Showing posts from category *Blog Columns.
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The Biological Roots of Conflict
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Armed conflict and its consequences concern us all. But where does war actually come from? In our new book, Sex and War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, Thomas Hayden and I argue that warfare and terrorism are written in our DNA. But that doesn’t mean humanity is doomed to a future as violent as our past has been. Understanding the biological basis of our warring instincts, we argue, gives us our best hope of decreasing the frequency and brutality of warfare.
Biologically speaking, war is an unusual behavior—very few other animals intentionally set out to kill members of their own species. Along with chimpanzees, with which we share a common evolutionary ancestor, we humans have a rare and terrible behavioral predisposition: Our young males, in the prime of life, are prone to band together and attack members of neighboring groups. The conflicts currently underway in the the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Darfur, Iraq, and elsewhere all have many proximate causes—political, religious, environmental, and otherwise. But contrary to long-held beliefs about the cultural roots of war, we argue that the behavior that makes the systematic slaughter of other human beings possible in the first place is based on a suite of evolved behavioral predispositions, which we call “team aggression.”
Anyone who has been in combat will tell you he fought not for a flag, or democracy, or some other abstraction, but for his buddy in the trench, his mate in the torpedo boat, or the soldier next to him in the up-armored Humvee. Intense loyalty for one’s immediate comrades, along with loss of empathy for the members of the enemy, are at the heart of team aggression, and of warfare and terrorism. These predispositions stretch back more than seven million years to our ape ancestors’ early battles for survival. We are all descended, by definition, from the victors of innumerable conflicts over resources, territory, and the right to mate. And we bear the marks of this legacy in the behaviors and impulses that spur us on to lethal conflict to this day, even when other solutions might be available.
The big question then becomes not, “Why do wars break out?”—that is the easy part—but, “Why does peace break out?,” as we know it often does. Far from condemning us to a future of warfare, understanding war’s biological roots can point us toward policies that increase the likelihood of peace, which also has deep roots in our biology. The first step toward peace is to do everything possible to grant women greater decision-making power in society. Team aggression is primarily a male drive, and while women are certainly competitive and capable of fighting bravely and ferociously, in the vast expanse of human history there is not a single record of women banding together spontaneously to attack their neighbors. Our book argues that when women have more agency, their societies become less warlike.
Population size and growth rates are two more key factors in the quest for peace. Rapid population growth increases competition over resources, increases unemployment, and boosts the ratio of young to older men, and all of these factors help facilitate extremism and violence. Experience shows, however, that when women have the opportunity to control their own fertility, family size and population growth decline—demonstrating that accessible, voluntary family planning programs are powerful tools for peace.
There is an aphorism: “If you want peace, understand war.” In Sex and War, we argue that understanding war also means understanding our own biology and evolutionary history. If we can do that, we can find more ways to help the biology of peace win out over the biology of war.
Malcolm Potts is Bixby Professor of Population and Family Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health. For more media coverage of Sex and War, see Newsweek, Wired Science, and The Scientist. -
Weekly Reading
›“Climate change of that scale [a 5° C increase] will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently,” said Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of energy, at the National Clean Energy Summit this summer.
“As the world focuses on the outcomes of the meeting on climate change that just concluded in Poznan, Poland, I am sitting in a workshop in Nazret, Ethiopia, listening to a panel of farmers talking about the effects of climate change on their lives – less rain, lower crop yields, malaria, no milk for their children,” writes Karen Hardee on Population Action International’s blog. “They are acutely aware that farm sizes shrink with each generation and speak eloquently of the need for access to family planning so they can have fewer children.”
The New York Times reports on the fight for control over uranium deposits in northern Niger, part of its ongoing series on resource conflict.
The current volume of Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism and International Organizations examines global water governance.
On the Carnegie Council’s “Policy Innovations” website, Rebecca Laks reports on efforts to incorporate alternative fuels into refugee camps in order to reduce deforestation in the surrounding environment.
The Center for American Progress has released “Putting Aid and Trade to Work: Fostering Development for Sustainable Security,” along with related documents.
The Sabaot Land Defence Force and the Kenyan army have been fighting over the rights to land in western Kenya for years, and local women are suffering, reports IRIN News. Fighters from both sides often rape women, giving them HIV/AIDS.
