“If you tell the world you’re going to do something and they go, ‘Yeah…?’ it’s probably that you’re making an incremental change in something that the world is already doing reasonably well,” said renowned inventor Dean Kamen at a May 2009 meeting co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Program on Science, Technology, America, and the Global Economy. “I’d rather work on the really big stuff.”

His track record proves it: He holds more than 400 U.S. and international patents, and his most famous inventions include an implantable insulin pump, a portable dialysis machine, and an artificial arm, as well as the Segway personal transporter.

Kamen now seeks to provide clean water to the 1.1 billion people who lack it with the Slingshot, a washing machine-sized device that uses just 500 watts of electricity to produce 10 gallons of clean water an hour.

Tackling the Big Problems: Water and Power

Kamen’s career as an inventor began in high school, when he would invent medical devices for his older brother, a doctor. The Slingshot grew out of a portable dialysis machine Kamen developed for patients with renal failure. After inventing a way to make perfectly sterile water for the dialysis machine, he explored whether he could adapt the water-purification technology for the developing world, where millions of people die each year from dirty water.

The data “take your breath away,” said Kamen. More than one billion people lack access to clean water, and 1.6 billion do not have access to electricity. Kamen thought he could address both of these problems with the Slingshot, which uses a Stirling-cycle generator to vaporize and condense the water, removing the impurities.

The generator runs on any kind of fuel, including the methane gas in cow dung, which is readily available in the Bangladeshi villages where Kamen conducted a six-month test of the Slingshot. The generator not only powers the water vaporizer, but also produces enough surplus electricity to power a light, cell phone, and computer for every household in a small village.

The Skepticism of Experts: A Bigger Problem?

In meetings with the World Bank and other international development organizations, Kamen was told that the Slingshot was more expensive than other ways of purifying water, including chlorine tablets, activated-charcoal filters, and reverse-osmosis desalination. But unlike these technologies, the Slingshot can remove any kind of contaminant from water; does not need filters, membranes, or chemicals; and does not require any technical know-how to use.

Kamen granted that the cheaper technologies might be more practical for urban areas, but argued that the Slingshot could have advantages in remote villages without access to technical expertise or a steady supply of chemicals or other components. He also suggested that microfinance might be a way to overcome the large initial cost of the Slingshot—although he emphasized that his expertise lies in developing the technology, and then partnering with experts who know how to surmount the various barriers to distribution.

“If everything I now say by way of recalling my history here seems to you like I’m frustrated, and angry, and disappointed, it’s mostly because I’m frustrated, angry, kinda disappointed,” said Kamen, adding, “But you’re going to fix all that.” Suggestions from audience members included learning from the experiences of venture capitalists who have invested in water technology in the developing world, as well as partnering with the military and defense contractors to manufacture and distribute the Slingshot.

Water, Electricity, and National Security

Kamen suggested that the Slingshot could be used to support U.S. foreign-policy and national-security objectives. For instance, the U.S. armed forces could bring water and electricity to an Afghani village with the Slingshot and Stirling-cycle generator. A telephone and camera mounted on the generator would provide communications technology.

“I would suspect that the Taliban…would be way more worried that everybody in town is happy, and healthy, and has light, and is communicating and showing pictures of everything going on” than about the threat of attack by the United States, said Kamen.

Photo: Dean Kamen. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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This morning, the Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress released a proposal for a National Strategy for Global Development. This is only the latest in a raft of attempts to imagine a new architecture for U.S. foreign aid—several of which are reviewed in the latest Environmental Change and Security Program Report.

“Security By Other Means: Foreign Assistance, Global Poverty, and American Leadership, compiles the findings of the Brookings Institution-Center for Strategic and International Studies Task Force on Transforming Foreign Assistance in the 21st Century into a manual of sorts for reforming foreign assistance,” writes the Wilson Center’s Sean Peoples in ECSP Report 13. “Not shying away from the nitty-gritty of foreign assistance policy, the book’s contributors delve deep into the current development assistance framework and recommend valuable reforms, which include: integrating strategic security concerns; formulating clear objectives; understanding recipient country capacities; and building effective partnerships that exploit comparative advantages.”

“Trade, Aid and Security: An Agenda for Peace and Development undertakes the challenging task of assessing the interrelationships between trade and aid, as well as the complex causes of conflict within the poorest countries,” writes Wilson Center Senior Scholar John Sewell. “Several chapters in Trade, Aid and Security make the case that resources, whether derived from aid flows or legitimate trade, often are not equitably distributed or used to end poverty or promote sustainable development. Instead, they are captured by special interests or steered to political elites.”

The United States’—and the Department of Defense’s (DoD)—dependence on fossil fuels poses a significant national-security threat, concludes Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security (summary), the second report from CNA’s Military Advisory Board (MAB), a group of 12 retired three- and four-star admirals and generals. At the report’s launch this morning, several members of the MAB were joined by several of the people they are trying to influence, including Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Ashton Carter and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy, Sanctions, and Commodities Douglas Hengel.

