THE END OF THE COLD WAR 1
has forced a redefinition of national security in the United States. While 'rogue states' like Iraq have replaced the Soviet Union as the enemy (Klare 1995), globalization has ushered in an era of more amorphous threats. The environment ranks high among them. 'Environment and security' are linked together in a rapidly growing policy enterprise which involves the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, the CIA, academic research institutes, private foundations and non-governmental organizations.

There are a number of reasons why 'environment and security' is an idea whose time has come. Clearly, serious global environmental problems such as ozone depletion, global warming and pollution of the seas require new forms of inter-national cooperation. Whether or not these should be the purview of national security agencies is another question, given their tradition of competition, secrecy, and nationalism (Deudney 1991).

The focus of the environment and security field is less on these legitimate concerns, however, than on a supposed causal relationship between population pressures, resource scarcities and intrastate conflict in the South. According to the main architect of this theory, Canadian political scientist Thomas Horner-Dixon, environmentally-induced internal conflict in turn causes states to fragment or become more authoritarian, seriously disrupting international security (Homer-Dixon 1994).

The scarcity-conflict model is fast becoming conventional wisdom in foreign policy, population and environment circles, popularized and sensationalized by writers such as Robert Kaplan and Paul Kennedy (Kaplan 1994, Connelly and Kennedy 1994). Top State Department officials have blamed political strife in Haiti, Rwanda and Chiapas, Mexico in large part on population and environmental stresses (Wirth 1994, Christopher 1996).

Opportunism no doubt plays a role in making the model a fashionable trend. For the State Department it is a convenient form of ideological spin control which masks the tragic human consequences of U.S. support for military regimes and Duvalier-style dictatorships during the Cold War. For the military it provides new rationales and missions to legitimize its multi-billion dollar budget. This also means more business for the large aerospace corporations suffering from the loss of Cold War defense contracts. Increasingly, the military-industrial complex is becoming a "military-environmental security complex" (Deibert 1996:29).

The international relations field also needs new raisons d'etre, and/environment and security research is well-funded. The population lobby has seized on it too for several reasons. As birth rates continue to rise around the globe more rapidly than anticipated, it is hard to sustain the alarmism that fuels popular support for population control. Building an image of an over-populated, environmentally degraded and violent Third World is politically expedient, especially as it feeds on popular fears that refugees from this chaos will storm our borders.

An appeal to national security interests is also a strategy to counter the right-wing assault on international family planning assistance. For example, a recent Rockefeller Foundation report High Stakes: Tbe United States, Global Population and Our Common Future (whose cover contrasts sad dark-skinned children with happy white ones) draws heavily on the scarcity- conflict model in order to move a recalcitrant Congress:

Resource scarcities, often exacerbated by population growth, undermine the quality of life, confidence in government, and threaten to destabilize many parts of the globe... Once a resource becomes scarce, a society's "haves" often seize control of it, leaving an even smaller share for the "have-nots." Since population growth rates are highest among the have-nots, this means that an even larger number of people are competing for a smaller share of resources-and violent conflict is often the result (Rockefeller Foundation 1997: 9,21).

In a kind of strange deja-vu, the threat of resource scarcities and political instability also featured in Rockefeller's first rationales for population control in the 1950s (Hartmann 1995).

Opportunism and political pragmatism are not the only explanations for the rapid acceptance of the seucity-conflict model, however. The concept of scarcity has a deep resonance in the U.S. cultural and political psyche. Andrew Ross draws the link between the manufacturing of social scarcity essential to capitalist, competitive individualist regimes and the notion of natural scarcity (Ross 1996). The grossly unequal division of wealth in a society of resource abundance and waste demands an ethic of social scarcity to explain poverty. In the 1970s the wasteful consumer class in the U.S. spearheaded concerns about a global ecology crisis; worried about the earth's 'natural limits', they brought a new paradigm of natural scarcity into being. The result, according to Ross, is that

