[p2p-research] Fwd: ZNet Daily Commentary: Climate and Political Tipping Points By Ted Glick

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/21/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Subject: ZNet Daily Commentary: Climate and Political Tipping Points By Ted Glick
> To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com

> Climate and Political Tipping Points

> Ted Glick's ZSpace Page /  	ZSpace

>  An article by Stephan Faris in the April, 2007 issue of The Atlantic, "The Real Roots of Darfur," explained the connection between climate change and the war in Darfur:
>
>  "The fighting in Darfur is usually described as racially motivated, pitting mounted Arabs against black rebels and civilians. But the fault lines have their origins in another distinction, between settled farmers and nomadic herders fighting over failing lands. . . Until the rains began to fail, the (nomadic herders) lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest. But with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land-even fallow land-for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. . .In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs began banding together to wrest their own (tribal lands) from the black farmers. . .
>
>  "Why did Darfur's lands fail? For much of the 1980s and '90s, environmental degradation in Darfur and other parts of the Sahel was blamed on the inhabitants. But by the time of the Darfur conflict four years ago, scientists had identified another cause. Climate scientists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. 'This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,' says Columbia University's Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.
>

To put this in a much longer range historical perspective, the
distinction between  "cooperator" and "dominator" societies follows a
division between agrarian and pastoral/nomadic economies.  Some
theorists like Oppenheimer trace the origins of the state to conquest
of agrarian populations by patriarchal, warlike pastoral nomads.  A
relatively recent historical example is the conquest of the eastern
Slavs of Kievan Rus by the Mongols.  The cruel, authoritarian
political culture of modern Russia is a direct outgrowth of the
brutality they experienced under the Tatar yoke.

And the impetus the original desertification of North Africa and
Central Asia gave to the growth of nomadic cultures on marginal land
may have been a historical tipping point towards authoritarianism and
patriarchy.  The desertification of Central Asia led to a long-term
outflow of pastoral nomads from the steppes, overrunning the settled
agrarian populations to the south and west and promoting the rise of
extractive states and authoritarian cultural values.  Through a chain
reaction, the threat of conquest led to the adoption of militaristic
values by threatened populations.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html