Table of Contents
ALSO BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I - LAST CALL FOR ILLUSIONS
CHAPTER 1 - Who Killed Ekaru Loruman?
Climate War Forensics
The Facts
The Social Challenge
The Catastrophic Convergence
Mitigation and Adaptation
The Argument
CHAPTER 2 - Military Soothsayers
The Apocalypse on Paper
The Allies
Geography of Climate Chaos
Hard State versus Failed State
CHAPTER 3 - War for a Small Planet: Adaptation As Counterinsurgency
Asymmetry from Above
The Receipt
Small Wars Past
Colonial Origins
A Doctrine Emerges
Banana Wars
The Manual
Cold War Proxies
Post–Cold War
II - AFRICA
CHAPTER 4 - Geopolitics of a Cattle Raid
The Raid
Inflamed Anew
Rain Cloud and Kalashnikov
Kenya by Road
Turkana
The Nomad Town
The Land of Raiding
CHAPTER 5 - Monsoons and Tipping Points
Life, Death, and Clouds
Feedback Loops and Tipping Points
Two Degrees Celsius
Bone-Eating Storks
Sifting for Causality
Gangsters
CHAPTER 6 - The Rise and Fall of East African States
Creating Kenya
Using Crisis, Seeding Crisis
Kikuyu Pushback
Decline of Old Raiding
The Guns of Uganda
Armories Plundered
Enter El Niño
False Solutions
CHAPTER 7 - Somali Apocalypse
Fall of the Lion
Paved with Outside Help
Ogaden War Forever
Fallout
Into the Abyss
CHAPTER 8 - Theorizing Failed States
Anatomy of the Ruins
Development in Reverse
States, War‚ Crime
III - ASIA
CHAPTER 9 - Drugs, Drought, and Jihad: Environmental History of the Afghanistan War
The Role of Drought
Vacation King
The Famine Coup
Saur Revolution
Droughtistan
Merciful Flower
Sticky Sap
Out of Nangarhar
CHAPTER 10 - Kyrgyzstan’s Little Climate War
Power . . .
. . . and Water
Last Straw
Post-Soviet Crisis
Central Asian Jihad
CHAPTER 11 - India and Pakistan: Glaciers, Rivers, and Unfinished Business
Water Tower Karakorum
Riparian Politics
Paradox of Scarcity
Bellicose Dams
Strategic Displacement
Triage
CHAPTER 12 - India’s Drought Rebels
Deep Roots of Rebellion
Naxalism Now
Climate, Water, and War
Hydraulic States—in Theory and Practice
Neoliberalism and Death by Cotton
The Green Revolution
Irrigating Corruption
Dry Cocktail of Rage
Dark Arts of Repression
Sowing Chaos
IV - LATIN AMERICA
CHAPTER 13 - Rio’s Agony: From Extreme Weather to “Planet of Slums”
Catastrophic Convergence Urbanized
New Climatic Normal
Repression in the Megaslums
Blowback Brazilian Style
From Guerrillas to Gangs
Neoliberal Brazil
From ISI to IMF
Continent of Debt
Austerity
Human Costs
Nordeste
Drought Land
Technologies of Adaptation
Politics of Adaptation
Rolling Back Neoliberalism
CHAPTER 14 - Golgotha Mexicana: Climate Refugees, Free Trade, and the War Next Door
Political Teleconnections
Migration
Who Is a Climate Migrant?
Neoliberal Fish
Pushed from the Sierra
Insurgent Mexico
Article 27 and the Corporatist State
Cárdenas and Oil
Oil’s Cursed Boom
Logic of Loans
Crash
Bailout ’82
NAFTA
Narcoguerra: Countdown to Chaos
In the Beginning There Was Murder
The Pus of Free Trade
Destabilization
Which Way Mexico?
CHAPTER 15 - American Walls and Demagogues
Spirit of War
Urban Border
Detention
Land of Violent Talk
Ideological Parapets
Season of Hate, Again
The Paranoid Style and Its Rational Uses
Fortress Europe
Romancing the End Times
CHAPTER 16 - Implications and Possibilities
Technology
Economics
Politics
Resistance North
Resistance South
Mitigation Now
Pathways Forward
Big Green Buy
Capitalism versus Nature?
Acknowledgements
NOTES
INDEX
Copyright Page
ALSO BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI
Lockdown America
The Soft Cage
The Freedom
For Juliet and her whole generation, with apologies
The pressure of the hungry and desperate billions has not yet become so great that world leaders see Kurtz’s solution as the only humane, the only possible, but fundamentally sound one. But that day is not far off. I see it coming. That is why I read history.