For more than two decades now, public consciousness has sustained complex assumptions about both kinds of scarcity. In that same period of time, however, neo-liberalism's austerity regime has ushered in what can only he described as a pro-scarcity climate, distinguished, economically, by deep concessions and cutbacks, and politically, by the rollback of "excessive" rights. As a result, the new concerns about natural scarcity have been paralleled, every step of the way, by a brutal imposition of social scarcity... the two forms of scarcity have been confused, either deliberately, in order to reinforce austerity measures against the poor, or else inadvertently, through a lack of information about how natural resources are produced and distributed (6)

Ross concludes that systematic inequalities underlie both shortages of economic resources and environmental degradation. Unlike New Right economists like Julian Simon, he does not minimize the severity of environmental problems, but points to the need for redistribution of wealth and power in order to prevent the "lonely hour when biological scarcity is the 'last instance' of determination in planetary life" (26).

Neo-Malthusianism dovetails nicely with the ideology of social and natural scarcity and has proved very compatible with neo-liberalism. It is not surprising that it occupies such an important place in the environment and security framework.

PARABLES OF SCARITY

In 1989 Jessica Matthews' article "Redefining Security" helped set the stage for the linking of environment and security. "Population growth lies at the core of most environmental trends," she wrote and then went on to recommend support for international family planning as one of the four most important steps in a new security agenda (Matthews 1989:163, 177).

Since that time references to population pressures as a, if not the, major strain on the environment have become seemingly obligatory in the literature. They are usually unsubstantiated, presented as a self-evident truth. The 1996 U.S. National Security Strategy announces in the preface that "large-scale environmental degradation, exacerbated by rapid population growth, threatens to undermine political stability in many countries and regions" (White House 1996:72). "Exacerbated by population growth" (and nothing else) is in fact a constant refrain.

Just what is the evidence for these assumptions? Thomas Homer-Dixon's Project on Environment, Population and Security, jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Canadian Center for Global Security, has produced a series of case studies (e.g. of Rwanda, South Africa, Pakistan, and Chiapas) to investigate the relationship between population growth, renewable resource scarcities, migration and violent conflict. While the text of the case studies tends to be more nuanced, the models based on them are simple diagrams of questionable causality.

Homer-Dixon admits that his project did not address the complex root causes of environmental scarcities such as "the maldistribution or depletion of resources, dysfunctional markets, exploitative gender relations and the international political economy." Instead "the project began its analysis with the existence of scarcity and examined the social consequences of that scarcity'(Homer-Dixon 1996:45). This is a fundamental flaw. analytically, how can one separate the root causes from the consequences? 'Scarcity,' like an artificial wall, stops and separates dynamic social and ecological processes.

In Figure 1 Homer-Dixon illustrates the main lines of causality between environmental scarcity and conflict. In Figure 2 he depicts the process of 'resource capture', and in Figure 3 that of 'ecological marginalization.' Note the important role of population growth in all three-and the notable absence of the "root causes" he neglects.

From Homer-Dixon 1996.45-46

There are a number of problems with these models. First, by their very nature, they homogenize diverse regions with distinct histories and cultures. Clearly, the specific colonial and post- colonial histories of countries such as Rwanda and Haiti, for example, have much to do with the present generation of 'scarcity' in those places.

Also missing from the picture is serious discussion of economic inequalities. Although Homer-Dixon acknowledges their importance, the place they occupy in his models skews causality, in effect naturalizing the processes of maldistribution. Combined with population growth, he argues, resource scarcity encourages powerful groups within a society to shift distribution in their favor-this is the 'resource capture' presented in Figure 2. Similarly, agricultural shortfalls due to population growth and land degradation are seen to induce large development schemes, the benefits of which are then captured by the rich (Homer-Dixon 1994:13).

The origins of inequalities and the role of powerful forces- agribusiness, mining, timber and other corporate interests-in environmental degradation receive little attention. The argument that environmental stress weakens state structures, or that it makes them more authoritarian, puts the cart before the horse, since state structures themselves profoundly affect how resources are distributed and managed. The choice of a large development scheme over more sustainable small-scale projects, for example, may have little or nothing to do with agricultural shortfalls and instead reflect the links between foreign donors and domestic elites who stand to gain from lucrative procurement and construction contracts.

