text:
The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Robert D.
The Coming Anarchy
How scarcity, crime, overpopulation,
tribalism, and disease are rapidly
destroying the social fabric of
our planet
Atlantic Monthly, February,
1994, 273 (2), 44-76.
The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect
of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in
his eyes. He spoke in a slow and
creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a
ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful,
though. "In forty-five years I have
never seen things so bad. We did
not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse -
the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to
bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in
the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone
come from houses like this." The
Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children.
"In three months these boys
confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs
and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's
leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his
schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his
middle-class sponsors held over him."
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of
West Africa. But it is now part and
parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup,
rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend - a top-ranking
African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more
precisely - really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural
point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet
is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the
unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack
gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers
proliferate. "The government in
Sierra Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown, last
September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American man.
They tied him up and stole
everything of value. Forget Miami:
direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in
neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the
U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal
and its environs. A State
Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and
immigration officials." This is one
of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for
reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of
the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding
guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance,
giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future.
An Italian ambassador was killed by
gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador
was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's
residence. After university
students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms,
they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on
fire. In one instance Ivorian
policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus
terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi,
putting their hands all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my
luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I
saw similar young men everywhere - hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very
unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.
"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the
villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any
hut. But in the cities this
communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited
for food. When young men find out
that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip
gradually into the criminal process."
"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he
continued, "there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of
education and indoctrination. Here
in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity.
Western religion is undermined by
animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on
irrational spirit power. Here
spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group
against another." Many of the
atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits,
and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil
fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with
them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a
mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she
could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the
rebels' chances of success."
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life,
polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is
increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West
Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one
place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose
family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates
and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they
provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities.
In those cities African culture is
being redefined while desertification and deforestation - also tied to
overpopulation - drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside.
West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide
demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy
emerges as the real "strategic" danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked
crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of
nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies,
security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly
demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate
introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will
soon confront our civilization. To
remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence - as I intend
to do in this article - I find I must begin with West Africa.
There is no other place on the planet where political
maps are so deceptive - where, in fact, they tell such lies - as in West Africa.
Start with Sierra Leone. According to the map, it is a
nation-state of defined borders, with a government in control of its territory.
In truth the Sierra Leonian
government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valentine Strasser,
controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the rural interior.
In the government's territory the
national army is an unruly rabble threatening drivers and passengers at most
checkpoints. In the other part of
the country units of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken up
residence, as has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government force fighting the rebels
is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffected
village chiefs. A pre-modern
formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior
to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in the era of organized
As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are
internally displaced, 280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another
100,000 have fled to Liberia, even as
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400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largest city in Sierra Leone,
Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional 600,000 Liberians in
Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing these four countries
have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none of the
governments except the Ivory Coast's maintains the schools, bridges, roads, and
police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. The Koranko ethnic group in northeastern
Sierra Leone does all its trading in Guinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely
to be sold in Liberia than in Freetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra Leone
you can buy Liberian beer but not the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as
in Ghana, most of the primary rain forest and the secondary bush is being
destroyed at an alarming rate. I
saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports. When Sierra Leone achieved its
independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of the country was primary rain
forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the proportion has
fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation has led to soil
erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes. Virtually everyone in the West African
interior has some form of malaria.
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit
in a more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the
underdeveloped world: the withering away of central governments, the rise of
tribal and regional domains, the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing
pervasiveness of war. West Africa
is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a series of coastal
trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to
violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once
observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies
a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his
celebrated novel The Heart of the
Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic doomsday, who
is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually,
will also be that of most of the rest of the world.
Consider "Chicago." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to
a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after
the American city. ("Washington" is
another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is widely regarded
as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an African success story,
and Abidjan has been called "the Paris of West Africa." Success, however, was built on two
artificial factors: the high price of cocoa, of which the Ivory Coast is the
world's leading producer, and the talents of a French expatriate community,
whose members have helped run the government and the private sector. The expanding cocoa economy made the
Ivory Coast a magnet for migrant workers from all over West Africa: between a
third and a half of the country's population is now non-Ivorian, and the figure
could be as high as 75 percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices fell and
the French began to leave. The
skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15 percent of Abidjan's
population of three million people live in shantytowns like Chicago and
Washington, and the vast majority live in places that are not much better. Not all of these places appear on any of
the readily available maps. This is
another indication of how political maps are the products of tired conventional
wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast's case, of an elite that will ultimately be
forced to relinquish power.
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the
bush: a checkerwork of corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and
black plastic wrap. It is located
in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged by flooding.
Few residents have easy access to
electricity, a sewage system, or a clean water supply. The crumbly red
laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards both inside
and outside the shacks. Children
defecate in a stream filled with garbage and pigs, droning with malarial
mosquitoes. In this stream women do
the washing. Young unemployed men
spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and gin while gambling on pinball
games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails. These are the same youths who rob houses
in more prosperous Ivorian neighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to
Chicago from Burkina Faso in 1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives
and thirty-two children, not one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shanty community
destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming to the area. Each time he and his neighbors rebuild.
Chicago is the latest incarnation.
Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast's population is
urban, and the proportion is expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6
percent. This means that the Ivory
Coast's 13.5 million people will become 39 million by 2025, when much of the
population will consist of urbanized peasants like those of Chicago. But don't count on the Ivory Coast's
still existing then. Chicago, which
is more indicative of Africa's and the Third World's demographic present - and
even more of the future - than any idyllic junglescape of women balancing
earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a model of
Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third World catastrophe.
President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December
at the age of about ninety, left behind a weak cluster of political parties and
a leaden bureaucracy that discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and the
non-Ivorian population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintain
order nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement.
The economy has been shrinking
since the mid-1980s. Though the
French are working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a
possibility worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence - an
urbanized version of what has already happened in Somalia. Or it may become an African Yugoslavia,
but one without mini-states to replace the whole.
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a
countryside draining into dense slums by the coast, ultimately the region's
rulers will come to reflect the values of these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in Sierra
Leone –
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and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in
power since 1967, was nearly toppled in 1991, not by democrats but by thousands
of youths whom the London-based magazine West Africa described as "Soweto-like
stone-throwing adolescents." Their
behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema's repressive one.
The fragility of these West African "countries"
impressed itself on me when I took a series of bush taxis along the Gulf of
Guinea, from the Togolese capital of Lome, across Ghana, to Abidjan. The 400-mile journey required two full
days of driving, because of stops at two border crossings and an additional
eleven customs stations, at each of which my fellow passengers had their bags
searched. I had to change money
twice and repeatedly fill in currency-declaration forms. I had to bribe a Togolese immigration
official with the equivalent of eighteen dollars before he would agree to put an
exit stamp on my passport. Nevertheless, smuggling across these
borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that in 1992 the
equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in the form of "hot cash"
assumed to be laundered drug money. International cartels have discovered the
utility of weak, financially strapped West African regimes.