“Cleaning the environment has been identified as major tool in waging war against mosquitoes” and malaria in Nigeria, reports the Vanguard. -
Weekly Reading
›The Center for Global Development’s interactive 2008 Commitment to Development Index rates 22 wealthy countries on how much they help poor countries in seven areas: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.
“Destitution, distortion and deforestation: The impact of conflict on the timber and woodfuel trade in Darfur,” a new report from the UN Environment Programme’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch, says that saw-mills and wood-fired brick kilns are devastating Darfur’s fragile environment.
“If we are successful in reaching peak population sooner, at a lower number of people, rather than later with more people, we will be much more able to confront the myriad interlocking crises we face — a comparatively less crowded planet is an easier planet on which to build a bright green future,” writes Worldchanging’s Alex Steffen.
“In the case of the South American farms studied in this report, average simulated revenue losses from climate change in 2100 are estimated to range from 12 percent for a mild climate change scenario to 50 percent in a more severe scenario, even after farmers undertake adaptive reactions to minimize the damage,” finds a World Bank report on climate change and Latin America. Foreign Policy’s Passport blog comments.
In A Framework for Achieving Energy Security and Arresting Global Warming, Ken Berlin of the Center for American Progress sets out five sets of issues the federal government will have to address in order to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign oil.
“Ask any environmental organisation what it thinks about birth control; it’ll sidestep the issue, and say it’s not their place to comment. If a commentator says there are too many people on the planet, their words smack of authoritarian dictatorships and human rights violations, and echo traces of unpalatable eugenics. However, the reality is that every time we eat, switch on a light, get in a car, drink a beer, go on holiday or buy something to wear or use, we are adding to our environmental footprint,” writes Joanna Benn in BBC’s Green Room, in an article that generated a lively stream of commentary.
Land Conflicts: A practical guide to dealing with land disputes, a report by GTZ, is available online. -
Weekly Reading
›The U.S. Army’s first annual sustainability report details its environmental “bootprint.” It reveals that the Army reduced its facility energy intensity use by 8.4 percent from FY04-FY07, but increased its hazardous waste generation by 35 percent from 2003-2006. The New York Times’ Green, Inc. blog weighs in.
The Economist’s “The World in 2009” features a special section on the environment. UN Under-Secretary-General Sir John Holmes discusses the urgency of preparing for and responding to climate change-related disasters, while Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestle, highlights the links between water scarcity, agriculture, and biofuels.
The Year of the Gorilla 2009, a project of the United Nations, will promote low-volume wood-burning stoves, ecotourism, anti-poaching projects, and human health care in an effort to save endangered gorillas. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder of Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH), describes CTPH’s efforts to protect mountain gorillas through human health care and family planning, community outreach and education, and support for alternative livelihoods.
“While policymakers, wedded to an outmoded worldview, fret about what Arctic climate change might do to national power directly in the basin, human wellbeing could be devastated around the world by cascading consequences of shifts in the Arctic’s energy balance,” writes Thomas Homer-Dixon in “Climate Change, the Arctic, and Canada: Avoiding Yesterday’s Analysis of Tomorrow’s Crisis.” “Ironically, these changes could – in the end – do far more damage to state-centric world order and even to states’ narrowly defined interests than any interstate conflicts we might see happen in the newly blue waters of the Arctic.”
A new paper from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute explores the links between mining and conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone.
Diamonds and Human Security: Annual Review 2008 examines the socio-political impacts of diamond extraction in 13 countries, including the DRC, Sierra Leone, Angola, and Cote d’Ivoire.
Former ECSPer and current freelance writer Ali Gharib dissects “greenocons,” arguing that “the apparent convergence of the right-wing with environmentalism, typically a politics of the left, is complex and conflicted.” -
Development From the Bottom Up and the Top Down
›From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, by Oxfam’s Duncan Green, is a very important book—one that should be read by everyone at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and bilateral aid agencies. It combines a critique of current development policies and institutions with insights from community organizing and grassroots empowerment. Furthermore, it is comprehensive, covering not only aid but also politics, inequality, vulnerability, and reform of global governance structures. Finally, the book links the two critical components of the development equation: citizen participation and competent governance. The dichotomy between these two has always been a false one.
