"Water, Land, People, & Conflict"
Transcript for Show No. 1143
Admiral Gene La Rocque, USN (Ret.), President, Center for Defense Information
HOST:
Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr., USN (Ret.), Deputy Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
PRODUCERS:
Glenn Baker
Moon Callison
Jennifer Jones
Jon Lottman
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Stephen Sapienza
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
NARRATOR:
Rick Boardman
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Jon Lottman
Adam Luther
Stephen Sapienza
AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION:
Eleanor Harrison
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
1143
INITIAL BROADCAST:
05 July 1998
CONDITION OF USE:
Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" (Center for Defense Information)
Michael Renner
Senior Researcher, Worldwatch Institute
Dr. Jessica Mathews
President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Geoffrey Dabelko
Director, Environmental Change and Security Project,
The Woodrow Wilson Center
Allen Hammond
Senior Scientist, World Resources Institute
Robert Engelman
Director, Population and Environment Program,
Population Action International
[Begin Broadcast]
NARRATOR: As we approach the 21st Century, the basic needs of 5.5 Billion human beings seriously threaten the earth's life-supporting environmental resources.
Almost 11% of the earth's surface, an area the size of China and India, has been exhausted by agriculture and other uses....
70% of the world's fish stocks are in decline....
By the year 2050, water is projected to be in short supply for 4.4 Billion people.....
HAMMOND: "Many people think that in the middle East its water and not oil that will be the source of the next wars."
NARRATOR: More and more, people and nations will be forced into competition for ever scarcer resources -- competition that will inevitably lead to conflicts.
ADM INTRO
(Opening Remarks from Host)
ADMIRAL CARROLL: Welcome to America's Defense Monitor, I'm Admiral Eugene Carroll. What would you do if you couldn't get clean water to drink? What if you could no longer buy enough food to eat? Around the globe the demand for natural resources is on the rise, and competition for vital resources is heating up. This program looks at how environmental problems, population growth , and growing shortages of vital resources threaten peace in the world community."
NARRATOR: What makes a nation and its people secure? Is it military or economic power? Is it strong governmental institutions or a high standard of living?
Whether you think of a nation's security strictly in terms of its physical safety, or more broadly in terms of defending it's economic strength, social values, and way of life, it is clear that the perception of security is evolving.
PERSON ON THE STREET: "I definitely think that environmental stability is a sign of a nation's stability as a whole, because it sort of reflects the values of the leaders in that country. If they don't value the environment then that sort of sends a message that they don't really value the people, and a country that doesn't value its own people definitely isn't going to be the most stable country."
RENNER: "the concept of security has evolved of course very dramatically with the end of the Cold War... I think one thing that has come to the surface very strongly is certainly the view that what happens to the natural environment, to resources such as air quality, water quality, water availability, and the ability of countries and people to feed themselves. That kind of thing has become more important in recent years and that is a very positive change."
NARRATOR: Michael Renner is a senior researcher with the Worldwatch Institute and author of the critically acclaimed book, "Fighting for Survival: Environmental Decline, Social Conflict and the New Age of Insecurity."
RENNER: "Most of the conflicts or wars going on are no longer wars between U.S. and Iraq, as was so prominent during the Gulf War, and more and more really are being carried out between the government and an opposition group or different ethnic groups within a country."
NARRATOR: The threat posed by large scale warfare between nations has given way to civil unrest and ethnic or religious turmoil within countries.
So called "failed states" -- when governments become incapable of maintaining peace within their own borders - are a rising concern. Somalia... Yugoslavia...Haiti...Liberia.
Often shortages of natural resources like clean water, arable farmland, forests, and fisheries are ongoing problems for societies torn by internal strife.
PERSON ON THE STREET: "Environmental problems in other countries can and do affect us so we should take special interest in those."
MATHEWS: "If you look at what countries we are worried about today, and you look at the connections that you can certainly trace between environmental resource degradation, through severe economic decline to political instability and fracturing... you see it in Haiti, in Rwanda, and Somalia....there's no question that these are at heart, in part, environmental threats. They have different manifestations: it may be soil erosion in one place, desalinization and land degradation in another, it maybe water shortages in another, but they are all environmental."
NARRATOR: Dr. Jessica Mathews is a leader in forging the connection between the environment and security. She is president of the prestigious Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
MATHEWS: "The concept of national security has gone through a couple of changes in the last fifteen years. First it broadened to include economic conditions, and that began to happen in the early 70's. Then in the 80's it broadened again to include environmental concerns a variety of things, in particular those that provide the resources that people can't live without - which is basically food and water"
QUESTION: Should the US concern itself with water shortages, soil erosion in other countries?
