Fred Dameron's Reviews > Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

I was apprehensive when I started reading this one, I thought it was going to be full of doom and gloom but I was surprised. It is full of gloom but it is a history of how the West has set up the countries of the tropics for failure and how this failure will be exasperated by warming.

It starts with what we call Failed States. They didn't have to happen. The area between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn was originally a prosperous well run tribal, hereditary principalities, city states, or kingdoms. Then the Europeans and later Americans arrived. We brought "Civilization" but what we actually brought was plague, war, and death. After the West conjured these uncivilized peoples we exploited them. We raped the land for mineral wealth, depleted the land of it's soil fertility, killed off native species and imported invasive species that further degraded the land. All to benefit the Mother Country. But that mother country was the home of banks, import/export business, foundries, mills, etc. A mother country that could care less about it's own poor and even less about the uncivilized natives that it was exploiting. Then cam the end of the Colonial Era.

When colonization came to an end and the Europeans/Americans left we left governments that were kleptocracy's. These kleptocracy's stole what little money was left in the newly founded nations treasury. The West took most of the treasuries with them as reparations for the land lost to the new local government by the western land holders. Often at well above the actual value of the property. Then in our Cold War fears we supplied loans to these corrupt governments to fight against Communist insurgencies. Loans that could only be repaid by turning the agricultural section and mineral section over to private ownership. Private owners headquartered in London, New York, Bonn, Paris, and Zurich. Essentially putting the newly freed nation back under colonial rule but, with local overseers call "President". Now with single crop big business agriculture: in India cotton, Guiney Bissau coco, Central America bananas, the local people are forced off the land and become day labors for the multinational agro companies. The local farms die off and the labor has to buy food from the few farmers that are still growing local crops: maize, peas, beans, sorghum etc. The small farm is under threat by the agro business multi national and the government, to feed it's people, has to get more loans from the west. Loans used to buy food, fertilizer, and farm equipment, all made by the G7. Under what was normal weather 20 to 30 years ago this would work for a long time but, with the weather through the tropics changing it won't.

Today the monsoons that 1/2 of India down the SE Asia depend on for water for the fields either come late, have less rain or, as in Bangladesh today, the rain comes all at once in a two to three day period causing flooding and loose of soil, crops, livestock and human life. Maybe those who die in the flooding are the lucky ones as they won't die in the famine that follows the flood? These will be the new "normal" conditions as the earth warms and goes past 2 degree's C. And were already at 1.6 to 1.7 depending on which particular data set one looks at. How much worse will the weather get at 2.5, 3, 3.5. or 4 deg C? As the weather gets worse these multiple millions of people living in the tropics WILL move. They can move North or South. South not much real estate so they will come North. How does the West Respond? DO we become an armed life boat? OK but eventually the millions/billions of climate refugees will swamp us. We simply can't make enough bullets to kill them as they cross the Rio Grande.

We have stop using so much carbon. We have to develop strategies for mitigating the worst effects of the coming climate volatility. We have to share these strategies with the States of the Tropics. By sharing we can keep these States stable longer and slow the mass migrations that are already starting. If we don't do these things then we are signing our children's death warrants. Many of our children and grand children WILL die protecting our unchanged life style and they will loose that fight as six to seven billion climate refugees try to find food.

Some will ask why does the U.S. and Europe have to change so much? The answer is it's out fault. We made the mess and we need to lead the way in cleaning it up. Today the U.S leads the world in per capita carbon emissions and Canada is right behind us. Both our countries use, per person, three times the carbon and emit three times the CO2 as China. China leads the way in carbon emissions only because they have so many people and they have, over the past eight years, are, and plan to spend in the future three times more than the U.S and E.U. combined on green tech. They were the West's, particularly England's, victims during the colonization period yet they are leading in fixing the problems the West caused. China is building more infrastructure in Africa and SE Asia. China is making inroads into South America with loans for green projects and water capture technologies. China is a major supporter of mixed crop agriculture in the Sahel region of Sub-Sahara Africa. A region that is home to Boko-Horam fanatics. Fanatics who are inspired by remnants of ideologies from the wars of liberation from European powers and are supplied with the weapons the West and the Soviets left behind after those wars.

Yea it's are fault these Tropic States are failures. Yes it's the West that is burning more carbon than any one else, per person. And it is because of these reasons that it is the West and the U.S in particular that must lead the way. Failure will only lead to our children fighting in unnecessary eco/resource wars that they will loose to the shear weight of numbers that the Tropic States can muster.