Customer Reviews

Environment, Scarcity, and Violence

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thomas Homer-Dixon's "Environment, Scarcity and Violence" offers a scholarly analysis of the role environmental scarcity plays in spawning violent human conflicts. The author uses social science research methodology to isolate the independent variable of environmental scarcity in order to study the ways it may or may not contribute to violence. Importantly, Homer-Dixon has found that environmental scarcity, while insignificant in itself, is a significant factor in amplifying the underlying tensions that may in turn fuel a society's descent into violence.

The author goes on to argue that countries that possess sufficient quantities of ingenuity may be able to avert violence by curing their environmental crises through the application of advanced technological and managerial skills. On the other hand, nations that lack ingenuity -- or those who lose intellectual capital as the result of their deteriorating environments -- are more apt to descend into violence as these societies negatively respond to their crises by turning against themselves.

Although the book provides no easy answers to the stated problems, it does suggest that democracy and international cooperation will be badly needed in the struggle to create a peaceful and stable planet. I strongly recommended this outstanding book to policy makers and others who are interested in learning how we might secure a non-violent future for ourselves in an increasingly tumultuous world.

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.

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.

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!