—SVEN LINDQVIST‚ Exterminate All the Brutes
I
LAST CALL FOR ILLUSIONS
CHAPTER 1
Who Killed Ekaru Loruman?
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land
EKARU LORUMAN lay beneath a flat-topped acacia tree, its latticework of branches casting a soft mesh of shade upon his body. He wore a silver earring and khaki shorts and lay on his side with his arm twisted awkwardly beneath him. The left side of Ekaru’s forehead was gone, blown away by the exit of a bullet. His blood formed a greasy, black slick on the desert floor. His sandals, shawl, and gun had been stolen.
Ekaru had been a pastoralist from the Turkana tribe, who live in northwest Kenya, on the arid savannas of the Rift Valley. He had been killed the day before when a neighboring tribe, the Pokot, launched a massive cattle raid. Ekaru’s corpse lay here on the ground, exposed to the elements with goats and sheep browsing nearby, because the Turkana do not bury people killed in raids. They believe doing so is bad luck, that it will only invite more attacks. So they leave their dead to decompose where they fall. But these supernatural precautions will not hold the enemy at bay, for profound social and climatological forces drive them forth.
The group of Turkana I was visiting had been push
ed south by severe drought and were now grazing their herds at the edge of their traditional range, very close to their enemies, the Pokot. In the pastoralist corridor of East Africa, a basic pattern is clear: during times of drought, water and grazing become scarce, the herds fall ill, and many cattle die. To replenish stocks, young men raid their neighbors. The onset of anthropogenic climate change means Kenya is seeing rising temperatures and more frequent drought. Yet, overall it is actually receiving greater amounts of precipitation. The problem is, the rain now arrives erratically, in sudden violent bursts, all at once rather than gradually over a season. This means eroding floods, followed by drought.1 The clockwork rains, upon which Kenyan agriculture and society depends, are increasingly out of sync.
Climate War Forensics
Why did Ekaru Loruman die? What forces compelled his murder? Ekaru, who had been about thirty-five years old—age among the Turkana is usually just estimated—had three wives, eight children, and about fifty head of cattle. He had been an important and powerful man in his community: a warrior in his prime, old enough to have plenty of experience and wisdom but still young and strong enough to run and fight for days on little food or water. And now he was dead.
We could say tradition killed Ekaru, the age-old tradition of “stock theft,” cattle raiding among the Nilotic tribes of East Africa. Or we could say he was murdered by a specific man, a Pokot from the Karasuk. Or that Ekaru was killed by the drought. When the drought gets bad, the raiding picks up.
Or 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.
The Facts
The scientific consensus about the status of the climate takes institutional form in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC does not conduct independent research but is, instead, a governmentand UN-supported international clearinghouse. It collects and summarizes all published scientific literature on climatology and related issues in biology, hydrology, oceanography, forests, glaciology, and other disciplines so that governments may respond to climate issues based on fully vetted research.
The IPCC has been attacked by climate-change denialists as alarmist and wrong because of several minor errors in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Addressing these did not, however, change the report’s overall conclusions. In fact, because the IPCC operates on the basis of consensus, its conclusions are quite conservative, and its reports lag years behind the latest scientific developments. The IPCC represents the lowest common denominator of fully accepted conclusions from the scientific mainstream.
The IPCC has concluded that civilization’s dependence on burning fossil fuels has boosted atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from around 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution to 390 ppm today. Analyses of ancient ice cores show 390 ppm to be the highest atmospheric concentration of CO2 during the last 10,000 years.2
Atmospheric CO2 functions like the glass in a greenhouse, allowing the sun’s heat in but preventing much of it from radiating back out to space. We need atmospheric CO2—without it, Earth would be an ice-cold, lifeless rock. However, over the last 150 years we have been loading the sky with far too much CO2‚ and the planet is heating up.
As the Pew Center on Global Climate Change explains, “The Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by 1.4°F (0.8°C) since the early years of the 20th century. The 11 warmest years on record (since 1850) have all occurred in the past 13 years. The five warmest years to date are 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2007.”3
Less than 1°C warmer over a hundred years may not sound like much, but scientists believe it is enough to begin disrupting the climate system’s equilibrium. The negative-feedback loops that keep Earth’s climate stable are increasingly giving way to destabilizing positive-feedback loops, in which departures from the norm build on themselves instead of diminishing over time. The Greenlanad and Antarctic ice sheets—which reflect large amounts of solar radiation back into space and regulate the flow of ocean currents—are melting at rates much faster than climate scientists had predicted even a few years ago. The loss of reflective ice means more solar radiation is absorbed, and the world heats faster. Polar ice is melting rapidly, disgorging billions of gallons of fresh water, which alters the chemistry and currents of the oceans and, adding volume, threatens to raise sea levels by up to a meter over this century.4
The Social Challenge
Climate change is happening faster than initially predicted, and its impacts are already upon us in the form of more extreme weather events, desertification, ocean acidification, melting glaciers, and incrementally rising sea levels. The scientists who construct the computer models that analyze climate data believe that even if we stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, CO2 levels are already so high that we are locked into a significant increase in global temperatures. Disruptive climate change is a certainty even if we make the economic shift away from fossil fuels.