The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more
severe border authorities seem to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can be as
hard as crossing their borders. The
Washington embassies of Sierra Leone and Guinea - the two poorest nations on
earth, according to a 1993 United Nations report on "human development" - asked
for letters from my bank (in lieu of prepaid round-trip tickets) and also
personal references, in order to prove that I had sufficient means to sustain
myself during my visits. I was
reminded of my visa and currency hassles while traveling to the communist states
of Eastern Europe, particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those
states collapsed.
Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global
Cultural Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, predicts
that West Africa - indeed, the whole continent - is on the verge of large-scale
border upheaval. Mazrui writes,
"In the 21st century France will be withdrawing from
West Africa as she gets increasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe]. France's West African sphere of influence
will be filled by Nigeria - a more natural hegemonic power. . . . It will be
under those circumstances that Nigeria's own boundaries are likely to expand to
incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the Republic of Benin (the
Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon."
The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than
Mazrui dares to say. France will
withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory Coast,
where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only because its
attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia but also
because younger French officials lack the older generation's emotional ties to
the ex-colonies. However, even as
Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too, is likely to split into several pieces.
The State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis of
"Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and
democratization are slim. . . . The repressive apparatus of the state security
service . . . will be difficult for any future civilian government to control. .
. . The country is becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional
splits are deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of
states from 19 to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing
authorities; religious cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and
evangelical Christian militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety
over southern [Christian] control of the economy is intense . . . the will to
keep Nigeria together is now very weak."
Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the
region - its population of roughly 90 million equals the populations of all the
other West African states combined - it is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms
that could make the Ethiopian and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especially so because Nigeria's
population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime, pollution,
and overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third World urban
dysfunction, is set to double during the next twenty-five years, while the
country continues to deplete its natural resources.
Part of West Africa's quandary is that although its
population belts are horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one
travels south away from the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the
Atlantic littoral, the borders erected by European colonialists are vertical,
and therefore at cross-purposes with demography and topography. Satellite photos depict the same reality
I experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal corridor - indeed, the
entire stretch of coast from Abidjan eastward to Lagos - is one burgeoning
megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographical standard should
constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the Ivory Coast, Ghana,
Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a
more impenetrable boundary is being erected that threatens to isolate the
continent as a whole: the wall of disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some
degree of safety, I spent about $500 for a hepatitis B vaccination series and
other disease prophylaxis. Africa
may today be more dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before
antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton described the health
situation on the continent as "deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum." Of the approximately 12 million people
worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose
modern road system only
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helps to spread the disease, 10 percent of the
population is HIV-positive. And war
and refugee movements help the virus break through to more-remote areas of
Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a
representative of the Centers for Disease Control in Abidjan, explains that in
Africa the HIV virus and tuberculosis are now "fast-forwarding each other."
Of the approximately 4,000 newly
diagnosed tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be
HIV-positive. As African birth
rates soar and slums proliferate, some experts worry that viral mutations and
hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of the AIDS virus that
is easier to catch than the present strain.
It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease
wall that threatens to separate Africa and other parts of the Third World from
more-developed regions of the planet in the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria, unlike
AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people
in sub-Saharan Africa have recurring bouts of the disease throughout their
entire lives, and it is mutating into increasingly deadly forms. "The great gift of Malaria is utter
apathy," wrote Sir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much
of the Third World today. Visitors
to malaria-afflicted parts of the planet are protected by a new drug,
mefloquine, a side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams. But a strain of cerebral malaria
resistant to mefloquine is now on the offensive. Consequently, defending oneself
against malaria in Africa is becoming more and more like defending oneself
against violent crime. You engage
in "behavior modification": not going out at dusk, wearing mosquito repellent
all the time.
And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while
driving from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The forty-five-minute journey in heavy
traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian
spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous
walls were coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping
containers, junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of
floating garbage. Mosquitoes and
flies were everywhere. Children,
many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the
skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight years Guinea's population
will double if growth goes on at current rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap
speed, and people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere
in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits,
and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.
Africa may be as relevant to the future character of
world politics as the Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan
wars and the First World War. Then
the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations based solely on
tribe. Now the threat is more
elemental: nature unchecked. Africa's immediate future could be very
bad. The coming upheaval, in which
foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside
world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will
loom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid
missions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa - a prologue to a
consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is set
to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, when environmental
and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becoming critical, and
when the post-First World War system of nation-states - not just in the Balkans
but perhaps also in the Middle East - is about to be toppled, Africa suggests
what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades hence.
To understand the events of the next fifty years, then,
one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash,
geographic destiny, and the transformation of war. The order in which I have named these is
not accidental. Each concept except
the first relies partly on the one or ones before it, meaning that the last two
- new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare - are the most important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at each idea, drawing
upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in various parts
of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a new political
Environment as a Hostile Power
For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and
other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will
become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places like
Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.
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Mention "the environment" or "diminishing natural
resources" in foreign-policy circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or
boredom. To conservatives
especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have
contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental
studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let
pile up on their desks.
It is time to understand "the environment" for what it
is: the national-security issue of
the early twenty-first century. The
political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease,
deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly,
rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and
Bangladesh - developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite
group conflicts - will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most
others will ultimately emanate, arousing the public and uniting assorted
interests left over from the Cold War. In the twenty-first century water will be
in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central
Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and
Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen
between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic case of
how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile
Clinton adviser Michael Mandelbaum has said, "We have a foreign policy today in
the shape of a doughnut - lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the
center." The environment, I will
argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will define a new threat
to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum's doughnut and allowing a post-
Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather than by design.
Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F.
Kennan's famous article, signed "X," published in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947, in
which Kennan argued for a "firm and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that
was imperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign
policy will one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and
more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security. The article, published in the fall of
1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head of the Peace and Conflict
Studies Program at the University of
Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold: Environmental
Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict." Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than
other analysts, integrated two hitherto separate fields--military-conflict
studies and the study of the physical environment.
In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence
will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests,
and fish. Just as there will be
environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally
induced praetorian regimes - or, as he puts it, "hard regimes." Countries with the highest probability of
acquiring hard regimes, according to Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened
by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state [read 'military']
strength." Candidates include
Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has
exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon argues that such
tendencies are likely to be superficial "epiphenomena" having nothing to do with
long-term processes that include soaring populations and shrinking raw
materials. Democracy is
problematic; scarcity is more certain.
Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have
more, not fewer, opportunities. In
addition to engendering tribal strife, scarcer resources will place a great
strain on many peoples who never had much of a democratic or institutional
tradition to begin with. Over the
next fifty years the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than
nine billion. Though optimists have
hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global
village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed
out, 95 percent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the
world, where governments now - just look at Africa - show little ability to
function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements. Homer-Dixon writes, ominously,
"Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today's
environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever
more compelling."
While a minority of the human population will be, as
Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a
"post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment
has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois
prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history,
living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural
dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil
to till, and space to survive in. In the developing world environmental
stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly among
totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held
Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as
environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential social disruption
will increase."
Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish thirty-seven, he grew up
amid the sylvan majesty of Vancouver Island, attending private day schools.