PERSON ON THE STREET: "Absolutely, I think that the environment is one continuous fabric, so I think that if something is happening in the U.S. or another country there's an effect."
PERSON ON THE STREET: "I do think the US should be concerned with water shortages and environmental issues in other countries because the population is expanding so fast that no action taken in other countries is independent... it has an effect on everybody in the world at this point"
NARRATOR: For decades the United States invested trillions of dollars into a massive military apparatus of tanks, war planes, and nuclear missiles to wage an all out war against the Soviet Union. And at $270 Billion a year the United States continues to maintain by far the most powerful, most expensive military force on the planet. In the year 2003, U.S. military spending is scheduled to reach almost $300 billion.
But while U.S. forces search the horizon for direct military threats, the risks to peace and stability have changed.
More and more, it is environmental problems that threaten the stability of countries and regions..... pollution, acid rain, water scarcity, and land degradation.
The nature of these global threats calls into question the value of increased investment in aircraft carriers, high tech fighter jets, and submarines, weapons designed to wage World War III.
PERSON ON THE STREET: "I think we need a certain amount of military defense, but I think its overdone. And I think we could cut back on that and yes any money we can save on our military defense should go not only for our environmental enhancement, but for other countries too."
PERSON ON THE STREET: "a military threat could potentially wipe out an entire country, so too can mother nature...so I think there needs to be equal attention brought to the two, I don't think that one should necessarily outweigh the other as far as priority on an agenda."
DABELKO: "With the end of the Cold War we have the environment rising as a priority, not that environmental degradation, depletion, population growth were not problems before, but we have more of an opportunity to talk about them and raise them in terms of priority and even consider them potential security issues."
NARRATOR: Geoffrey Dabelko is director of the Environmental Change and Security Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The project seeks to understand the links between the environment and security.
DABELKO: "Some people argue that the environment degradation and depletion of resources, when coupled with population growth, can be one among many factors that can contribute ... to other issues such as ethnic tensions, such as relative wealth between one or another group within a society. That in turn might contribute to conflict. And so it's not that the environment causes conflict, but the environment may be one a group of political, economic and social variables that leads to conflict."
NARRATOR: Taking stock of current global environmental trends may help predict sources of tension on the horizon.
HAMMOND: "We're losing forests, we're losing coral reefs, we're losing fertile soils, we're losing essentially all the resources people need to support themselves particularly in pre-industrial societies."
NARRATOR: Allen Hammond, is a senior scientist and visionary thinker at the World Resources Institute. His latest book called "Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century" probes the consequences of present social, economic, and environmental trends.
HAMMOND: "As industrial demand increases, well the fisheries are getting over fished. As timber gets scarce in Asia and Africa the logging companies are moving into South America and into the Siberian forests. So basically the picture doesn't look real good and when you look at potential water scarcity out twenty years and thirty years it looks very grim in much of Africa and most of the Middle East."
NARRATOR: In addition to resource scarcities, issues such as population growth magnify the competition for natural resources.
By the year 2000, Earth will be home to over 6 Billion people - four times as many as in 1900.
With population growth comes increased human activity and stress on the environment.
ENGELMAN: "I think that policy makers are increasingly looking at these relationships between the number of people and the rate of growth and the natural resources they depend upon, increasing competition for those natural resources, and various other stimulant of conflict that may lead in fact to war."
NARRATOR: Robert Engelman is director of the Population and Environment Program with Population Action International, a non-profit organization dedicated to informing the public about population growth issues.
ENGELMAN: "much of the problem with the world's environment at this particular moment in history relates to activities that are not in their essence unsustainable, it might be cutting down trees, it might be using rivers to dispose of human waste -- not in their essence impossible for the environment to handle, but they're made unsustainable by the scale of the activity."
NARRATOR: There are signs that the scale of human activity is degrading our environment.
Pollution from autos and industries have increased temperatures worldwide causing the polar ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise. Many species, including some types of sea turtles, penguins, and bears, have already been pushed to the brink of extinction. Massive deforestation and related loss of natural habitat result in the disappearance of nearly 27,000 animal and plant species each year.
Equally serious, is the prospect that access to natural resources will be further limited in the future.
RENNER: "we're talking nowadays not so much about access to new resources, opening new frontiers but really we're talking about in a sense really is a world that is getting ever smaller and that is getting ever more limited in it's resources. And so we're talking not so much about untapped resources but resources that are already being stressed and already being pushed to the limit."
NARRATOR: Improved technology and new manufacturing techniques allow us to make more products at a quicker rate, while consumers are bombarded with advertisements that positively promote over indulgence and excess.
