsewhere or maintain ties at home.

Following a decade of attempts to protect rural land owners from market abuses, Pauline Peters argues that it was easy for anthropologists to rebuff economic models of land, seeing customary land as ‘unproductive’ and aiming to create markets in rural places with no infrastructure. However antithetically the ‘new’ view privileges negotiation and flexibility of land as a solution for rural problems, ignoring evidence of vulnerability in the form of land conflict. In the process of intellectual tug of war between the World Bank and its critics, the Bank economists could utilize empirical evidence and models that their critics often did not. As for contemporary environmental scholarship, it is still stuck on Hardin’s problem which “has no technical solution.” We now know resources are not absolutely finite but depend on human use. But disciplines which are not “rural per se” but nevertheless engaged in rural issues have been vocal and influential in rural policy. Alternative advocates often call for small and local solutions to vulnerability. While raising awareness of anthropological details, which are important, in application small is analogous to ineffective, drawing attention away from more prominent issues of law and rights which, Peters argues, environmental theories tend to treat idealistically.

Demographic Vulnerability: a more serious problem?

Human-environmental dynamics tend towards equilibrium historically, mediated by shocks. These cannot be completely avoided, but buffered by recovery and adaptation strategies. The important thing is that these strategies are outside of the realm of human control, but that the means to buffer them – for example negotiating the end to a conflict, or alternatively taking more land – are something governments can. Secondly while environmental, market or political shocks are short term, occurring at a scale of decades, demographic systems operate on orders of centuries or even millennium. So despite misgivings about neoliberalism, there can be little doubt that conservative governments can negatively impede their people’s normal abilities in dramatic ways. Consider three

Nature Magazine writes in 2006, "Climate Change not Linked to African Wars". Surprisingly this idea is still very popular. Statistical studies have emphasized the presence of rebel-funding exploitative resources, land-conflict, and factors like GDP and population.

cases, Rwanda, with its genocide-dominated narrative in action; Ethiopia, a a military government whose laws have been taken from former authoritarian and royal sources; and Somalia, dominated by tribal militants. All have one thing in common: they prevent people from moving, economically changing, and urbanizing directly.

Just prior to the genocide of 1994 land availability was stressed to the maximum. Men had begun demanding land from their fathers before it was given – a large taboo indicating social stress. Here, spontaneous demographic changes expected from this kind of density had begun, as Olson (1995) showed, many people began delaying marriage, though children continued marrying outside of the church, disobeying their parents. And after the genocide, evidence mounted showing a practical land-class war which targeted the middle class. Whether one believes in determinism of any sort or not, it is impossible to ignore the existence of resource stress in Rwanda. Econometrics can be deadly. Today, Rwanda remains one of the least urbanized, least diversified economies in the world largely due to its government’s control of people’s land rights. Ethiopia maintains state ownership of land and therefore people are not legally allowed to sell and buy it. Along with exclusive urban planning, this system makes Ethiopia one of the least urbanized, largest peasant economies in the world (Ellis 2007). In Rwanda too, land cannot be sold below a certain minimum to prevent ‘desperation sales’. In both cases cities are exclusive to settlers. As for the militants of Somalia – they block change more directly, going so far as to prevent their own people from fleeing during famine.

Since in 2007 the majority of the world’s population became urban, making it apparent that informal urbanization with or sans growth, can accelerate sustainability (see previous post: Slum Luck). Hernand de Soto (2000) has called on governments to defend property rights and enable access to cities, and ability to possess and sell agrarian land.  His proposal serves as a compliment to martya Sen’s famous ‘right to develop’ (Sen 1999).

Erroneous Conservatism 

What is particularly concerning about governments like Ethiopia’s or Rwanda’s is how one finds the footprint of misinformed, quazi-environmental science in their justifications for their policies – those same ideas which derive from confusing the frontier phase and the post-frontier phase, and placing all blame on colonialism. At a conference held in Ethiopia by the Global Mountain Program, to promote rural-urban linkages to alleviate poverty, these biases were evident in comments made by Ethiopia’s minister of environment,

[The highlands] are poor because they have been the most defiant and thus the last parts of Africa to try to come to terms with this globalizing Western Europe world… they are still the major centers of crop domestication and genetic diversity. It is only their defensive interaction with the outside world from a position of disadvantage that has reduced them to poverty (Gete 2008).

As Alex de Wall wrote, “Accountability, even after [an estimated] 70,000 ‘deaths related to a famine in Sudan in 1998, took the “‘soft’ form of internal agency evaluations and lesson-learning workshops” (IRIN 2010).Caught up in their own self-vindication, many in the west might fail to appreciate this deeper layer of fallacy. Popular strategies up until today, encouraged in the UN through the Millennium Development Goals by Jeffrey Sachs (2005), have probably not changed much from their poorest-only focus. One reason may be a general reticence to discuss population pressures. Another might be broad distrust of neoliberal economics. One does not need to believe in free market to at least support de Soto’s enthusiasm for economic rights. Unleashing people’s adaptive capacity requires addressing broad institutional and economic dynamics, which new definitions of adaptation suggest can be achieved by supporting connections between multiple wealth classes and peoples. It remains to be seen whether the current crisis entrench rural poverty bias or open the door to the sharper blade of legal reform, political pressure, and development.

Bibliography

Analysis: What is Famine? IRIN humanitarian news and analysis. N.p., July 20 2010. Web. 13 May 2010.

Barret, Christopher, Thomas Reardon and Patrick Webb. “Nonfarm Income Diversification and Household Livelihood Strategies in Rural Africa: Concepts, Dynamics, and Policy Implications.” Food Policy, 26.4 (2001).

Billsborrow, RE and HWO Okoth-Ogendo. “Population-driven changes in land use in developing countries.” Ambio 21 (1992): 37-45.