His speech is calm, perfectly even,
and crisply enunciated. There is
nothing in his background or manner that would indicate a bent toward pessimism.
A Canadian Anglican who spends his
summers canoeing on the lakes of northern Ontario, and who talks about the
benign mountains, black bears, and Douglas firs of his youth, he is the opposite
of the intellectually severe neoconservative, the kind at home with conflict
scenarios. Nor is he an
environmentalist who opposes development. "My father was a logger who thought about
ecologically safe forestry before others," he says. "He logged, planted, logged, and planted.
He got out of the business just as
the issue was being polarized by environmentalists. They hate changed ecosystems. But human beings, just by carrying seeds
around, change the natural world." As an only child whose playground was a
virtually untouched wilderness and seacoast, Homer-Dixon has a familiarity with
the natural world that permits him to see a reality that most
icy analysts - children of suburbia and city streets -
are blind to.
"We need to bring nature back in," he argues. "We have to stop separating politics from
the physical world - the climate, public health, and the environment." Quoting Daniel Deudney, another
pioneering expert on the security aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says
that "for too long we've been prisoners of 'social-social' theory, which assumes
there are only social causes for social and political changes, rather than
natural causes, too. This
social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, which separated
us from nature. But nature is
coming back with a vengeance, tied to population growth. It will have incredible security
"Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New
York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned
post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and
a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information
highways. Outside is the rest of
mankind, going in a completely different direction."
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel's
and Fukuyama's Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by
Hobbes's First Man, condemned to a life that is "poor, nasty, brutish, and
short." Although both parts will be
threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the
First Man will not.
The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground
water tables in the western United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras
and the Chesapeake beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands,
off the coast of India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt,
Bangladesh, and Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland
where there is no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.
Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in
his Toronto office. "The darker the
map color, the worse the degradation," he explains. The West African coast, the Middle East,
the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central America have the darkest shades,
signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water
problems. "The worst degradation is
generally where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where
the soil is the best. So we're
degrading earth's best soil."
China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential
example of environmental degradation. Its current economic "success" masks
deeper problems. "China's fourteen
percent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the
economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is
intensifying." Referring to the
environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil,
Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior
China has rapidly declined at the same time that the quality of that land has
been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinization. He mentions the loss and contamination of
water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and
reservoirs with eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025:
it is a misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale population movements are
under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities,
leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional
disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a
weak tradition of central government - again as in Africa. "We will probably see the center
challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map,"
Homer-Dixon says.
Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power relationships, at which we now look.
Cossacks, Juju Warriors
In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington,
of Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking
article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he argues, has been moving
during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to ideological
conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I would add that as refugee flows
increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the world - turning
them into sprawling villages - national borders will mean less, even as more
power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated groups.
In the eyes of these uneducated but
newly empowered millions, the real borders are the most tangible and intractable
ones: those of culture and tribe. Huntington writes, "First, differences
among civilizations are not only real; they are basic," involving, among other
things, history, language, and religion. "Second . . . interactions between
peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions
intensify civilization consciousness." Economic modernization is not necessarily
a panacea, since it fuels individual and group ambitions while weakening
traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth noting, for example, that it
is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that
has seen the worst intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims. Consider that Indian cities, like African
and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs - Delhi and Calcutta, and also
Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world - and it is
apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict
are deeply related.
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Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu,
Muslim, Slavic Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and
possibly African civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in
India, Turkic Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian
cities, the West clashing with Asia. (Even in the United States,
African-Americans find themselves besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.)
Whatever the laws, refugees find a
way to crash official borders, bringing their passions with them, meaning that
Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural disputes.
Because Huntington's brush is broad, his specifics are
vulnerable to attack. In a rebuttal
of Huntington's argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a
Lebanese-born Shi'ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in
the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs,
"The world of Islam divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus . . .
are not coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interests of states.
Where Huntington sees a
civilizational duel between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast
religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in that battle the Iranians have tilted
toward Christian Armenia."
True, Huntington's hypothesized war between Islam and
Orthodox Christianity is not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus.
But that is only because he has
misidentified which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to Azerbaijan made clear
to me that Azeri Turks, the world's most secular Shi'ite Muslims, see their
cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris
not because the latter are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the
same Turks who massacred Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on
languages employing a Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously
militant as defined by Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole
swath of Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural
allies of their fellow Indo-Europeans the Iranians.
Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint
of cultural and racial war. But, as
Ajami observes, Huntington's plate tectonics are too simple. Two months of recent travel throughout
Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks are developing a deep distrust,
bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they are also, especially in the
shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish public opinion, revising their
group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as Muslims being deserted by a
West that does little to help besieged Muslims in Bosnia and that attacks
Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.
In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for
nation-state war at the beginning of the twentieth century, could be a powder
keg for cultural war at the turn of the twenty-first: between Orthodox
Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a classic Byzantine configuration of
Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam
is falling into a clash between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this very subdivision,
not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates that the West,
including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington's scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West
has proved capable of playing one part of the House of Islam against another.
True. However, whether he is aware of it or
not, Ajami is describing a world even more dangerous than the one Huntington
envisions, especially when one takes into account Homer-Dixon's research on
environmental scarcity. Outside the
stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju
warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient
tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla
conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in
no discernible pattern - meaning there's no easy-to-define threat. Kennan's world of one adversary seems as
distant as the world of Herodotus.
Most people believe that the political earth since 1989
has undergone immense change. But
it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the
atlas is only now beginning. The
crack-up of the Soviet empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military
confrontation are merely prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead.
Michael Vlahos, a long-range
thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, "We are not in charge of the environment and
the world is not following us. It
is going in many directions. Do not
assume that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution."
Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare,
I want to take a closer look at the interaction of religion, culture,
demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources in a specific area
of the world: the Middle East.
Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara,
the Turkish capital, exude visual drama. Altindag, or "Golden Mountain," is a
pyramid of dreams, fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as
though each shack were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and
painfully toward heaven - the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in
the city. Nowhere else on the
planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man's striving, with
gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and onions growing on
verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons that I will explain, the
Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from the African one.
To see the twenty-first century truly, one's eyes must
learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized
images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages
and glamorous downtowns. There are
far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real - whose raw
energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the
future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that shantytowns
are not all bad.
Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider.
In Turkey it is the opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the
better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one
pocket and $1,000 in traveler's checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real neighborhood.
The inside of one house told the
story: The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard
walls was deceiving. Inside was a
home - order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a
television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few
plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud
when it rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.
Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases
strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a
cafe sipping tea. One man sipped
beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in
Turkey, a secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little problem of
alcoholism. Crime against persons
is infinitesimal. Poverty and
illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to
say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists
to gain a foothold.
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free
slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which
Turkish Muslim culture is made. A
culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle East once again.
Slums are litmus tests for innate
cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor
extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively
[pages 64-65
ing, the future's winners. Those whose cultures cannot will be the
future's victims. Slums - in the
sociological sense - do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family
groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural
identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history's perennial nomads, take
disruption in stride.