Green’s central message is that “development, and in particular efforts to tackle inequality, is best achieved through a combination of active citizens and effective states.” This should become part of the operational code of every development institution.
Green points out that “shocks and changes” can be important catalysts for reform. The current financial crisis is one of these shocks, and for our political leaders, it has made global governance a problem to be dealt with—as opposed to an issue too easily ignored. Just look at the recent G20 meeting. My colleagues and I spent a fair amount of time a decade ago designing and trying to sell leaders on an expanded summit to deal with the challenges of globalization. There were no takers. Yet this month we had a heads-of-state meeting that included leaders previously excluded from the G7.
No one really knows how long this crisis will last. But if leaders and their governments do not respond wisely and creatively, the human costs in both rich and poor countries will be immense. Leaders must understand that market forces left unregulated can ultimately prove destructive. This is the lesson of the struggle to regulate the U.S. national economy during the 19th century and of the period after World War I.
The financial crisis also provides an opportunity to raise fundamental questions about long-standing development policies. I strongly believe that the world, and particularly the United States, needs to adopt a new type of realpolitik—call it global realpolitik if you wish. For the United States, a global agenda should include:- An energy strategy that transitions to a less oil-dependent energy supply;
- A climate policy that recognizes one of the greatest threats to our well-being;
- A renewed emphasis on agriculture so that food production increases, particularly in poor countries;
- A health policy that deals with major health threats, old and new, and equips the world to deal with the next pandemic;
- An international effort to deal with failing states and internal conflicts; and
- A major emphasis on ending poverty.
In all of these areas, development promotion provides an important set of tools. No matter how good our intentions, we cannot accomplish these goals without competent partners: states with the capacity to manage their own affairs and cooperate on global problems—states in which rights and freedoms are guaranteed, and in which people feel they have a voice in the policies that affect them. International development is critical to helping foster such states.
I have two additional comments on From Poverty to Power. First, I think the section on aid could have been stronger. The aid “business” is in considerable disrepair, with simply too many donors trying to do too many things in too many places with too little coordination. There are many ways to make aid more effective, but they will not be easy to implement, and Green could have delved into the complexities a bit more.
Second, the book’s strength is also its weakness. It is nearly 500 pages long and has 792 endnotes! Fortunately, there are summaries in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese available online—but there needs to be a version aimed specifically at policymakers. Imagine you had 10 minutes to brief President-Elect Obama on the key findings of the book. What would you tell him? For better or worse, in this town, your insights are only as good as your elevator speech.
John W. Sewell is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the former president of the Overseas Development Council. -
Population-Health-Environment Effort Launched in American Samoa
›The government of American Samoa has decided to boldly address the issue of rapid population growth, due to its potentially severe environmental impacts on the territory. Governor Togiola Tulafono’s Coral Reef Advisory Group, for which I work, has identified population pressure as the single largest threat to American Samoa’s coastal resources. This is an important finding because all of American Samoa’s population lives along the coast, and the entire territory is considered a coastal zone.
The government recently hosted a Population Summit with more than 130 key stakeholders to discuss the problems and to devise collaborative solutions. Governor Tulafono opened the summit by stating that “resources are not finite—there are limits—and in an island setting as ours, the primary threat comes from people and how they behave responsibly in their use of land, water and air.” Participants developed a Population Declaration containing numerous policy initiatives, project proposals, and a recommendation to create a Population Commission. This declaration was presented to the legislature and Governor Tulafono for their consideration. American Samoa recently held elections, and the new government will be sworn in come January, at which point the working team I coordinate will be pressing the government to implement this important call to action.
Population-health-environment (PHE) activities are still in their infancy in American Samoa. However, we do have some projects underway. The most progress so far has been with local education and outreach efforts. I am working with one of our local environmental educators to develop PHE lesson plans and activities for local schools. We will be advertising these lesson plans in the local newspaper and informing teachers that our staff are available to come to their schools to introduce these issues. In addition, we are developing a number of PHE educational resources to distribute at schools we visit.
