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Weekly Reading
April 20, 2009 By Wilson Center Staff“The Arctic could slide into a new era featuring jurisdictional conflicts, increasingly severe clashes over the extraction of natural resources, and the emergence of a new ‘great game’ among the global powers,” argue Paul Berkman and Oran Young, two researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Science. “However, the environment provides a physical and a conceptual framework to link government interests in the Arctic Ocean, as well as a template for addressing transboundary security risks cooperatively.” In the Washington Times, Paula Dobriansky, former U.S. undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs, argues that the Antarctic Treaty offers lessons for dealing with competing territorial claims in the Arctic.
An article by Fred Pearce in Yale Environment 360, “Consumption Dwarfs Population As Main Environmental Threat,” has re-energized the debate over population’s contribution to climate change. For more, see Suzanne Petroni’s article “An Ethical Approach to Population and Climate Change” in ECSP Report 13.
Time interviews Laurel Neme, author of Animal Investigators: How the World’s First Wildlife Forensics Lab Is Solving Crimes and Saving Endangered Species, about the illegal wildlife trade. Neme will speak at the Wilson Center on May 20.
Slate’s William Saletan discusses the skewed sex ratio in China. For more on this topic, see Richard Cincotta’s review of Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.
According to Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, “If you invest a dollar in sanitation, you save seven dollars in health-care costs.” Audio is available of a recent talk featuring George and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
Time reports on Mexico’s water crisis. (See “Water Stories” for more on water and sanitation in Mexico.) It also features photo slideshows on the politics of water in Central Asia and the global water crisis.
In a paper published in Ecology (subscription required), Kevin Lafferty, a research ecologist for the United States Geological Survey at the University of California Santa Barbara, argues that climate change may not necessarily expand the range of disease vectors, as many scientists have argued.
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