The future of the Middle East is quietly being written
inside the heads of Golden Mountain's inhabitants. Think of an Ottoman military encampment
on the eve of the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. That is Golden Mountain. "We brought the village here. But in the village we worked harder - in
the field, all day. So we couldn't
fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan. Here we fast. Here we are more religious." Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen
other women, was stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked me to join her under the shade
of a piece of sheet metal. Each of
these women had her hair covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering
television for the first time. "We
are traditional, religious people. The programs offend us," Aishe said.
Another woman complained about the
schools. Though her children had
educational options unavailable in the village, they had to compete with
wealthier, secular Turks. "The kids
from rich families with connections - they get all the places." More opportunities, more tensions, in
other words.
My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage Hills, a brutally
realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life in the
shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus ("built in a night"). "He listened to the earth and wept
unceasingly for water, for work and for the cure of the illnesses spread by the
garbage and the factory waste," Tekin writes. In the most revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the
squatters are told "about a certain 'Ottoman Empire' . . . that where they now
lived there had once been an empire of this name." This history "confounded" the squatters.
It was the first they had heard of
it. Though one of them knew "that
his grandfather and his dog died fighting the Greeks," nationalism and an
encompassing sense of Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and
upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required to have a notion of
But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about
the armies of Turkish migrants that had come before their own - namely, Seljuks
and Ottomans? For these recently
urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world, India, and
so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul's phrase. As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in
India: A Wounded Civilization, "They
saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a claim on
their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own philosophy of
community and self-help. For them
the past was dead; they had left it behind in the villages."
Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the
twenty-first century these new men and women, rushing into the cities, are
remaking civilizations and redefining their identities in terms of religion and
tribal ethnicity which do not coincide with the borders of existing states.
In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980, 44 percent of Turks lived in
cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent. By the year 2000 the figure is expected
to be 67 percent. Villages are
emptying out as concentric rings of gecekondu developments grow around
Turkish cities. This is the real
political and demographic revolution in Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign
correspondents usually don't write about it.
Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a "normal"
part of the social fabric, urban poverty is socially destabilizing. As Iran has shown, Islamic extremism is
the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants threatened with
the loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their values are under
attack, where basic services like water and electricity are unavailable, and
where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment. The American ethnologist and orientalist
Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951 that Islam "has made possible the optimum
survival and happiness of millions of human beings in an increasingly
impoverished environment over a fourteen-hundred-year period." Beyond its stark, clearly articulated
message, Islam's very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one religion that is prepared
to fight. A political era driven by
environmental stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization,
and refugee migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and
intensification of Islam, already the world's fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam is spreading in West
Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes new
converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a
weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)
In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly
forging a consensus with modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the
Arab and Persian worlds (and virtually invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom - because it put
development and urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more
intense - fueled the 1978 Islamic Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab
world, has little oil. Therefore
its development and urbanization have been more gradual. Islamists have been integrated into the
parliamentary system for decades. The tensions I noticed in Golden Mountain
are natural, creative ones: the kind immigrants face the world over. While the world has focused on religious
perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of
whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in
Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant
Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another
way vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their
Anatolian heartland has lots of water - the most important fluid of the
twenty-first century. Turkey's
Southeast Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation
systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps
Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. The project's centerpiece is the
mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are emblazoned the words of
modern Turkey's founder: "Ne Mutlu Turkum
Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").
Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's
Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians,
the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and
companies in charge. On a recent
visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the high-voltage
electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of giant humming
transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim unfolding suburbia,
complete with schools, for dam employees. The emerging power of the Turks was
Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me
that "while oil can be shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be
spread more evenly within the society. . . . It is true, we can stop the flow of
water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water
overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behavior."
Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from
the oil fields of Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in
southern Anatolia - near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey, as
presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?
I very much doubt it.
Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of
political reality outside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, Turkey, an organic
outgrowth of two Turkish empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been
among the most stable. Turkey's
borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of independence, in
the early 1920s. Kemal Ataturk
provided Turkey with a secular nation-building myth that most Arab and African
states, burdened by artificially drawn borders, lack. That lack will leave many Arab states
defenseless against a wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and
frontiers in coming years. Yet even
as regards Turkey, maps deceive.
It is not only African shantytowns that don't appear on
urban maps. Many shantytowns in
Turkey and elsewhere are also missing - as are the considerable territories
controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with Eritrean guerrillas in
what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia, traveling in "northern Iraq"
with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in the Caucasus controlled
by a local mafia - to say nothing of my experiences in
West Africa - led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began
to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the
political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so
countries, each signified by a bold and uniform color: this map, with which all
of us have grown up, is generally an invention of modernism, specifically of
European colonialism. Modernism, in
the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states in Europe and
was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty Years' War - an
event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which
together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly flush with an
enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific techniques
of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms, making a
jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them. Frontier is itself a modern concept that
didn't exist in the feudal mind. And as European nations carved out
far-flung domains at the same time that print technology was making the
reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into its own as a way of creating
facts by ordering the way we look at the world.
In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University,
demonstrates that the map enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in
terms of a "totalizing classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate,
and therefore - in principle - countable." To the colonialist, country maps were the
equivalent of an accountant's ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, "shaped the
grammar" that would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia,
Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. The
state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the twentieth century
applied to countries covering only three percent of the earth's land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the
state, as a governing ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside
the industrialized world. Even the
United States of America, in the words of one of our best living poets, Gary
Snyder, consists of "arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is really
Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not
only in the United Nations but in various geographic and travel publications
(themselves by-products of an age of elite touring
which colonialism made possible) that still report on
and photograph the world according to "country." Newspapers, this magazine, and this
writer are not innocent of the tendency.
According to the map, the great hydropower complex
emblemized by the Ataturk Dam is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is
populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world's 20 million
Kurds live in "Turkey." The Kurds
are predominant in an ellipse of territory that overlaps not only with Turkey
but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in
northern Iraq, a consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the
fictitious nature of that supposed nation-state.
On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it
occurred to me what a risky idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line
between two clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as in
West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the people
doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a moonscape, over which peoples
have migrated and settled in patterns that obliterate borders, the end of the
Cold War will bring on a cruel process of natural selection among existing
states. No longer will these states
be so firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap with nearly
everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out of a state
in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in effect, as the
natural selector - the ultimate reality check. They have destabilized Iraq and may
continue to disrupt states that do not offer them adequate breathing space,
while strengthening states that do.
Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their
growing economy, and the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I
have encountered, are on the verge of big-power status, and because the 10
million Kurds within Turkey threaten that status, the outcome of the
Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more critical to the future of the Middle East
than the eventual outcome of the recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
America's fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian
issue, coupled with its lack of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a
function of its own domestic and ethnic obsessions, not of the cartographic
reality that is about to transform the Middle East. The diplomatic process involving Israelis
and Palestinians will, I believe, have little effect on the early- and
mid-twenty-first-century map of the region. Israel, with a 6.6 percent economic
growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter
Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that
is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity. Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the
one hand, and war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a
classic national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will
undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass
migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent.