Homer-Dixon's view of the state is oddly idealized. Environmental scarcities, he argues, "threaten the delicate give and take relationship between state and society." If the state cannot cope with the resulting agricultural shortfalls, economic stress and migration, then "grass-roots organisations" responsive only to their own constituencies may step in to respond. This enhances "the opportunities for powerful groups to seize control of local institutions or the state and use them for their own gain (Homer-Dixon 1996:48)."

It takes quite a stretch of the imagination to believe the states which he has studied, which include Mexico, Pakistan and Rwanda after all, had a nice give and take relationship with their people before scarcity set in. In fact, one could argue the real scarcity in those places was and still is one of democratic control over the structures that govern access to both economic and natural resources. Characterizing "grassroots organizations" as forces for social segmentation also neglects the role many such groups have played in building a democratic civil society to challenge corrupt and authoritarian states.

The neglect of external actors constitutes a further lacuna. Intra-state violence is seldom a self-contained phenomenon- where, for example, does the role of the arms trade, geopolitical maneuvering and international financial institutions figure in Homer-Dixon's models? The models are essentially dosed systems in which internal stresses may generate movement outward, mainly though mass migration, but the outside is rarely seen to he pressing in.

Homer-Dixon, for example, depicts ecological marginalisation (Figure 3) as a process by which unequal resource access and population growth force the migration of the poorest groups to ecologically vulnerable areas such as steep hillsides and tropical rain forests. The pressure of their numbers and their lack of knowledge and capital then cause environmental scarcity and poverty (Homer-Dixon 1996:47).

But should population growth and unequal resource access really he ascribed equal weight as the 'push factors' causing people to migrate to such areas? An extensive study of deforestation by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development notes that while many observers blame deforestation on forest clearing by poor migrants, they ignore the larger forces attracting or pushing these migrants into forest areas, such as the expansion of large-scale commercial farming, ranching, logging and mining. "To blame poor migrants for destroying the forest is like blaming poor conscripts for the ravages of wax" (Barraciough and Ghimire 1990:130). The study found an absence of any close correspondence between deforestation rates and rates of either total or agricultural population growth.

In most cases the ecological damage caused by poor peasants pales in comparison with that caused by commercial extraction of resources, often for export. The greatest deforestation occurred under colonialism, and today most tropical wood and beef production, for example, is destined for foreign markets. The failure to link the consumption patterns of developed countries and Southern elites to 'local' land uses is in fact a key shortcoming of Homer-Dixon's approach. The scope of inquiry is surprisingly insular in a period of rapid global economic integration.

The narrow conceptualization of population is also surprising given that the population field itself is opening up to more gender-sensitive analysis and programming. Homer-Dixon, and the environment and security literature in general, focus mainly on aggregate population size and density, paying little attention to other key dynamics such as age distribution, differential mortality rates, and sex ratios (Arizpe, Stone and Major 1994). Neglecting history once again, the literature displays little understanding of the processes of demographic transition to lower birth and death rates.

Nor, except for a few obligatory references to the need for women's literacy programs, does it seriously address gender inequalities despite a significant body of research in this area. Subsumed into the analytic frame of 'population pressure', women implicitly become the breeders of both environmental destruction and violence. Important questions are not asked, much less answered. What are women's property rights, labor obligations, and roles in the management of environmental resources? How have structural adjustment policies affected their health, workloads and status relative to male family members? Where are investments being made: in basic food production, where rural women most often work, or in export agriculture? If men are forced to migrate to earn cash or to join militaries, how do women cope with the labor requirements needed to sustain food production and maintain infrastructure?

Instead of linking violence to women's fertility, one can ask how violence affects women's capacity to support the family and community institutions on which protection of the local environment depends. Even more than conventional inter-state war, current conflicts in Africa brutally target women and children in order to destroy communities and at the same time

depend on their labor to sustain military forces with both food and fresh recruits (Turshen and Twagiramariya 1998). Women are often discriminated against in post-conflict transitions as well. In Rwanda, for example, there are concerns that widows may lose access to land because of womenís limited property rights, undermining the process of agricultural rehabilitation (Byrne, Marcus and Power-Stevens 1995).

Violence is also a direct cause of environmental destruction. The German Institute for Peace Policy estimates that one-fifth of all global environmental degradation is due to military and related activities (Hynes 1993). Feminist geographer Joni Seager argues that whether they are at peace or war, militaries are the biggest threat to the global environment (Sener 1993). Even after the cessation of conflict, land mines and the lingering effects of scorched earth policies and chemical warfare obstruct environmental restoration.

Militaries also directly contribute to the creation of both 'social' and 'natural' scarcities since they take economic resources away from human development and environmental improvements.

This is not to say that population growth plays no role at an in environmental degradation, but to ascribe to it the leading role is to miss the bigger, more complex picture. It fails to address adequately the question of why birch rates remain high in some places. In El Salvador, for example, the same unequal social and economic relations which have slowed demographic transition underlie unsustainable patterns of resource use (Faber 1992).

Recent research also challenges the neo-Malthusian assumption that population pressure always negatively affects the environment. In parts of Africa, increasing population densities combined with sound agricultural practices have spurred environmental improvements (Tiffen, Mortimore and Gichuki 1994). Similarly, the focus on peasant populations as the destroyers of the environment neglects the important role of traditional agriculture in preserving biodiversity (Altieri and Merrick 1987).

Even though he focuses on population, Homer-Dixon is not a strict Malthusian doomsdayer in the tradition of Garrett Hardin, Paul Ehrlich, et al. He believes that social and technical ingenuity can help overcome the problem of resource scarcities. Institutions that "provide the right incentives for technological entrepreneurs" and "family planning and literacy campaigns" that ease population-induced scarcity are among his solutions (Homer-Dixon 1994:16-17). Missing from this technocratic framework is the notion of political transformation. Indeed, progressive movements for social change would probably he put into the category of scarcity-induced conflict.

Despite its popularity among liberals, Homer-Dixon's is a conservative world view where the maldistribution of both power and resources is essentially naturalized and determined by the god of scarcity. When this god of scarcity meets the devil of racism, the result is the greening of hate.

BACK TO DEEPEST, DARKEST AFRICA

In 1994 journalist Robert Kaplan popularized Homer-Dixon's views in an Atlantic Monthly piece on "The Coming Anarchy," which proclaimed the environment as the most important national security issue of the 21st century (Kaplan 1994). Much of the article dwells on West Africa which Kaplan presents as a hopeless scene of overpopulation, squalor, environmental degradation and violence, where young men are post-modern barbarians and children with swollen bellies swarm like ants.

Kaplan's article did for Africa what The Bell Curve did for the U.S.: it reintroduced racism as a legitimate form of public discourse. But whereas The Bell Curve was at least attacked by some elements of the liberal press, "The Coming Anarchy' captured the imagination of the liberal establishment, even that of President Clinton himself .

"I was so gripped by many things that were in that article," Clinton said in a speech on population, land by the more academic treatment of the same subject by Professor Homer- Dixon... You have to say, if you look at the numbers, you must reduce the rate of population growth' (U.S. Department of State 1994).

Homer-Dixon, of course, should not he held responsible for all of Kaplan's racist (and misogynist) stereotyping, and he is now careful to distance himself from the journalist's work. Yet the fact remains that the scarcity-conflict model can easily serve as a vehicle for this kind of thinking. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of Africa.

Kaplan expands on the themes of "The Coming Anarchy' in his book The Ends of the Eartb which takes environmental determinism to a new and absurd level. For example, he links violence in Liberia to its dense forests. In the dark rain forest where trees and creepers block the view, "men tend to depend less on reason and more on suspicion," he writes. The Liberian forest, "a green prison with iron rain clouds," is thus responsible for the animism and spirit worship which weakened the civilizing influences of Islam and Christianity. Liberia, "a forest culture" further undermined by overpopulation, is naturally more prone to violence (Kaplan 1996a:28-29).

Seen through Kaplanís eyes, African women are mainly bare- breasted and pregnant and their fertility is out of control, with dire consequences. In an interview on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, he went so far as to suggest that if women in Rwanda had lower fertility, the genocide would not have happened (Kaplan 1996b).

His images of Africa are reminiscent of old colonial accounts of the enlightened white man encountering the primitive savage. In fact, he is enamored of the British colonial writer Richard Burton, who, he notes approvingly, perceived that slaves preferred the "paradise" of the Arnerican South and the "lands of happiness" in the West Indies to their native home (Kaplan 1996a:80-81).

Despite the lack of substantive evidence, Kaplan maintains that Africaís climate and poverty are the breeding ground for AIDS and other deadly diseases which, along with crime, threaten even our wealthiest suburbs. And that is why self- interest dictates we care about the continent. He is short on solutions, however. He is not keen on democracy, preferring the "honest" authoritarianism of Singapore's dictator Lee Kuan Yew (Kaplan 1996a:377). Hence, he argues, the West should shift emphasis away from promoting democracy in the Third World toward "family planning, environmental renewal, road-building and other stabilizing projects" (Kaplan 1995). He ignores the emergence of many positive national and transnational political forces such as the peace, environmental and women's movements.

Like Kaplan, Jeffrey Goldberg of the New York Times also shoulders a modern day variant of the white man's burden. In a recent feature article entitled "Our Africa Problem," he writes:

There is a whole new set of what might be called biological national-security issues: environmental destruction, explosive population growth, the rapid spread of disease and the emergence of entirely new diseases. It is widely understood that these things hurt Africa. What is not understood is that they can also hurt America (Coldberg 1997:35).

Goldberg warns of yet unknown killer microbes emanating from Central Africsís dense rain forests. "Chaos, though, is the best incubator of disease," he claims, and disease is an incubator of chaos. Africa is caught in a vicious cycle of misery where war and corruption mean no health care and family planning, which leads to "too many sick people" who in turn "create desperation and poverty," leading back to corruption and war (35). This simple closed system leaves out everything from IMF and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment pro- grams that have seriously eroded African public health systems to declining terms of trade for African products on the inter-national market.

Goldberg has solutions, however. Watching the sterilization of a poor, naked Kenyan woman, he notes that U.S. aid for

family planning can help stem the biological crisis of overpopulation. Then add to that the magic bullet of the free market. The export of beef and roses, he believes, will save Uganda. The U.S. should pursue a policy of heightened engagement in Africa not only to subdue the microbes, reduce population growth, and stem the tide of refugees, but quite simply "to make money'(80).

But making money is not always conducive to protecting the environment. For example, commercial livestock and flower production may well have a negative impact on Ugandaís ecology. Methyl bromide, a highly toxic pesticide which is also a major ozone depletor, is now used on neighboring Kenyaís flower crops (Political Ecology Group 1997). The limits of Goldberg's environmental understanding are revealed by his statement that Mobuto, Zaire's recently deposed dictator, was "an effective environmentalist," even if an inadvertent one, because he let the countraís infrastructure deteriorate and left its immense forests in near-pristine condition (Goldberg 1997:38). Underdevelopment thus becomes synonymous with environmentalism, as if the human beings inhabiting Zaire do not matter.

A psychoanalyst could have a field day with Kaplan and Goldbergís images of Africa- the dark, impenetrable rain forest as the subconscious; fears of womenís uncontrolled fertility as a manifestation of sexual repression; Africa as the unknown, the other, the enemy; the U.S. as the superpower superego.

Whatever the reason, these images have infected the U.S. political psyche, helping to shape public opinion if not public policy. That overpopulation was a major cause of the genocide in Rwanda has become conventional wisdom in mainstream environmental and foreign policy circles. In a much heralded speech on the environment, former Secretary of State Warren Christopher warned that "We must not forget the hard lessons of Rwanda, where depleted resources and swollen populations exacerbated the political and economic pressures that exploded into one of this decade's greatest tragedies"(Christopher 1996:83). Similarly, Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Timothy Wirth remarked recently that in Rwanda "there were simply too many people competing for too few resources" (Wirth 1996:118).

Scholars more familiar with Rwandaís history, and that of neighboring states, offer a much more complex understanding of the tragic events there. While not denying the existence of demographic and environmental pressures, Peter Uvin, who worked as a development consultant in the region, analyzes the role of economic and political inequalities, institutionalized ethnic prejudice, and foreign assistance in generating the conflict.

Ironically, the international aid community considered Rwanda a model developing country., even in the 1990s when violent repression and genocidal preparations were becoming state policy, foreign aid more than doubled. Uvin writes:

Rwanda's genocide was the extreme outcome of the failure of a development model that was based on ethnic, regional and social exclusion; that increased deprivation, humiliation and vulnerability of the poor; that allowed state-instigated racism and discrimination to continue unabated; that was top-down and authoritarian; and that left the masses uninformed, uneducated, and unable to resist orders and slogans. It was also the failure of development cooperation based on ethnic amnesia, technocracy and political blindness (Uvin 1996:34).

In his study of the population-resources dilemma in Rwanda and Burundi, economist Lconce Ndikumana explains why agriculture has stagnated in the region, noting the lack of substantive improvements in farming technologies. At the same time the demand for children has remained high. Yet despite pressure on the land, he argues that the political crises in both countries are mainly the result of institutional failure caused by a long history of ethnic divisions between the Hutu and Tutsi: "These countries have promoted nepotist and dictatorial political systems that reward ethnic identity rather than merit while miserably failing to protect the rights and interests of the individual and minority groups... Population growth is only a scapegoat for people willing to put the blame of failed development policies on rural populations(Ndikuma1997:21,30).

The failure of the international community to acknowledge the genocide and take swift action can also he seen as profound institutional failure on the global level.

Even Homer-Dixon's case study of Rwanda acknowledges that environmental and population pressures had at most "a limited, aggravating role in the Rwandan conflict (Pereival and Homer-Dixon 1995:2). The case of Rwanda dearly points to the importance of in-depth case study research to counter simplistic explanations of conflict. In his analysis of population-environment models in Africa, Robert Ford urges scholars and policy makers "to take the longer road" and confront the complex and constantly changing political, economic, cultural, historical and environmental dynamics of a specific locale. Neo-Malthusianism, he concludes, "is not a sound basis for environmental security' (Ford 1995:215).

FAULTY DIAGNOSES, FAULTY PRESCRIPTIONS

It is too early to judge whether the scarcity-conflict model will have a direct impact on foreign policy or continue to play a more indirect role of (mis)shaping public opinion by masking the deeper political and economic forces generating poverty, environmental degradation, violence and migration in the South. Much will depend on the extent to which it is challenged by alternative voices. Failing an effective challenge, one can foresee a number of serious consequences. These include:

Distortion of population policy. By over-emphasizing the role of population growth in environmental degradation and violence, the model legitimizes population control as a top priority. Already in India and Bangladesh, population control absorbs from one quarter to one-third of the annual health budget, and in a number of African countries under- going structural adjustment, public health systems have been decimated while funding of population programs has increased. (Hartmann 1995).

Viewing population pressure as a security threat creates a false climate of fear and urgency, eroding the progress made by the womens health movement m moving die population establishment away from a narrow focus on fertility reduction to a more comprehensive womenís reproductive health and rights perspective at the 1994 U.N. Population Conference in Cairo. This perspective is likely to he lost if family planning is viewed as the magic bullet to pacify Third World trouble spots and save the environment. Dennis Pirages, a key academic exponent of the scarcity-conflict model, believes that dealing with population growth is the place to begin a "paradigm shift' in foreign and defense policies. He laments the Cairo "emphasis on rights at the expense of responsibilities" and instead advocates tough and resolute action on family planning. (Pirages 1997:43)

This kind of security mindset could relegitimize the use of targets, incentives and coercion in family planning programs,

with grave repercussions for women's health and human rights. It could reinforce the persistent bias in the choice of contraceptive technology towards long-acting, provider-dependent methods such as Norplant over sa&r barrier methods, which also protect against sexually transmitted diseases such as HIVIAIDS (Hartmann 1995).

Homer-Dixon's project shows no sensitivity toward these issues, neglecting to look at the ethical implications of its focus on population pressures and the actual population programs that exist in the case study countries. In one article he briefly mentions coercive policies in China leading to lower fertility rates, but he does not criticize them. Rather, his concern is that "experts are not sure this accomplishment ran be sustained for long" (Homer-Dixon 1994:37-38). It hardly bodes well for women's right when forced abortions and sterilizations are considered an "accomplishment."

Gender bias and blindness. This approach to population is part of a larger gender bias and blindness in the environment and security field. It is in fact far behind the development field in this respect, perhaps because it takes so little notice of literature and ideas outside of its disciplinary boundaries. The poor, when they are differentiated at all, are done so mainly on the basis of ethnicity and religion.

While the neglect of gender issues could easily lead to policies that reinforce male hegemony and treat women as objects rather than subjects, it also prevents recognition of the leading role women have played in reconciliation efforts, such as the peace movement in the Middle East and Somalia and the anti- communalism struggle in India. Women have been at the forefront of attempts at ecological restoration too, such as the Green Belt movement in Kenya and the Chipko movement in India. Rather than targeting womenís fertility, it would make more sense to learn from their organizing efforts and engage them in the processes of conflict resolution.

Dehumanizing and depoliticizing refugees. By naturalizing poverty and political violence in the South, the scarcity-conflict model dehumanizes refugees of color, turning them into faceless invaders fleeing the chaos and environmental degradation they brought upon themselves (see, for example, Connelly and Kennedy 1994). This view feeds racism and helps legitimize current U.S. immigration 'reform' that, among other restrictive measures, severely curtail the rights of asylum seekers.
Using the scarcity-conflict model, political refugees from countries like El Salvador could potentially he recast as less worthy 'environmental refugees.' Already senior U.S. intelligence officials are rewriting the history of the war in El Salvador as one caused by environmental impoverishment and overpopulation, Failing to acknowledge U.S support for the Salvadorean military's death squads and scorched earth policies (Smith 1995).

MILITARISING SUSTAINABILITY

A particularly pressing issue is what impact the scarcity-conflict model will have on U.S. defense policies. Currently, the Environment and Security Office of the U.S. Department of Defense has a budget of about $5 billion, almost equivalent to that of the civilian Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (Nitze 1995). While much of this money is directed toward activities such as cleaning up bases and protecting military personnel and facilities from biological hazards, another top priority is "helping neutralize environmental conditions which could lead to instability' (Goodman and Center 1995:98).

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) focuses more explicitly on "the linkages between increasing ethnic tensions ... and resource scarcity' (Wilson Center 1997:209), and since 1991 the annual U.S. National Security Strategy document has included environmental issues.

Using military satellites for environmental surveillance seems to he the most important practical application of the new national security focus on the environment. In the MEDEA project a select group of environmental scientists is working with the CIA to identify key sites for surveillance. The data collected will he kept in secret archives and then released to "unspecified 'future generations' of scientists" (Deihert 1996). Given the intelligence communities long history of deeply institutionalized secrecy, duplicity and paranoid distrust of outsiders, Deibert is skeptical that environmental researchers, especially those from other countries, will he able to have confidence that the information, when it is finally released, has not been altered or rnanipulated for 'national security reasons' (3 1).

The existence of alternative satellite monitoring systems, Controlled by civilians, can act to some extent as a hedge against intelligence disinformation. But Diebert points to the worrying :rend of merging both civilian and military environmental reconnaisance systems under one umbrella, so that the military effectively) becomes the clearing house for environmental data. He cites as an example the Brazilian government's purchase of a $1.4 billion Amazon Surveillance System from the U.S., which will he used to monitor borders, airspace, and the environment.