Incipient climate change is already starting to express itself in the realm of politics. Extreme weather events and off-kilter weather patterns are causing more humanitarian crises and fueling civil wars. The United Nations has estimated that all but one of its emergency appeals for humanitarian aid in 2007 were climate related. Already climate change adversely affects 300 million people per year, killing 300,000 of them. By 2030—as floods, droughts, forest fires, and new diseases grow worse—as many as 500,000 people per year could be killed by climate change, and the economic cost of these disruptions could reach $600 billion annually.5
Rising sea levels will be one of the greatest stresses. In 2007, the IPCC projected that sea levels could rise by an average of 7 to 23 inches during this century. These numbers were soon amended, and scientists now believe sea levels will rise by an average of 5 feet over the next 90 years.6 Such sea-level rises will lead to massive dislocations. One recent study from Columbia University’s Center for International Earth Science Information Network projects that 700 million climate refugees will be on the move by 2050.7
Perhaps the modern era’s first climate refugees were the five hundred thousand Bangladeshis left homeless when half of Bhola Island flooded in 2005. In Bangladesh 22 million people will be forced from their homes by 2050 because of climate change. India is already building a militarized border fence along its 2,500-mile frontier with Bangladesh, and the student activists of India’s Hindu Right are pushing vigorously for the mass deportation of (Muslim) Bangladeshi immigrants.8
Meanwhile, twenty-two Pacific Island nations, home to 7 million people, are planning for relocation as rising seas threaten them with national annihilation. What will happen when China’s cities begin to flood? When the eastern seaboard of the United States starts to flood, how will people and institutions respond?
The Catastrophic Convergence
Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters the catastrophic convergence. By catastrophic convergence, I do not merely mean that several disasters happen simultaneously, one problem atop another. Rather, I argue that problems compound and amplify each other, one expressing itself through another.
Societies, like people, deal with new challenges in ways that are conditioned by the traumas of their past. Thus, damaged societies, like damaged people, often respond to new crises in ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive. In the case of clim
ate change, the prior traumas that set the stage for bad adaptation, the destructive social response, are Cold War–era militarism and the economic pathologies of neoliberal capitalism. Over the last forty years, both these forces have distorted the state’s relationship to society—removing and undermining the state’s collectivist, regulatory, and redistributive functions, while overdeveloping its repressive and military capacities. This, I argue, inhibits society’s ability to avoid violent dislocations as climate change kicks in.
In this book I examine the prehistories of the climate disaster in order to explain how the world came to be such a mess and, thus, so prone to respond to climate change in ways that exacerbate the social fallout of the new extreme weather. In much of the world, it seems that the only solidarity forthcoming in response to climate change is an exclusionary tribalism, and the only state policy available is police repression. This is not “natural” and inevitable but rather the result of a history—particularly the history of the Global North’s use and abuse of the Global South—that has destroyed the institutions and social practices that would allow a different, more productive response.
The Cold War sowed instability throughout the Third World; its myriad proxy wars left a legacy of armed groups, cheap weapons, smuggling networks, and corrupted officialdoms in developing countries. Neoliberal economic policies—radical privatization and economic deregulation enforced by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—have pushed many economies in the Third World—or, if you prefer, the Global South—into permanent crisis and extreme inequality. In these societies, the state has often been reduced to a hollow shell, devoid of the institutional capacity it needs to guide economic development or address social crises.
Sometimes these forces have worked together simultaneously; at other times they have been quite distinct. For example, Somalia was destroyed by Cold War military interventions. It became a classic proxy battleground. Though it underwent some limited economic liberalization, its use as a pawn on the chessboard of global political struggle caused its collapse. The same holds true for Afghanistan, which was, and still is, a failed state. It never underwent structural adjustment but was a proxy battleground. On the other hand, Mexico, the north of which is now experiencing a profound violent crisis, was not a frontline state during the Cold War, but it was subject to radical economic liberalization.
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