Seventy percent of the Arab
population has been born since 1970 - youths with little historical memory of
anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial attempts at nation-building,
or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. The most distant recollection of these
youths will be the West's humiliation of colonially invented Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab
states have a declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at
current growth rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These states, like most African ones,
will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies. The Middle East analyst Christine M.
Helms explains,
"Declaring Arab nationalism "bankrupt," the political
"disinherited" are not rationalizing the failure of Arabism . . . or
reformulating it. Alternative
solutions are not contemplated. They have simply opted for the political
paradigm at the other end of the political spectrum with which they are familiar
- Islam."
Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of
Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to
cultural and political reality. As
state control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and demographic
stress, "hard" Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely to emerge.
The fiction that the impoverished
city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the
Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace
process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and
volatile realm of Islam. In that
realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of
the coming era.
The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but
far more relevant to the kind of map that will explain our future world. The Kurds suggest a geographic reality
that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. The issue in Turkey is not simply a
matter of giving autonomy or even independence to
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Kurds in the southeast. This isn't the Balkans or the Caucasus,
where regions are merely subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off
from Georgia, and so on. Federalism
is not the answer. Kurds are found
everywhere in Turkey, including the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara.
Turkey's problem is that its
Anatolian land mass is the home of two cultures and languages, Turkish and
Kurdish. Identity in Turkey, as in
India, Africa, and elsewhere, is more complex and subtle than conventional
cartography can display.
To appreciate fully the political and cartographic
implications of postmodernism - an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which
the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a
jagged-glass pattern of city-states, shanty-states, nebulous and anarchic
regionalisms - it is necessary to consider, finally, the whole question of war.
"Oh, what a relief to fight, to fight enemies who defend
themselves, enemies who are awake!" Andre Malraux wrote in Man's Fate. I cannot think of a more suitable battle
cry for many combatants in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The intense savagery of the fighting in
such diverse cultural settings as Liberia, Bosnia, the Caucasus, and Sri Lanka -
to say nothing of what obtains in American inner cities - indicates something
very troubling that those of us inside the stretch limo, concerned with issues
like middle-class entitlements and the future of interactive cable television,
lack the stomach to contemplate. It
is this: a large number of people on this planet, to whom the comfort and
stability of a middle-class life is utterly unknown, find war and a barracks
existence a step up rather than a step down.
"Just as it makes no sense to ask 'why people eat' or
'what they sleep for,'" writes Martin van Creveld, a military historian at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in The
Transformation of War, "so fighting in many ways is not a means but an end.
Throughout history, for every
person who has expressed his horror of war there is another who found in it the
most marvelous of all the experiences that are vouchsafed to man, even to the
point that he later spent a lifetime boring his descendants by recounting his
exploits." When I asked Pentagon
officials about the nature of war in the twenty-first century, the answer I
frequently got was "Read Van Creveld." The top brass are enamored of this
historian not because his writings justify their existence but, rather, the
opposite: Van Creveld warns them that huge state military machines like the
Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and that something far more
terrible awaits us.
The degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation of War complements
Homer-Dixon's work on the environment, Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash,
my own realizations in traveling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more than sixty
countries, and America's sobering comeuppances in intractable-culture zones like
Haiti and Somalia is startling. The
book begins by demolishing the notion that men don't like to fight. "By compelling the senses to focus
themselves on the here and now," Van Creveld writes, war "can cause a man to
take his leave of them." As anybody
who has had experience with Chetniks in Serbia, "technicals" in Somalia, Tontons
Macoutes in Haiti, or soldiers in Sierra Leone can tell you, in places where the
Western Enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass
poverty, people find liberation in violence. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I
vicariously experienced this phenomenon: worrying about mines and ambushes frees
you from worrying about mundane details of daily existence. If my own experience is too subjective,
there is a wealth of data showing the sheer frequency of war, especially in the
developing world since the Second World War. Physical aggression is a part
of being human. Only when people attain a certain
economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized. In light of the fact that 95 percent of
the earth's population growth will be in the poorest areas of the globe, the
question is not whether there will be war (there will be a lot of it) but what
kind of war. And who will fight
Debunking the great military strategist Carl von
Clausewitz, Van Creveld, who may be the most original thinker on war since that
early-nineteenth-century Prussian, writes, "Clausewitz's ideas . . . were wholly
rooted in the fact that, ever since 1648, war had been waged overwhelmingly by
states." But, as Van Creveld
explains, the period of nation-states and, therefore, of state conflict is now
ending, and with it the clear "threefold division into government, army, and
people" which state-directed wars enforce. Thus, to see the future, the first step
is to look back to the past immediately prior to the birth of modernism - the
wars in medieval Europe which began during the Reformation and reached their
culmination in the Thirty Years' War.
Van Creveld writes,
"In all these struggles political, social, economic, and
religious motives were hopelessly entangled. Since this was an age when armies
consisted of mercenaries, all were also attended by swarms of military
entrepreneurs. . . . Many of them paid little but lip service to the
organizations for whom they had contracted to fight. Instead, they robbed the countryside on
their own behalf. . . ."
"Given such conditions, any fine distinctions . . .
between armies on the one hand and peoples on the other were bound to break
down. Engulfed by war, civilians
suffered terrible atrocities."
Back then, in other words, there was no "politics" as we
have come to understand the term, just as there is less and less "politics'
today in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, and the
Caucasus, among other places.
Because, as Van Creveld notes, the radius of trust
within tribal societies is narrowed to one's immediate family and guerrilla
comrades, truces arranged with one Bosnian commander, say, may be broken
immediately by another Bosnian commander. The plethora of short-lived ceasefires in
the Balkans and the Caucasus constitute proof that we are no longer in a world
where the old rules of state warfare apply. More evidence is provided by the
destruction of medieval monuments in the Croatian port of Dubrovnik: when
cultures, rather than states, fight, then cultural and religious monuments are
weapons of war, making them fair game.
Also, war-making entities will no longer be restricted
to a specific territory. Loose and
shadowy organisms such as Islamic terrorist organizations suggest why borders
will mean increasingly little and sedimentary layers of tribalistic identity and
control will mean more. "From the
vantage point of the present, there appears every prospect that religious . . .
fanaticisms will play a larger role in the motivation of armed conflict" in the
West than at any time "for the last 300 years," Van Creveld writes. This is why analysts like Michael Vlahos
are closely monitoring religious cults. Vlahos says, "An ideology that challenges
us may not take familiar form, like the old Nazis or Commies. It may not even engage us initially in
ways that fit old threat markings." Van Creveld concludes, "Armed conflict
will be waged by men on earth, not robots in space. It will have more in common with the
struggles of primitive tribes than with large-scale conventional war." While another military historian, John
Keegan, in his new book A History of
Warfare, draws a more benign portrait of primitive man, it is important to
point out that what Van Creveld really means is re-primitivized man: warrior
societies operating at a time of unprecedented resource scarcity and planetary
Van Creveld's pre-Westphalian vision of worldwide
low-intensity conflict is not a superficial "back to the future" scenario. First of all, technology will be used
toward primitive ends. In Liberia
the guerrilla leader Prince Johnson didn't
just cut off the ears of President Samuel Doe before Doe
was tortured to death in 1990 - Johnson made a video of it, which has circulated
throughout West Africa. In December
of 1992, when plotters of a failed coup against the Strasser regime in Sierra
Leone had their ears cut off at Freetown's Hamilton Beach prior to being killed,
it was seen by many to be a copycat execution. Considering, as I've explained earlier,
that the Strasser regime is not really a government and that Sierra Leone is not
really a nation-state, listen closely to Van Creveld: "Once the legal monopoly
of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing
distinctions between war and crime will break down much as is already the case
today in . . . Lebanon, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Peru, or Colombia."