DABELKO: "You have on the one side, increased levels of consumption. So, in developed countries, for example, through the process of industrialization, it's allowed us to process more -- more efficiently but process more materials, and so we consume more. On the other side of the coin and equally important, is the growth in numbers of people.... in that sense, it's more people for the same size pie and even a shrinking pie because we've depleted resources many of which cannot be easily replaced."
NARRATOR: Water...we use it to irrigate our crops, we harness its power to generate electricity, we quench our thirst with it, and bathe in it. Over 75% of the earth is covered by water. However, only 3% of this vital resource is freshwater.
In some countries, getting clean water is as easy as a walk to the kitchen, but for a majority of the world's population, access to drinkable water is a daily struggle.
Global water use has tripled since 1950. Nearly 1/3 of the developing world, 1.2 billion people, still don't have access to safe and reliable supplies of water.
ENGELMAN: "Water is essential to life, health, to well being, as well as economic development. And people for many years have taken it for granted because when populations were smaller and consumption of water was less for the most part the rivers that flowed into country provided all the all that you needed.. But there are some countries that are tremendously dependent on rivers that have a large number of people upstream and very rapidly growing populations upstream ."
NARRATOR: The word "rivalry" comes from the Latin word that means "people who share the same stream" and increasingly it's competition for water that is causing tensions within and between countries.
HAMMOND: "Water is one of those resources that crosses international boundaries and that leads to certain kinds of tension."
NARRATOR: The potential for conflict over freshwater is increased by the fact that most major watersheds -- sources of water formed by rivers and the land they drain -- cross international borders.
HAMMOND: "unless we learn to use these watersheds and manage them as a unit, which requires sharing and international cooperation, it is very difficult not to have conflict, and particularly as pressures for water rise. Many people think that in the Middle East its water and not oil that will be the source of the next wars."
NARRATOR: One potential threat to peace in the Middle East is the growing demand for the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
ENGELMAN: "There has been tremendous concern in the Tigris and Euphrates about Turkey's development of the waters of those rivers, they're trying to irrigate large areas of Turkey where rain fed agriculture is no longer sufficient to feed a growing population in Turkey...downstream is Saddam Hussein who is very dependent on those rivers for fresh water, and he is very concerned about what's happening in Turkey because he needs that water to keep flowing through his country, Syria is similarly concerned"
NARRATOR: Conflict over water between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq is decades old, and it is now intensifying as a result of Turkish dam building projects, which include a series of 22 dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The Turkish water project will decrease Syria and Iraq's ability to harness the rivers for irrigation and power, as well as potentially cause water shortages in the two countries within 20 years.
Both Syria and Iraq have threatened a regional war over the Turkish project.
ENGELMAN: "there has been no outright conflict , there has been no war over water, but it's certainly a source of tension and conflict and potentially as populations continue to increase, and economic development proceeds, people use more water....There's not going to be anymore water going down these rivers that's something we need to be constantly aware of, there's not much you can do to develop more water"
NARRATOR: Because crops cannot grow without water, water scarcity and productive farmland are key issues for many struggling nations around the world.
ENGELMAN: "as more farmers are farming and they're limited by the amount of land that they can spread to and they're limited in the amount of land they can clear for agriculture they need to use the farmland they've got more intensively ...but there's a danger if you do that too intensively without paying attention to some of the side effects of that which is that you can leave land bare to rain and you can work land so intensively that the land erodes and you start to lose soil."
NARRATOR: Each year, about 25 billion metric tons of nutrient-rich topsoil is dislodged by wind and rain, leaving the land barren, and thereby setting the stage for famine and disorder in already weak nations.
Worldwide the growth of grain production has slowed dramatically, and the amount of food available per person has declined.
By 2025, at least 26 countries are projected to suffer from a scarcity of fertile cropland, among them some of the world's poorest nations: Somalia, Bangladesh, Kenya, Mauritania, and Yemen.
RENNER: "we need to look at why are certain environmental trends toward greater degradation and depletion why are they set in motion, what's behind that, what are the social and economic reasons? What are the political circumstances that even worsen these circumstances further accelerate them or perhaps could actually put the brake on this and help us get on a different path."
NARRATOR: While conflicts over water scarcity and land degradation are often most severe in developing nations, one instance where shrinking resources are causing tensions among industrialized countries is fishing.
HAMMOND: "there have been numerous disputes in the North Atlantic between European fisheries of various kinds. There have been concerns about Japanese and Russian fisheries in the Pacific, they haven't come to blows yet, but these pressures are mounting."
NARRATOR: The world's oceans once seemed an inexhaustible source of fish. But today, the natural fisheries are in decline.
The United Nations estimates that almost 70% of the world's major fishing areas are fully exploited, over-exploited, or depleted.