Bryceson, DF. “The Scramble in Africa: Reorienting Rural Livelihoods.” World Development 30.5 (2002): 725-39.Bryceson, DF et. al. “Critical Commentary. The World Development Report 2009”. Urban Studies 46.4 (2009): 723-73

Corebridge, Stuart and Gareth A. Jones 2010. “The Continuing Debate About Urban Bias: The Thesis, Its Critics, Its Influences, and Implications Poverty Reduction.” Progress in Development Studies. 10.1 (2010): 1-18.

De Soto, Hernand. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. USA: Perseus Books, 2000.

Ellis, Frank and Stephen Biggs. “Evolving Themes in Rural Development 1950s -2000s”. Development Policy Review 19.4 (2001): 437-448.

Gete, Zeleke, Peter Trutmann, and Aster Denekew. Proceedings of a planning workshop on  Thematic Research Area of the Global Mountain Program (GMP) August 29-30, 2006. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Martine, George et. al. The New Global Frontier: Urbanization, Poverty and Environment in the 21st Century. UK: Earthscan, 2008.

Reynolds, James., et. al. “Global Desertification: Building a Science for Dryland Development.” Science 316 (2007): 847-851.

Sen,Amartya Kumar. Development as Freedom. New York: Random House, 1999.

Sachs, Jeffrey. The End of Poverty: Economic possibilities for out time. New York: Penguin Books (2005).World Bank 2009, World Development Report 2009: Reshaping economic geography

Bronowski, in The Ascent of Man, says thinking is cheap, action is valuable. Are we recycling the same old questions about our world and economy, in the climate debate?

Science and Awareness

Since 2007 the fourth IPCC Report has established unequivocally that climate change is real. Now the immediate questions arising are, how can we mitigate and adapt; what are the limits of collective action and responsibility; and what will happen? It has been popular to take the existence of global warming alone as enough of a reason to act. But skepticism, even if it is not directly aimed at climate science, is reasonable when many continue advocating unready technologies under the premise of political will, or when experts fail to clarify to the public and each other that the primary strategic issues for most third world peasants is not climate change itself. Yet too often activists will identify unwillingness in environmental issues as a sign of pure ignorance and assign environmental science – a problem based discipline – a superior status. In a post-environmental era, activists must incorporate the human element into their argument, recognizing the intuition of the public and designing better arguments to woo them. One step may be assessing whether, after the 4th Report, are we still asking the right questions?

Like most sciences, climate science ascended from every day interest in the world. In the enlightenment, the study of how climate change over long periods was mainly a gentlemanly pursuit, followed and complimented by other geologies, such as trying to explain the last ice age. But lay people have always had an intuitive sense of nature too, which is not clearly cut from expert’s. Children growing up outside ponder the small differences in seasons, and farmers attach vague laws to weather too. Nature has been romanticized by writers from Coleridge to Kerouac, and taken seriously by Rachel Carson. William Cronin (a man who was recently at the center of the labor protests in Wisconsin), has identified a particular problem in American ecology, an idealization of the pristine frontier before expansion, which plays into a general idealization of nature. For example one Swedish author shows, through media uses of glaciers, they once advertised skiing vacations and now most often are used for climate change awareness, a shift from persistence to ambiguity. Public perception of the environment often overlaps with either vague or biased portraits of nature from the science world, which have less to do with science than a notion of burden and fate. After the 2004 tsunami, the Guardian reported

The tsunami underlines the threat posed by climate change, Britain’s top scientist said today. Sir David King…said: “what is happening in the Indian Ocean underlines the importance of earth’s system to our ability to live safely.

A reader of this might think about the tsunami as being somehow tied to the climate change issue. One might say from the perspective of environmental security there indeed is little difference. But when one considers how many people have been quoted on the salience of climate change, efforts at raising awareness on it may lose power if used too often. More important than highlighting our vulnerability is to delve more deeply into the next-step questions still left unanswered.

For example, it has been pointed out that climate change will open up many new agricultural frontiers by pushing the climatic envelope north. Certain countries will actually benefit in the long run – Canada and Russia, for example, with their massive unused landscapes. Too, with a certain built-in amount of climate change, countries can do very little to prevent some flooding of their shorelines. However, many concerned scientists implicitly seek to aid vulnerable poor in other nations, such as dry land people. And yet, one notices that this sense of responsibility is rarely invoked to justify domestic (US) action when speaking to the public. Perhaps this is because the average American is self-concerned. Or else, and more likely, because the arguments for aiding third world people because of climate change are less persuasive – only more current – than the old aid arguments themselves, a whole new subject.

The Next Stage of Debate 

It is wrong to consider climate change policy skepticism as simple foot-dragging. As late as the 1950s, when scientists began observing global climate change using weather balloons, climate change was not political.Manly believed, like ozone depletion that it would be a simple-fix. When it became clear how immense the costs were, the tone of politicians and the public changed. Dunlap and McCright say,

…partisan differences in support for environmental protection among the general public remained relatively modest until recently. For example, from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, support for increased spending on environmental protection by self-identified Democrats was typically only around 10 percent higher than for self-identified Republicans. The gap began to widen in the late 1990s, likely reflecting voters’ tendency to follow cues from party leaders and political pundits.

The public on both sides of the debate, through the media, contrives any idea useful to support its interests. Where is the role of science? The IPCC Report demonstrated both the potential persuasion of an argument formulated through collective action, and the time required to produce it. But when a moderate conservative expressed doubts about the economic feasibility of climate action, it is not purely based on skepticism of the science. If the same rigor of natural sciences were applied to closing the gap between economic strategies we might come much closer to real action. However to date, it has been far too popular among environmentalists to advocate quick action on the basis of the impending costs, without considering the full picture.