If crime and war become indistinguishable, then
"national defense" may in the future be viewed as a local concept. As crime continues to grow in our cities
and the ability of state governments and criminal-justice systems to protect
their citizens diminishes, urban crime may, according to Van Creveld, "develop
into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and
political lines." As small-scale
violence multiplies at home and abroad, state armies will continue to shrink,
being gradually replaced by a booming private security business, as in West
Africa, and by urban mafias, especially in the former communist world, who may
be better equipped than municipal police forces to grant physical protection to
local inhabitants.
Future wars will be those of communal survival,
aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity. These wars will be subnational, meaning
that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own
citizens physically. This is how
many states will ultimately die. As
state power fades - and with it the state's ability to help weaker groups within
society, not to mention other states - peoples and cultures around the world
will be thrown back upon their own strengths and weaknesses, with fewer
equalizing mechanisms to protect them. Whereas the distant future will probably
see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades will
see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the average person, political values
will mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is
liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek
travelers: Why the differences between peoples?
In Geography and
the Human Spirit, Anne Buttimer, a professor at University College, Dublin,
recalls the work of an early-nineteenth-century German geographer, Carl Ritter,
whose work implied "a divine plan for humanity" based on regionalism and a
constant, living flow of forms. The
map of the future, to the extent that a map is even possible, will represent a
perverse twisting of Ritter's vision. Imagine cartography in three dimensions,
as if in a hologram. In this
hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop
the merely two-dimensional color markings of city-states and the remaining
nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead,
indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies.
Instead of borders, there would be
moving "centers" of power, as in the Middle Ages. Many of these layers would be in motion.
Replacing fixed and abrupt lines on
a flat space would be a shifting pattern of buffer entities, like the Kurdish
and Azeri buffer entities between Turkey and Iran, the Turkic Uighur buffer
entity between Central Asia and Inner China (itself distinct from coastal
China), and the Latino buffer entity replacing a precise U.S.-Mexican border.
To this protean cartographic
hologram one must add other factors, such as migrations of populations,
explosions of birth rates, vectors of disease. Henceforward the map of the world will
never be static. This future map -
in a sense, the "Last Map" - will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.
The Indian subcontinent offers examples of what is
happening. For different reasons,
both India and Pakistan are increasingly dysfunctional. The argument over democracy in these
places is less and less relevant to the larger issue of governability. In India's case the question arises, Is
one unwieldy bureaucracy in New Delhi the best available mechanism for promoting
the lives of 866 million people of diverse languages, religions, and ethnic
groups? In 1950, when the Indian
population was much less than half as large and nation-building idealism was
still strong, the argument for democracy was more impressive than it is now.
Given that in 2025 India's
population could be close to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a
shrinking natural-resource base, including dramatically declining water levels,
and that communal violence and urbanization are spiraling upward, it is
difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive the next century. India's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution
has been achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its watershed.
Norman Myers, a British development
consultant, worries that Indians have "been feeding themselves today by
borrowing against their children's food sources."
Pakistan's problem is more basic still: like much of
Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the
Muslims of the subcontinent, yet there are more subcontinental Muslims outside
Pakistan than within it. Like
Yugoslavia, Pakistan is a patchwork of ethnic groups, increasingly in violent
conflict with one another. While
the Western media gushes over the fact that the country has a woman Prime
Minister, Benazir Bhutto, Karachi is becoming a subcontinental version of Lagos.
In eight visits to Pakistan, I have
never gotten a sense of a cohesive national identity. With as much as 65 percent of its land
dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a
yearly population growth of 2.7 percent (which ensures that the amount of
cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more
and more desperate place. As
irrigation in the Indus River basin intensifies to serve two growing
populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.
"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart,"
Homer-Dixon predicts. "Their
secular governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management
ability over people and resources." Rather than one bold line dividing the
subcontinent into two parts, the future will likely see a lot of thinner lines
and smaller parts, with the ethnic entities of Pakhtunistan and Punjab gradually
replacing Pakistan in the space between the Central Asian plateau and the heart
of the subcontinent.
None of this even takes into account climatic change,
which, if it occurs in the next century, will further erode the capacity of
existing states to cope. India, for
instance, receives 70 percent of its precipitation from the monsoon cycle, which
planetary warming could disrupt.
Not only will the three-dimensional aspects of the Last
Map be in constant motion, but its two-dimensional base may change too. The National Academy of Sciences reports
"as many as one billion people, or 20 per cent of the
world's population, live on lands likely to be inundated or dramatically changed
by rising waters. . . . Low-lying countries in the developing world such as
Egypt and Bangladesh, where rivers are large and the deltas extensive and
densely populated, will be hardest hit. . . . Where the rivers are dammed, as in
the case of the Nile, the effects . . . will be especially severe."
Egypt could be where climatic upheaval - to say nothing
of the more immediate threat of increasing population - will incite religious
upheaval in truly biblical fashion. Natural catastrophes, such as the
October, 1992, Cairo earthquake, in which the government failed to deliver
relief aid and slum residents were in many instances helped by their local
mosques, can only strengthen the position of Islamic factions. In a statement about greenhouse warming
which could refer to any of a variety of natural catastrophes, the environmental
expert Jessica Tuchman Matthews warns that many of us underestimate the extent
to which political systems, in affluent societies as well as in places like
Egypt, "depend on the underpinning of natural systems." She adds, "The fact that one can move
with ease from Vermont to Miami has nothing to say about the consequences of
Vermont acquiring Miami's climate."
Indeed, it is not clear that the United States will
survive the next century in exactly its present form. Because America is a multi-ethnic
society, the nation-state has always been more fragile here than it is in more
homogeneous societies like Germany and Japan. James Kurth, in an article published in
The National Interest in 1992,
explains that whereas nation-state societies tend to be built around a
mass-conscription army and a standardized public school system, "multicultural
regimes" feature a high-tech, all-volunteer army (and, I would add, private
schools that teach competing values), operating in a culture in which the
international media and entertainment industry has more influence than the
"national political class." In
other words, a nation-state is a place where everyone has been educated along
similar lines, where people take their cue from national leaders, and where
everyone (every male, at least) has gone through the crucible of military
service, making patriotism a simpler issue. Writing about his immigrant family in
turn-of-the-century Chicago, Saul Bellow states, "The country took us over.
It was a country then, not a
collection of 'cultures.'"
During the Second World War and the decade following it,
the United States reached its apogee as a classic nation-state. During the 1960s, as is now clear,
America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial
polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various
kinds. William Irwin Thompson, in
Passages About Earth: An Exploration of
the New Planetary Culture, writes, "The educational system that had worked
on the Jews or the Irish could no longer work on the blacks; and when Jewish
teachers in New York tried to take black children away from their parents
exactly in the way they had been taken from theirs, they were shocked to
encounter a violent affirmation of negritude."