Carter outlined some of the ways DoD is attempting to increase its energy efficiency, from insulating air-conditioned tents in Iraq with foam, which can lead to a 45 percent reduction in energy usage, to incorporating the fully burdened cost of fueling vehicles into the acquisitions process, to tripling the amount of spending on energy research and development over the past two years.

Hengel echoed the report’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of energy, climate change, and security, explaining that President Obama added the Secretary of Energy to the National Security Council for precisely this reason.

On May 28 at 3:00 p.m., ECSP will host a discussion of the report’s findings, featuring CNA General Counsel Sherri Goodman; General Charles Wald USAF (Ret.), chairman of the MAB; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn USN (Ret.), a member of the MAB. ECSP also hosted a discussion of the MAB’s previous report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.

Climate-change adaptation measures, including military-to-military collaboration on disaster preparedness and response, could be part of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), currently under preparation, reports Defense Environment Alert (one free article provided to new users). Congress mandated that the next QDR address the national-security impacts of climate change in 2008 defense-authorization legislation.

“Speaking at a conference hosted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Washington, DC, May 5, Kent Butts, a professor with the US Army War College and global warming expert, told delegates that while much attention is being paid to climate change mitigation measures, preparations for inevitable global warming effects have garnered too little attention at the Pentagon,” said Defense Environment Alert. “The armed services have invested considerable resources in developing new energy strategies to reduce consumption and switch to alternative sources of energy, but have yet to really focus on adaptation, Butts says.”

“While the military should not be the lead agency handling climate change impacts in the United States or other developed countries, Butts said, in many developing nations the military may be the only government agency capable of providing services such as disaster response and preparedness work. Civilian government in the developing world is often weak and lacks basic resources such as manpower, transportation and engineering capability, Butts said.”

Environmental-security concerns appear to enjoy considerable traction in the Obama administration. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair cited energy, food, and water scarcity, as well as the impacts of climate change, as potential security threats in his February 2009 testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Last month, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy echoed these concerns.

“Indonesia’s forest loss continues more or less unabated, despite global concern for the resource and forest-dependent people, as well as a wealth of knowledge about the problems and solutions: poor governance, corruption, perverse incentives in the industrial sector,” said AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow Steve Rhee. Rhee was joined by Henrik Urdal of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), who also studied the effects of environmental degradation on conflict in Indonesia, for “Demography, Environment, and Conflict in Indonesia and India,” an April 21, 2009 event sponsored by the Environmental Change and Security Program.

Parsing the Patterns: Population, Resources, and Conflict

Urdal argued that case studies have sometimes overstated the links among population, resource scarcity, and conflict. Researchers tend to choose cases where there is conflict and then look for a population or resource dimension. If you look hard enough, “it’s always possible to find some connection,” said Urdal.

However, quantitative studies are also imperfect, cautioned Urdal, because most of them use national-level data, which do not capture local dynamics. In addition, they have a tendency to ignore conflicts in which the state is not involved.

Two Sub-National Studies: India and Indonesia

Urdal sought to avoid these problems by using sub-national data and including political violence and riots, as well as armed conflict, in his quantitative studies of India and Indonesia. From 1956-2002, he found that high rural population growth and density, as well as declining agricultural wages, increased the likelihood of violence in Indian states. Surprisingly, those states with high rates of urban population growth were less likely to experience conflict.

In Indonesian provinces, Urdal and his colleagues found a relationship, albeit a weak one, between population growth and non-ethnic violence between 1990-2003. They also found an increased risk of non-ethnic violence in provinces with high population growth and high levels of inequality between different religious groups. However, there was no relationship between land scarcity and conflict.

Forests, Conflict, and Participatory Mapping in Kalimantan: Unintended Consequences

Forty million Indonesians—one-fifth of the population—depend on forests for their livelihoods, said Rhee. Yet much of Indonesia’s forests have never been surveyed, so the people who live there are considered squatters and receive little or no compensation from the logging and mining industries. This inequity has generated both violent and non-violent conflict between the indigenous dayaks, the government, and extractive-industry companies.

In an attempt to resolve some of this conflict, the Center for International Forestry Research initiated a participatory mapping project in 27 villages in the Malinau district of Kalimantan in 1999. Participatory mapping enables dayaks to establish land rights and negotiate compensation from companies.

Following the 1998 ousting of President Suharto, district governments, rather than the central government, began issuing timber permits. The villages in Malinau often used the maps they had created to justify their claims to the land. But the district government did not cross-check the claims, so this generated inter- and intra-village conflict—roadblocks, protests, and lock-ups of timber equipment.

Although the “cowboy logging” that characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s has largely ceased, Rhee believes it may be replaced by “carbon cowboys” seeking to capitalize on the UN Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) program, which aims to reduce carbon emissions by paying governments to preserve forests. “With climate change, and the link between climate change and forests, Indonesia is very much on the map again,” said Rhee.

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In a recent talk (transcript) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy (formerly of the Center for a New American Security) laid out five trends that are affecting U.S. national security:

“Almost every conflict in Africa you can point at has something to do with competition over resources in an environment which has bad governance,” said Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, at an April 13, 2009, event co-sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and Africa Program and the International Gateway at the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center. Maathai discussed her new book, The Challenge for Africa, with Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko.