ENGELMAN: "What we're seeing is that as the amount of resources, in this case fish, available on a per person basis declines, people are getting anxious about making sure that they can get their little piece of the resources that survive."
NARRATOR: Too many fishermen and boats chasing too few fish.... Each small explosion symbol on this map represents a recent conflict or dispute, many involving damage to property or violence.
ENGELMAN: "one can look at fisheries and see that we have pretty much reached the limit of the amount of fish that we have harvested from the oceans, its roughly 90 million metric tons a year and its been fairly stable at that level for nearly a decade now. And in that same decade, that we've pretty much maxed out on the oeans harvested fish we've also seen a tremendous upsurge of mostly small scale conflict, not violent conflict, but let's say tensions, between the fishing fleets of various countries.."
NARRATOR: As fish stocks have declined, fishermen have responded with more aggressive and technologically advanced means of catching fish.
Harmful fishing techniques, like cyanide poisoning and dynamiting, have severely damaged marine ecosystems, while commercial fishing has drastically depleted the major fisheries.
Modern trawlers are gigantic floating factories that drag nets large enough to hold twelve jumbo jets, as they haul tons of fish from the seas.
Each year up to 39 million tons of unwanted fish, called 'bycatch', are dumped back into the sea and die because of unselective fishing practices.
Scientists predict that at the current rate of fishing, many fish stocks could be eliminated within 25 years.
To date most of the conflict over fishing grounds has been limited to small scale skirmishes between the fishing fleets of industrialized countries, where people have the luxury of buying the types of fish they prefer to eat.
However these small scuffles are nothing compared to the turmoil that could arise if the fisheries collapse in countries where people depend on fish as a major part of their diet.
HAMMOND: "The major pressure on the fisheries is you and I, because we like to eat some fish for dinner in the restaurant and that's devastating the world's fisheries because they are all being over fished. And unfortunately 3/4 of billion people depend on fish as their main source of protein, so when those fisheries collapse, well it will cost us a little bit more for shrimp, but it will cost those people their main food supply"
RENNER: "more and more the question really becomes what do we have to do to make sure that we don't continue to over fish the resource so much that we have a collapse of the fishery and nobody wins everybody loses. I think that is the real issue. That is the issue not just in fisheries, but to every other environmental issue"
NARRATOR: If environmental problems can lead to crises in already weak societies, it suggests that new emphasis should be placed on averting potential conflicts through diplomatic channels, plus scientific and economic cooperation among nations, rather than waiting for these societies to collapse.
ENGELMAN: "sometimes these conflicts if people are foresightful, and they use diplomacy rather than guns it can have a good result they can learn to cooperate over a scarce resource, if they are not foresightful and they have high confidence that the resource is always going to be there, or that they are powerful enough to get the resource if it becomes scarce then you have a real problem then you can have fights over resources"
NARRATOR: Lessons learned from emergency interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda demonstrate that it's often hard to motivate politicians to deal with an environmental problem before it reaches crisis proportions, when the cost of a solution might be relatively low.
MATHEWS: "By the time you've actually got the crisis on your hands - tens of thousands of people dying, or tens of thousands of refugees, active shooting and conflict, by that time, the costs of doing something about the underlying problems tend to be terribly high."
NARRATOR: Wisely coping with future deadly crises may require the recognition of the fact that a nation's security is more than just safety from military threats. True security also lies in the social, economic, political, and environmental health of a nation.
MATHEWS: "perhaps security is what comes in the conditions of peoples daily lives..it comes in an effect sort of bottom up. Whether they have food, whether they have jobs, whether they have a place to live, wether they are free from extreme health effects, and so that this notion of "human security" is starting to get some exposure some credence and being talked about."
DABELKO: "as we redefine security now and go into the next century, it's also a question of who's going to provide the security. Which institutions are going to do that? Is it going to be the military or is it perhaps going to be the -- the more traditional diplomatic channels or are there going to be new actors in providing security that might be like the Environmental Protection Agency or the U.S. Agency for International Development? These institutions, these offices, these departments that are aimed at things like the health of a population, ensuring access to fresh water."
(Closing Remarks from Host)
ADMIRAL CARROLL: "Will nations and societies clash over access to natural resources in the future, or, will global cooperation maintain a healthy environment and insure enough food and clean water for expanding populations? Unfortunately in many countries, including America, short term military programs receive much higher priority over long term environmental concerns. Of course, we need a sound national defense, but we cannot afford to neglect critical social, economic, political, and environmental requirements that contribute equally to the security and well being of all Americans. Failure to support constructive efforts to solve global environmental problems now will only increase the certainty of instability and conflict within and between nations. Until next time for America's Defense Monitor, I'm Admiral Eugene Carroll."
[End Broadcast]