Issues like West Africa could yet emerge as a new kind
of foreign-policy issue, further eroding America's domestic peace. The spectacle of several West African
nations collapsing at once could reinforce the worst racial stereotypes here at
home. That is another reason why
Africa matters. We must not kid
ourselves: the sensitivity factor is higher than ever. The Washington, D.C., public school
system is already experimenting with an Afrocentric curriculum. Summits between African leaders and
prominent African-Americans are becoming frequent, as are Pollyanna-ish
prognostications about multiparty elections in Africa that do not factor in
crime, surging birth rates, and resource depletion. The Congressional Black Caucus was among
those urging U.S. involvement in Somalia and in Haiti. At the Los Angeles Times minority
staffers have protested against, among other things, what they allege to be the
racist tone of the newspaper's Africa coverage, allegations that the editor of
the "World Report" section, Dan Fisher, denies, saying essentially that Africa
should be viewed through the same rigorous analytical lens as other parts of the
Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional
late-twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an age of cultural and
racial clash, when national defense is increasingly local, Africa's distress
will exert a destabilizing influence on the United States.
This and many other factors will make the United States
less of a nation than it is today, even as it gains territory following the
peaceful dissolution of Canada. Quebec, based on the bedrock of Roman
Catholicism and Francophone ethnicity, could yet turn out to be North America's
most cohesive and crime-free nation-state. (It may be a smaller Quebec, though,
since aboriginal peoples may lop off northern parts of the province.) "Patriotism" will become increasingly
regional as people in Alberta and Montana discover that they have far more in
common with each other than they do with Ottawa or Washington, and
Spanish-speakers in the Southwest discover a greater commonality with Mexico
City. (The Nine Nations of North America, by
Joel Garreau, a book about the continent's regionalization, is more relevant now
than when it was published, in 1981.) As Washington's influence wanes, and with
it the traditional symbols of American patriotism, North Americans will take
psychological refuge in their insulated communities and cultures.
Returning from West Africa last fall was an illuminating
ordeal. After leaving Abidjan, my
Air Afrique flight landed in Dakar, Senegal, where all passengers had to
disembark in order to go through another security check, this one demanded by
U.S. authorities before they would permit the flight to set out for New York.
Once we were in New York, despite
the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy Airport held up
disembarkation by conducting quick interrogations of the aircraft's passengers -
this was in addition to all the normal immigration and customs procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling,
disease, and other factors had contributed to the toughest security procedures I
have ever encountered when returning from overseas.
Then, for the first time in over a month, I spotted
businesspeople with attache cases and laptop computers. When I had left New York for Abidjan, all
the businesspeople were boarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed from
gates near Air Afrique's. The only
non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis.
Although the borders within West
Africa are increasingly unreal, those separating West Africa from the outside
world are in various ways becoming more impenetrable.
But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: we ignore
this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in
November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and
Albanians. The future was in
Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and
Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was
approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an
expanding desert. The real news
wasn't at the White House, I realized. It was right below.
The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy


text:
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Sugar Snap Pea and Barley Salad
From the kitchen of One Perfect Bite...This is a wonderful salad that adapts easily to al fresco dining. Barley, at least in my home, is a woefully neglected grain. I've recently made an effort to include more of it in our diet. I've found it to be a lovely grain with a nutty taste that offers a slight resistance to the tooth. If you rinse it properly after cooking, you'll find it to be a delicious addition to your table. I've made the salad for this post with snap peas, but green beans could easily be substituted. Plan on making this salad the day before you plan to serve it. The flavors of the dressing need time to permeate the salad. It's also important not to overcook the vegetables you add to the barley. You want them to be crisp tender, so they will add some crunch to the salad. I know those of you who try this salad will enjoy it. The recipe originally came from Eating Well Magazine, so you know this fiber rich dish is good for you. It will make a great addition to your grain and salad repertoire. Here's the recipe.
Sugar Snap Pea and Barley Salad...from the kitchen of One Perfect Bite courtesy of Eating Well Magazine
2 cups water
1 cup quick-cooking barley
8 ounces sugar snap peas, trimmed and sliced into matchsticks
1/2 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/4 cup finely chopped scallions (white and tender green)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1) Bring water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add barley and cook, covered, for 10 to 12 minutes, or according to package directions. Remove from the heat and let stand, covered, for 5 minutes.
2) Rinse barley under cool water and transfer to a large bowl. Add snap peas, parsley, onion, oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper and toss to combine. Refrigerate. Serve chilled. Yield 4 to 6 servings.
One Year Ago Today: Asparagus and Mushroom Strata
Two Years Ago Today: Buttermilk Cluster with Blue Poppy Seeds
You might also enjoy these recipes:
Barley Apricot Salad with Almonds - Fit Foodista
Mushroom Barley Soup - Bon Appetit Hon
Mushroom and Barley Ragout - Jenny's Cookbook
Mushroom Barley Risotto - Brown Eyed Baker
Moosewood Mushroom Barley Soup - The Apron Archives
Spring Barley Risotto - Lisa is Cooking
Beef Barley Soup - Sea Salt with Food
Rice and Barley Side Dish - Living the Gourmet
Carrot Barley Galettes - Chocolate and Zucchini
Asian Style Barley Pilaf - The Kitchen Masochist
26 comments :
A Sugar Snap Pea and Barley Salad sounds fabulous. I have only every cooked with barley in soups before.
:-) Mandy
PS. Hope the repairs of your computer are going well. - June 8, 2011 at 2:35 AM
thank you for this Mary! I so seldom use my barley either :)
- June 8, 2011 at 3:20 AM
- Maureen said...
This looks so fresh and delicious! Going to have to try this one. It's beautiful to look at !
- June 8, 2011 at 4:06 AM
- Unknown said...
This looks so refreshing and delicious! You're right about barley being neglected - I never think of using it! Thanks for the great reminder and beautiful photo!
- June 8, 2011 at 5:38 AM
- blackbookkitchendiaries said...
this is simply elegant! i love already:)
- June 8, 2011 at 8:48 AM
- Unknown said...
I'll admit that I don't cook with barley, but that does not mean I would not like this salad! YUM! It looks and sounds wonderful!
- June 8, 2011 at 9:03 AM
- penny aka jeroxie said...
Oh! New way to use barley. And so healthy as well :)
- June 8, 2011 at 10:15 AM
LOVE sugar snap peas! Thanks Mary for this great recipe.
Karen - June 8, 2011 at 10:40 AM
- Jeannie said...
Barley salad? Interesting way of cooking barley which I usually just boil with candied winter melon and drink as a dessert on a hot day!
- June 8, 2011 at 11:14 AM
- Pure Complex said...
I've never tried anything like this snap pea and barley salad but I have to admit this looks delicious. I can't wait to save this recipe.
- June 8, 2011 at 1:05 PM
- Khadija El Mary said...
