Product Description

The Earth's human population is expected to pass eight billion by the year 2025, while rapid growth in the global economy will spur ever increasing demands for natural resources. The world will consequently face growing scarcities of such vital renewable resources as cropland, fresh water, and forests. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues in this sobering book that these environmental scarcities will have profound social consequences--contributing to insurrections, ethnic clashes, urban unrest, and other forms of civil violence, especially in the developing world.

Homer-Dixon synthesizes work from a wide range of international research projects to develop a detailed model of the sources of environmental scarcity. He refers to water shortages in China, population growth in sub-Saharan Africa, and land distribution in Mexico, for example, to show that scarcities stem from the degradation and depletion of renewable resources, the increased demand for these resources, and/or their unequal distribution. He shows that these scarcities can lead to deepened poverty, large-scale migrations, sharpened social cleavages, and weakened institutions. And he describes the kinds of violence that can result from these social effects, arguing that conflicts in Chiapas, Mexico and ongoing turmoil in many African and Asian countries, for instance, are already partly a consequence of scarcity.

Homer-Dixon is careful to point out that the effects of environmental scarcity are indirect and act in combination with other social, political, and economic stresses. He also acknowledges that human ingenuity can reduce the likelihood of conflict, particularly in countries with efficient markets, capable states, and an educated populace. But he argues that the violent consequences of scarcity should not be underestimated--especially when about half the world's population depends directly on local renewables for their day-to-day well-being. In the next decades, he writes, growing scarcities will affect billions of people with unprecedented severity and at an unparalleled scale and pace.

Clearly written and forcefully argued, this book will become the standard work on the complex relationship between environmental scarcities and human violence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256821 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
"He focuses specifically on the relationship between environmental scarcity, ethnic clashes, and civil strife". -- Nikola Smith, Journal of International Affairs

Clearly written and forcefully argued, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence is an excellent work. -- Review

Review
[The book's] assertion that violence and the environment may be linked, and its conclusion that most big developing countries appear to be hurtling toward more internal conflict, are too important and intriguing to be left to an academic audience.
(John Stackhouse Toronto Globe and Mail )

This volume is for anyone with professional or deep personal interests in the relationships of natural resource management to economic development and human societies.
(Joseph P. Dudley The Quarterly Review of Biology )

[A] comprehensible model linking environmental scarcity and violence.
(Stephen P. Adamian Boston Book Review )

Important and intriguing.
(John Stackhouse Globe and Mail )

Clearly written and forcefully argued, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence is an excellent work.
(Biology Digest )

Thomas Homer-Dixon . . . has conducted extensive research on the links between environmental stress and violence in developing countries. . . . The book addresses the fact that environmental scarcity is not in itself a necessary or sufficient cause of conflict. Homer-Dixon evaluates why some societies are able to adapt well to environmental scarcity while others are not.
(Nikola Smith Journal of International Affairs )

Review
This is an important book. Homer-Dixon moves the arguments about environmental scarcity and violent conflict forward a big step. I doubt if much will be written about the subjects in the next ten years that does not build on it, follow out some of its leads, or try to refute it.
(Robert Jervis, Institute for War and Peace Studies, Columbia University )

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful, General, Missing the Big Bang

Last year we had some exceptional works on water scarcity (de Villier), resource wars (Klare), corporate razing of the environment (Czech), among many others that I reviewed here on Amazon. This year we have two extraordinary books, this is the second of the two in my estimation (the other being Andrew Price-Smith's "The Health of Nations: Infectious Disease, Environmental Change, and Their Effects on National Security and Development"- as both authors are from the University of Toronto, one can only applaud the collection of talent this organization seems to nurture).

The author is brilliant and has a longer track record than most for being both prescient and meticulous about in the arena of environmental scarcity.

His book is effective in making the point, but very candidly, did not go the full distance that I was hoping for--he is, in a word, too general and the book lacks a single chapter that pulls it all together with very specific rankings of both the variables and the countries.

The general proposition is clear-cut: environmental scarcity has social effects that lead to violent conflict. However, the author takes a side road in exploring "human ingenuity" as an ameliorating factor, and while he makes reference to crass corporate and elitist carpet-bagging and the social structures of repression, he fails to draw out more fully and explicitly the inherent association between repressive corrupt regimes with extreme concentrations of wealth and power, scarcity, and violence.

For myself, I found two gems within this book: the first, a passing comment on the crucial role that unfettered urbanization plays in exacerbating scarcity and all that comes with it (migration, disease, crime); the second, the author's prescriptive emphasis, extremely importance, on the prevention of scarcity rather than adaptation or amelioration of scarcity.

The endnotes would have been more useful as footnotes but are quite good. The bibliography and index are four star rather than five star, and I was quite disappointed to not have a single page about the author, nor a consolidated bibliography of his many signal contribution over time in the form of articles and lectures.

A must read on the relationship of violence and scarcity...
Like most political science books, after I finished this one, I was slightly disappointed. I bought this book in hopes of a masterwork; upon turning its last page, I thought that this book was something much less than this. I thought that it begged as many questions as it sought to answer; I thought that much of what it brought forth as profound was only that in the sense of being profoundly obvious; I thought that the author opened this book with definitions that were overly broad and thus, in the end, proved nothing.

Thankfully, as time has passed, though, my opinion of this book has changed fully and completely. Many of the problems that I saw with this book stemmed from the fact that this book is essentially the first large-scale, well-publicized work of its kind. Its author puts forth a strongly written and researched work into the interrelationship between scarcity and violence on multiple levels; it is both (fairly) easy to understand while still being challenging for those who are not new to the study of conflict....

I'd recommend this book to any student of international or comparative politics-- especially those who are interested in fighting between groups of people. This is probably going to be one of the key books toward understanding what is to come in the world in the next twenty or so years; in this category (though topically somewhat unrelated) I'd suggest van Crevald's 'The Transformation of War' and 'The Rise and Decline of the State' and some of Robert Kaplan's travel books as excellent source material....

I am certain that there are going to be many who dislike what this book says-- but as to how it is written, and how it is researched, it seems to me to have been in large measure flawless. Buy this book.

Seminal thoughtpiece, masterfully written
This book offers brilliant and carefully argued insights into the nexus of relations that the title suggests. Homer-Dixon has made a case for environmental conern all the more powerful by steering away from the dogmatism that so often accompanies such work. Instead, he has presented a book that is the result of years of academic research in a way that anyone will enjoy reading it. Homer-Dixon is a great writer who knows an enormous amount about this subject and has as a result written an incredible book. Buy it! Read it! Get your professor to put it on the core reading list of any course about world politics, international relations, environment, and more!