“This is why I wrote this book: Because I really was challenging us as Africans to think outside the box and to begin to see why when we seem to move forward, we make two steps forward, and we make one step backward, and so we look like we are not moving,” said Maathai. “Some of these issues are complex, they are difficult—but they have a lot to do with the way we have decided to manage our resources and to manage our politics and economics.”

The Three Legs of Stability

Maathai used the traditional African three-legged stool as a metaphor for what she views as the three essential components of a stable society: sustainable environmental management, democratic governance, and a culture of peace. “Those legs are chiseled by a craftsman…[who] chisels all the three legs at the same time, in order to create a balance,” she said. “If we don’t have these three legs, no matter who comes, and with whatever [loans or aid], we shall never develop.”

Land, Politics, and Ethnicity: An Explosive Combination

Maathai explained that in the absence of democratic governance and sustainable environmental management, natural resources have repeatedly ignited conflict in her native Kenya. For instance, the advent of private land ownership during colonialism pitted Maasai herders, who need large tracts of land to graze their cattle, against Kikuyu farmers, who for the first time obtained deeds to their land and began to erect fences to mark the boundaries.

In addition, Maathai noted that politicians often use Kenya’s ethnic divisions and land scarcity to whip up animosity toward internal migrants and bolster their own re-election prospects. “If you don’t, then, therefore, ensure that the resources within the country are equitably distributed, and you encourage these prejudgments that communities have against each other, you’re going to have conflict,” she said.

Holistic Approach Is Key to Successful Development

The Green Belt Movement began as a small, grassroots project that envisioned tree-planting as a way to address rural women’s needs, including firewood, food, clean water, and soil erosion. “Even though that’s how we started, it very quickly became clear to me that these are symptoms, and therefore we needed to get to the causes. And it is in search of the causes that eventually led me into understanding how interconnected these issues were,” said Maathai, who urged governments, development agencies, and nonprofits to adopt an integrated approach to development.

“Unless you deal with the cause, you are wasting your time. You can use all the money you want for all the years you want; you will not solve the problem, because you are dealing with a symptom. So we need to go outside that box and deal with development in a holistic way.”

“I can’t say, ‘Let us deal with governance this time, and don’t worry about the resources.’ Or, ‘Don’t worry about peace today, or conflicts that are going on; let us worry about management of resources.’ I saw that it was very, very important to use the tree-planting as an entry point,” explained Maathai.

“Even though it is the women who provide the drive for planting trees—partly because it is they who suffer when the environment is destroyed, it is also they who work in the field—once we are in the community, we will have to deal with the women, deal with the men, deal with the children, deal with the livestock, deal with everything,” said Maathai.

Climate Change, Forests, and Environmental Justice

According to Maathai, 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are due to deforestation and forest degradation—more than the percentage due to transportation. She is working with Avoided Deforestation Partners to make avoiding deforestation part of the Copenhagen agreements—a step that would not only slow global climate change, but also help those who are directly dependent on natural resources like forests for their livelihoods, and therefore most vulnerable to climate change. “This is the one issue which really comes to tell us that indeed, the planet is a small village, and all of us are in this little village together.”

Today, the Washington Post’s Ben Pershing called the outbreak of swine flu in North America an “unexpected challenge” for President Obama. Now, Obama’s advisers probably didn’t predict that his first 100 days in office would include this particular threat, but the U.S. intelligence community has been aware of the security threats posed by infectious diseases for a long time.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair’s annual threat assessment, presented to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in February 2009, included the following:

“Highly publicized virulent infectious diseases—including HIV/AIDS, a potential influenza pandemic, and ‘mystery’ illnesses such as the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—remain the most direct health-related threats to the United States. The most pressing transnational health challenge for the United States is still the potential for emergence of a severe pandemic, with the primary candidate being a highly lethal influenza virus.”

The U.S. intelligence community did not just start thinking about these issues a few months ago. In 2000, the Environmental Change and Security Program hosted a presentation of the findings of a National Intelligence Estimate entitled The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States. In December 2008, the National Intelligence Council released Strategic Implications for Global Health, which built on the 2000 report but also explored non-infectious health issues like maternal mortality, malnutrition, and chronic disease.

The current swine flu outbreak has several geopolitical implications. First, governments and international organizations (particularly the World Health Organization) will be perceived as more or less legitimate based on their ability to contain and treat the disease.

Second, governments’ decisions to issue travel warnings or ban certain products coming from affected countries are made with an eye toward both political and health implications. For instance, after the European Union issued an advisory against traveling to the United States, the acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention struck back, saying it was unwarranted.

Finally, this outbreak of swine flu won’t do anything to burnish Mexico’s image as a tourist destination, which has already suffered from the brutal drug violence of the last year. Lagging economic growth in Mexico, due to fewer tourists and the fallout from the global financial crisis, could help fuel unrest or increase immigration to the United States.

For more on diseases that can spread between animals and people—and how this relates to the environment—see “Human, Animal, and Ecosystem Health,” a May 2008 meeting sponsored by ECSP.

Photo: Mexican police officers wear surgical masks to guard against the spread of swine flu. Courtesy of Flickr user sarihuella.

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