Barley Salad! Very healthy and delicious. Thanks for the recipe. Have a great day Mary,
Cheers - June 8, 2011 at 4:12 PM
- Ginny Hartzler said...
This is so beautiful! And easy, as well. It could really be a whole meal if you add some iced tea and maybe a roll.
- June 8, 2011 at 11:53 PM
- Nami | Just One Cookbook said...
Hi Mary! This salad looks so healthy and delicious! I haven't had time to come by your blog for maybe 2-3 posts and I just wondered... HOW DO YOU DO IT everyday...cooking + blogging and all the rest of chores and everything you have to do. I just admire your hard work and I and I'm sure your readers appreciate it very much.
- June 9, 2011 at 12:04 AM
- Banana Wonder said...
love the grains! What a great combo with the nutty barley and sweet peas.
- June 9, 2011 at 3:26 AM
- The Blonde Duck said...
Add this with those dips and you've got a perfect dinner!
- June 9, 2011 at 7:48 AM
- Angie's Recipes said...
The salad looks not only pretty, but also very tasty!
- June 9, 2011 at 7:48 AM
- T.W. Barritt at Culinary Types said...
I love barley, and this is a lovely main dish salad especially as there will be ample fresh snap peas shortly!
- June 9, 2011 at 7:53 AM
This really is a beautiful salad, Mary. I love the barley in there for added nutrition and chewy texture. Hope you're having a wonderful week!
- June 9, 2011 at 8:31 AM
- Barbara said...
I've been seeing barley in so many salads lately, Mary. It's nice to see it outside soup!
Jamie Oliver made a side dish with it recently.
This is inspiring me...I'm going to bring home some barley next visit to the market. - June 9, 2011 at 8:33 AM
- From the Kitchen said...
I'm "in tune" as I just picked up some barley at Whole Foods. It usually goes into soup but this recipe looks and sounds quite tasty and our weather is calling for coolness from the kitchen!
I'm "back" and looking forward to catching up on what has been on your table.
Bonnie - June 9, 2011 at 9:37 AM
- Catherine said...
Dear Mary, Sugar snap peas are one of my favorite. I grow them each year. The salad sounds delish! Blessings, Catherine xo
- June 9, 2011 at 1:55 PM
I love snap peas, they're so fresh with just the right amount of crunch. They look fantastic in this salad. Gorgeous!
- June 9, 2011 at 6:07 PM
- briarrose said...
Fresh and colorful. Love it.
- June 10, 2011 at 1:47 PM
- linksdistodaquilo said...
this is simply elegant! i love already:)
- June 10, 2011 at 8:06 PM
- Elaine said...
What a beautiful salad! I'm sorry to hear about your computer problems. Hope you have a great Saturday.
- June 11, 2011 at 11:40 AM
- sangeeta said...
Hi i am here for the first time and i feel so glad to be here. Loved every bit of this blog and this barley salad is so my type of food. We don't get sugar snap peas in India n i make this salad with different greens and sprouts etc.
Wonderful pictures you have. - June 12, 2011 at 3:33 AM

subset: commoncrawl


text:
My beautiful boy, Evan, I am so sorry I did not learn more about circumcision before you were born. I am sorry we made the quick and thoughtless decision to get you circumcised so you would not look different from your dad. It is ok to look different. I am so sorry I never changed your diaper at the hospital and I never saw what you looked like intact. I was ignorant. I am so sorry.
My beautiful boy, Colby, I am so sorry I was weak and caved when it came to the decision about your circumcision. I am sorry we made the decision to get you circumcised so you would not look different from your dad and your brother. It is ok to look different. You were born in a birth center and I changed your diapers for a week before you were circumcised. Every time I saw you intact, I felt sad for Evan. I cried and talked to your Dad and others around me. But hardly anyone wanted to talk about it, or if they did, they said it was better to do it as a baby when you would not remember having it done, it would be too painful to have it done as an adult, and your self-esteem would be damaged for looking different. When I saw that device attached to you at the pediatrician¹s office as he circumcised you, I couldn¹t believe the cruelty. I felt so small there, like I was a kid again with no say in the matter. But I'm an adult now and I should not have been so passive. I should have fought tooth and nail to keep you intact. I am so sorry.
My beautiful husband, I am so sorry that I was weak and passive and agreed to circumcise our boys. I am sorry someone circumcised you. None of you were allowed to decide for yourselves whether to remain intact or not. I could have given your sons that choice, but I did not. I am so sorry.
Jennifer V., OR
also published in The Compleat Mother
because the importance of the information
outweighs people's right to not be challenged in their beliefs.
~ Maddy Reid, Peaceful Parenting
Speak up on the issue of keeping babies whole.
You never know whose life you will change forever,
or what mother will thank you later.
If your first son was circumcised, and you would like to keep future sons intact, or make a difference in the lives of your grandsons or boys born around you, please join with others at Keeping Future Sons Intact, at the Saving Our Sons Community, or in Intact: Healthy, Happy, Whole
Now that I know better, I do better."
For parents-to-be who have not yet witnessed the difference between an intact vs. circumcised newborn baby boy, below is one example. [View additional examples, and see the difference between an intact and non-intact adult here.]


text:
Chris Brown Pleads Not Guilty to Hit-and-Run
Chris Brown Pleads Not Guilty to Hit-and-Run
Chris Brown just pled not guilty to the charge of hit-and-run, stemming from that minor car accident -- which led to his probation getting revoked -- TMZ has learned.
Since he wasn't arrested on the day of the accident, Chris now has to go to a police station to get booked for the crime ... which means he'll have to take another mug shot. He has until August 6th to take care of that.
Chris' next court date in the hit-and-run case is August 15.
As for his possible probation violation in the Rihanna beating case -- the singer has to appear in court for a separate probation violation hearing in August.
As we reported, the judge revoked Chris' probation in the wake of the hit-and-run charge ... but he's currently free on his own recognizance.
The remaining charges from the car accident -- driving without a valid license and proof of insurance -- were dismissed.


text:
The common thread that runs through all small businesses, from professional services to manufacturing, is that a motivated workforce is central to the business's success.
Here are some quick, inexpensive, and potentially effective ways to motivate your employees and improve your employee retention.
Weekly "Good News" Emails
Too often the business day can be about addressing problems or issues, large and small. We forget to recognize the "wins" and other positive accomplishments. Yet, it is the successes we achieve that inspire us to reach new heights.
Encourage Mental Breaks
Whether it is making sure employees go out for lunch, take a mid-day walk, or even take a short "power nap," these breaks away from the grind can re-energize, refresh, and even lead to new ideas.
Be Visible
As a leader, your troops appreciate your visibility and a human connection to you. Walk around the floor. Write handwritten notes of appreciation. Roll up your sleeves to help meet a deadline.
Break the Routine
Think about bringing in a community speaker for a "lunch and learn" session. Perhaps even sponsor a "bring your pet to work day!" Changing up the routine inspires, invigorates, and makes it more fun to be at work.
Invite Staff to Client Visits
Not only will an employee appreciate the opportunity to visit with a client and the vote of confidence it implies, but he or she will gain a valuable perspective on what a client needs and the integral role he or she has in delivering your service or product.
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