In 2004, US Pentagon defense adviser
Andrew Marshall, predicted that “abrupt climate change could bring the planet
to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and
secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies.” Christian Parenti, the
author of “Tropic of Chaos”, says that climate change is causing violence
around the world right now, particularly in the global South. The book “looks
at the intersection of the legacy of cold war militarism, free market economic
restructuring and the onset of anthropogenic climate change”

By RP Siegel in Triple Pundit (22
September 2011):

For years, the Pentagon has been
saying that climate change is perhaps the biggest threat to American security
of all. Back in 2004, a report commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew
Marshall, the man behind the restructuring of the US military under Donald
Rumsfeld, predicted that “abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the
edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure
dwindling food, water and energy supplies.” The report went on to declare that
the threat to global stability posed by climate change was indeed greater than
that of terrorism.

Ironically, while climate change
denial seems to be a communal oath among right wing politicians, folks in the
military that they so staunchly support, are busy preparing for it, both
strategically and tactically. Retired Rear Admiral Dennis McGinn  has called climate change a threat
multiplier.

Most of the coverage of the
subject has focused on natural forces, not military ones as a threat to our
continued existence. Should we be concerned about this? Will the Pentagon’s
prediction come true?

According to Christian Parenti,
the author of the newly released book Tropic of Chaos, it already has. Parenti
says that climate change is causing violence around the world right now,
particularly in the global South. The book “looks at the intersection of the
legacy of cold war militarism, free market economic restructuring and the onset
of anthropogenic climate change” and traces how these factors, with particular
emphasis on the latter as a kind of socio-economic last straw, create the
conditions for increased civil war, religious war, banditry and increased
violence. He suggests the best way to deal with this violence is to mitigate
the exacerbating condition.

The book opens with the death of
a Kenyan tribesman named Ekaru Loruman who is killed in a cattle raid in the
midst of a severe drought. Cattle raids are not unusual among the Turkana
people, in fact they have been going on for generations. But Parenti sees
deeper forces at work.

…perhaps Ekaru was killed by
forces yet larger, forces transcending the specifics of this regional drought,
this raid, this geography, and the Nilotic cattle cultures. To my mind, while
walking through the desert among the Turkana warriors scanning the Karasuk
hills for the Pokot war party, it seemed clear that Ekaru’s death was caused by
the most colossal set of events in human history: the catastrophic convergence
of poverty, violence, and climate change. This book is an attempt to understand
the death of Ekaru Loruman, and so many others like him, through the lens of
this catastrophic convergence.

This line of reasoning reminds me
of the correlation between the increase in severe storm activity and warmer
ocean temperatures. While it is impossible to blame any given storm on the
changing climate and the anthropogenic activity responsible for it, the trend
is clear: deadly storms are on the increase, as are floods and droughts and
other extreme weather events.

Likewise, it might be difficult
to pin the blame for the death of Ekaru Loruman specifically on climate change,
though this doesn’t stop  Parenti from
suggesting it. It was clearly a significant contributing factor, as it was in
countless other examples, which can be tallied, in a statistical sense, to
support Parenti’s assertion.

Drought, floods, food shortages,
refugees have all put enormous stress on situations that in many cases were
already stressed with the result that the breaking point has or will soon be
reached.

Parenti writes in TomDispatch,
“Get used to it.  Food, weather,
upheaval, and war.  Those are likely to
be in the headlines not only for decades to come, but tied together in all
sorts of complicated and unsettling ways.
Extreme weather and increasingly severe droughts, whether in Texas,
China, or Somalia; crops burned to a frizzle or obliterated in some other
fashion; starving people desperately on the move; incipient resource wars; and
a world in which the basics of everyday life are increasingly beyond the buying
power of tens of millions, if not billions of the poor — that’s a recipe for
our future.  Unfortunately, it’s also
increasingly the present, as grain crops fail in various global breadbaskets
and food prices soar.”

The book goes on to discuss the
militaristic response that many major powers including our own have taken, such
as  securing their borders or
counter-insurgency operations, which he argues are doomed to fail. Instead,
says Parenti, we should focus our efforts on learning to live within the limits
of the planet. Sounds like something I might have said myself a time or two.

RP Siegel is the co-author of the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first
in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including
energy, food, and water.  Like airplanes,
we all leave behind a vapor trail. And though we can easily see others’, we
rarely see our own.

Source: www.triplepundit.com