Wars of want
It's comforting to be told environmentalists are deluded, but in fact scarce resources are fuelling terrible conflicts
John Gray Tuesday August 21, 2001 The Guardian
According to a growing body of opinion - well represented by Bjorn Lomborg in last week's Guardian - we shouldn't fear too much for the state of the planet. There's nothing wrong with it that technology can't solve. Natural resources are practically inexhaustible. Environmentalists who claim that we're coming up against the limits of the Earth's tolerance are deluded. A magnificent future of unending growth is opening up - if only we can bring ourselves to stop worrying about the environment.
The idea that environmentalists are crying wolf is bound to be popular. Who wants to face the prospect of having to make radical changes in their lives? But the notion that resources are infinite couldn't be more wrong. Shrinking natural resources are a fact - and an increas ingly important cause of war. The combination of worldwide industrialisation and population growth is putting ever more pressure on resources that are unalterably finite. The result is not only the degradation of the planet - including enormous and irreparable damage to other species - but bitter human conflict.
Critics of environmentalism argue that free markets create an incentive for resources to be used efficiently, new technologies to be devised and further resources to be discovered. If this is true, growing resource scarcity is a myth. Let's leave aside the intellectual merits of the anti-environmentalist argument (though I'm pretty sure it's largely tosh). More to the point is how far it is removed from historical realities. Over the past 10 years, the depletion of scarce resources has triggered a major war and aggravated a number of conflicts. There is good reason to think wars of scarcity will become more common.
We have managed to forget that the last big war of the 20th century was fought over control of the Gulf oil supplies. True, there were other reasons for the war, but the decisive factor was the threat to western oil supplies. Without oil, our industrial civilisation soon comes to a halt. The proportion of the world's supply of cheap, conventional oil that lies in the Gulf is growing inexorably as oilfields elsewhere are depleted.
The most critical input to western economies is increasingly located in the world's most conflict-ridden region. This is partly what accounts for American energy policies, which aim to mate rially reduce American dependence on Gulf oil. It is also at the back of the revival of the Great Game in the post-communist countries of central Asia. Today, as they did in the 19th century, the great powers are vying for control of the region's oil. The struggle for energy supplies looks like being one of the dominant themes of this century.
It's not only oil that's becoming a potent factor of dispute. Water shortage underlies some of the worst conflicts. It's one of the issues at stake in the Middle East, and it was a factor in the genocidal war in Rwanda. Rwanda is one of the most water-stressed countries, and in the early 90s it had one of the highest rates of population growth. As a result, per capita food production fell - a fact that undoubtedly worsened the conflict.
It's becoming fashionable in rich countries to deny that resources are limited, but it is a truth well understood in the developing world. In China, it is widely accepted that its most serious long-term problems are pollution, water shortage and population growth. The government recognises that the only solution is to reach a balance between human needs and natural resources. Yet its far-sighted "one-child" policy is attacked relentlessly in the west.
Those who look to technol ogy and free markets to solve environmental problems pay too little attention to huge inequalities in the consumption of resources - or to the inequalities of power that sustain them. The average American or west European consumes about 100 times as much commercially produced energy as an average Bangladeshi. In terms of their impact on the planet, rich countries are far more overpopulated than poor ones.
On the most conservative estimates, world population will increase by more than 2bn during the next 30 or 40 years. If worldwide industrialisation continues to accelerate, the pressures on resources can only be intensified. The rising expectations of billions of humans are on a collision course with growing scarcity in some of the basic necessities of life.
Anti-environmentalists like to think of themselves as sober, practical people, patiently pegging away against the legions of apocalyptic doomsters, but what is most striking is their wild utopianism. They insist that environmental problems can be conjured away by new technology. But technology can just as easily be used to develop new weapons of mass destruction to fight over shrinking resources.
We need to confront the root causes of scarcity - in the distortions of the global free market and overpopulation. If we don't, history suggests that the crisis which anti-environmentalists tell us doesn't exist will be solved by the time-honoured Malthusian expedient of war.
John Gray is professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics