Environment, Scarcity, and Violence

(Paperback)

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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. He synthesizes work from a wide range of international research projects to develop a detailed model of the sources of environmental scarcity. Pathbreaking and informative, this book will become the standard work on the complex relationship between environmental scarcities and human violence.

Reviews

Winner of the 2000 Lynton Keith Caldwell Prize, American Political Science Association "[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

Author Bio

Thomas F. Homer-Dixon is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Environmental Scarcity and Global Secunty and The Ingenuity Gop.