Also problematic is the kind of technocratic, quantitative analysis of environment and conflict emerging from both official and academic security circles, which substitutes for rigorous, qualitative and historical research. The ClAís State Failure Task Force" is testing the effect of 75 possible independent variables, including demographic, environmental, social and economic ones, on various political crises from 1955-1994. But in a world of complex causality, how can such variables he considered 'independent" (Wilson Center 1997:212)? (in keeping with neoliberal trends, "openness to international trade" was found to one of the most important predictors of state stabuity.)

Gareth Porter has argued for the creation of a quantitative national security impact index" which would reveal the

importance of major global environmental threats (Porter 1996). Researchers in Norway are using quantitative analysis to test whether environmental scarcity and population density are major contributors to civil conflict (Wilson Center 1997:200). Such studies are no doubt the wave of the future, and could serve as the empirical basis for the formation of defense policies. As such, they require detailed critical scrutiny.

The U.S.military is already directly involved in promoting 01 sustainable development" in Africa, assisting almost 20 countries in environmental activities such as fisheries management, game park preservation and water resource management (Butts 1996:26). The Defense Intelligence Agency has also identified ecological deterioration in Lake Victoria "as a cause of potential instability in East Africa' s Atwood 1995).

While these are real environmental concerns, why is the U.S. military addressing them and not civilian agencies in partnership with local people themselves? Isn't it a fundamental contradiction in terms to have a military engaged in "sustainable development," when it is has been the cause of so much environmental devastation and is hardly known for its democratic, participatory and gender-sensitive approach? Daniel Deudney argues convincingly that turning the environment into an object of national security risks under-mining the positive forms of global environmental thinking and cooperation that have been emerging in recent years. He writes:

The movement to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations must directly challenge the tribal power of nationalism and the chronic militarization of public discourse. Ecological degradation is not a threat to national security., rather, environmentalism is a threat to national security attitudes and institutions. When environmentalists dress their arguments in the blood-soaked garments of the war system, they betray their core values and create confusion about the real tasks at hand (Deudney 1991:28).

Its also important to remember that national security agencies need an enemy, and who is the enemy when violence and instability are blamed on population pressures and resource scarcities? Implicitly, if not explicitly, the enemy becomes poor people, especially poor women, and the social movements which represent them. It may be an ironic outcome of the scarcity-conflict model that environmental groups are themselves targeted as security threats when they challenge the control and degradation of natural resources by local elites governments, and transnational corporations.

Anti-environmentalist repression is already occurring in many countries. Witness the violent suppression of the Ogoni people in Nigeria who are trying to protect their lands from destruction by Shell Oil. Sooner or laterwhen their lands are rendered uninhabitable, they too will probably be written off as resource-scarce.

It is time to challenge the population, environment and security trinity before it exercises a firmer hold on public policy and consciousness. While a watchdog role is necessary, it is not sufficient. The integration of progressive social science research with the experiences and activism of environmental, women's, peace and refugee rights movements can create a new and deeper understanding of the forces generating poverty, environmental destruction and violence. Solutions will come not from the barrel of a gun, a spy satellite or coercively imposed contraceptive technologies, but horn the wisdom and actions of those who have been working long and hard to overcome the scarcity of justice.

- Betsy Hartmann is the Dirretor of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amhent, AM. and afoundng member ofthe Committee on Women, Population and the Environment. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs.. The Global PoZitics ofPopuZation Control (South End Prm, 1995) and co-author ofA Quiet Wolence.. A View from a Bangladesh Village (Food First and Zed Books. 1983)

This is a slightly abridged version of a piece which will appear in CWPE's anthology, Dangerous Intersections, edited by Ynestra King and Jael Silliman to be published by South End Press in 1998. 1 would also like to refer readers to the Woodrow Wilson Environmental Change and Security Project Reports, which are an excellent compilation of information.