Family planning clinic staff and environmental educators have begun collaborating on a weekly radio series on the issue of rapid population growth. These discussions are raising the awareness of listeners and encouraging them to be good stewards of their health and their environment. In addition, a team of educators is planning the first annual World Population Day event here next year.
On the policy side, we are collaborating with the various agencies, planning departments, and staff from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community to develop a Territorial Population Policy. Once this is developed, American Samoa will be one of only three island states in the South Pacific with such a policy. This policy is still in the early stages of being written, but I am confident that a draft will be developed over the coming year.
Finally, American Samoa is ramping up its marine-protected-area efforts, especially the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources’ community-based fisheries management program, which is an ideal venue for integrating population and environmental efforts. One of my main focus areas over the coming year will be looking at how I can connect the ongoing Department of Health activities with these programs. Although we are still in the early stages of addressing PHE issues in American Samoa, I am hoping to use the momentum from the recent summit to get us up to speed as quickly as possible.
Alyssa Edwards, a former ECSP intern, is the population pressure local action strategy coordinator with the Coral Reef Advisory Group in American Samoa.
Photo: Samoan schoolchildren play on a truck. Courtesy of Alyssa Edwards. -
Weekly Reading
›The National Intelligence Council has released Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, an unclassified report seeking to identify a range of future security trends. As the Washington Post notes, the report “makes for sometimes grim reading in imagining a world of weak states bristling with weapons of mass destruction and unable to cope with burgeoning populations without adequate water and food.” ECSP hosted a review of an intermediate draft of the report in July 2008.
The United Nations, the U.S. Department of Defense, and several other militaries are spearheading an effort to fight climate change and ozone-depleting substances. The partnership comes out of a conference held in Paris earlier this month on the role of militaries in protecting the climate. Andrew Alder, who attended the conference, writes, “the Pentagon can also play a leading role in reducing carbon emissions, ironically helping to reduce the very threat for which it is preparing.”
In “Quantum of Solace,” James Bond goes up against a villain who takes control of a country’s water supply. Pacific Institute Director Peter Gleick thinks this is “art imitating life in many ways,” as he believes conflict over water will become more severe unless we develop and implement more efficient ways of using our limited freshwater resources.
“Data on rainfall patterns only weakly corroborate the claim that climate change explains the Darfur conflict,” argue Michael Kevane and Leslie Gray of Santa Clara University in “Darfur: rainfall and conflict,” a paper in Environmental Research Letters.
Human and animal diseases must be addressed before the different protected areas that make up the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area can be connected, according to “As the Fences Come Down: Emerging Concerns in Transfrontier Conservation Areas.”
Healthy People, Healthy Ecosystems is a new manual by the World Wildlife Fund on how to integrate health and family planning into existing conservation projects. It features examples of population-health-environment projects from the Philippines, Nepal, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Uganda. -
Weekly Reading
›The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated two restrictions on the Navy’s use of sonar during submarine training exercises off the coast of southern California. The restrictions had been designed to protect whales and other marine mammals.
Sierra magazine features letters to the next U.S. president from international environmental leaders, including Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder and CEO of Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health and recent author of “Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda.” “As we become increasingly aware of the great threat of climate change to life on Earth, we must not forget the other immediate threats of poverty, disease, and population growth,” writes Kalema-Zikusoka in Sierra. “These threats are interrelated and need to be addressed simultaneously.”
The Pacific Institute has released an updated version of its popular Water Conflict Chronology. The earliest entry is from 3,000 B.C.; the most recent occurred last month.
Representatives of Arab and Mediterannean governments met in Tunis this week to discuss strengthening their collaboration over environmental security, reports China Daily.
“NATO’s current conceptualization of environmental security needs to be broadened and deepened,” argues Janelle Knox-Hayes in Oxford International Review.
Health in Harmony is promoting conservation and providing access to health care in West Kalimantan in Indonesia through an innovative development project, reports New America Media.
Armed conflict and its consequences concern us all. But where does war actually come from? In our new book, 
The government of American Samoa has decided to boldly address the issue of rapid population growth, due to its potentially severe environmental impacts on the territory. Governor Togiola Tulafono’s 
