Resource Curse

In class we discussed the resource curse, the role oil companies play in it, and what the role of other countries to help fix the problem. From my understanding, the resource curse occurs when, in an under developed country, one resource is abundantly available and the main source of money for that country. This can lead to many issues for development, government and conflict.

Oil is often the natural resource associated with the resource curse. Oil is exported out, and those countries importing then have refineries in order to make the oil usable. These countries place a high demand on these cities to get the oil since it is used in such high quantities, which is likely a contributing factor to the resource curse. Possibly to alleviate some of this pressure, oil importing countries could import from multiple countries instead of only a few. Even though if all the importers spread it out, the exports would end up to be the same, a schedule could be implemented so that the exporters do not have to export such high quantities so often. Another possibility for alleviation could be a cap on exports or a cap on income taken in on the export of one resource. This would incentivize diversification of exports so that these countries are not so heavily reliant on just the one resource. Diversification would push the exporting countries to produce more crops or other resources that could be use as exports and thus alleviate stress on producing such great quantities of just one resource. This would also help with avoiding depletion of the resource. Oil companies are thought to perpetuate the resource curse cycle, and this could be fixed by having the oil producing countries refine their own oil. This would add jobs to the country in the refineries. Also, the control over the oil would be spread out so much further, and not just in the hands of a few. It would lessen the chance of the military controlling the resource, since many more people would need to be involved in order to refine before it could be exported.

Other countries could play a role in fixing the curse. For oil in particular, the big importers of oil could decrease their demand. This is obviously much easier said than done. This would involve developing a different fuel source to be used on a large scale, and thus far I don’t think we have an option for that. Countries could ban booty futures so that it would be illegal for rights to be bought for an oil well in case of a future war. Maybe the importers, who are typically wealthier countries, could offer some kind of incentive to have these countries work towards better governments and enforcement practices. Also, like the suggestion earlier of the exporting countries being the ones who refine the oil, the wealthier importing countries could offer money, or offer a loan to the exporters to develop and construct a refinery in order to help their government and economy run a bit more smoothly.

The Poverty Trap: Environmental Implications

“Inequality”.  It is becoming a bigger and bigger buzzword these days.  In the United States, we spend a lot of time talking about the increasing wealth of the “top 1%”, income inequality, and wage inequality.  On a more global scale, we talk about extreme poverty and inequality, the inability the access natural resources and the bare necessities for survival.  These conversations are all related to the idea of the “poverty trap”, a concept that I have been learning about in my development economics class.  Basically, in an economy where there is inequality and credit markets are imperfect (also known as all world economies), inequality reproduces itself.  Poor parents do not have the same ability as the wealthy to invest in things like education and health, thus making it more difficult for their children to succeed.  Due to the inability of poor parents to accumulate capital, the poverty trap makes sure that their children also do not have any capital to help them invest in education and health the way the wealthy do.  Thus they must continue to struggle just to maintain enough income to survive.  It is a vicious cycle and a market failure that bars the impoverished from investing in goods and futures that everyone should have equal access to.

However, when we talk about the poverty trap and inequality in the general media, we do not often link it to increasing environmental degradation.  Colin Kahl says, “At both the global and local levels, natural resource depletion and environmental degradation result from interactions among extreme wealth, population pressures, and extreme poverty”.  In less developed countries where the current exclusive political institutions allow for an extremely high level of poverty, where wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few, there is also a higher level of environmental degradation.  When families are so incredibly impoverished, their main focus is survival, day to day.  This leads to an inability to accumulate capital and knowledge for parents and their children.  The inability to accumulate capital leads to a lower level of interest in environmental protection because families need to use all the resources they can to survive.  For example, there is a fuel wood crisis in Africa because families are growing and rapidly harvesting wood to fuel their stoves.  Also, a lack of knowledge and the inability to obtain education makes it impossible for the impoverished to learn more about environmental issues and family planning.  The poverty trap can be applied specifically to environmental issues because poverty contributes to environmental degradation, which in turn worsens poverty.  Extreme poverty and declining resources can lead to civil strife and resource conflicts, such as the Zapatista uprising that happened in Chiapas, Mexico due to the unequal distribution of land that made it difficult for the indigenous peoples to accumulate any capital from farming and harvesting the land.

So what is our solution to the poverty trap?  Will alleviating the poverty trap allow us to better protect against environmental degradation?  In my opinion, there is a huge need for social consensus and public intervention on the issue.  For example, public investments are needed in education and early childhood development, taxes for the wealthy must increase, and political and financial institutions must be re-vamped to make way for inclusive instead of exclusive institutions.  These changes need to happen before environmental degradation so undermines the power of state authority and legitimacy that civil strife breaks out.  Uprisings like the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas may cause regime and institutional change if they occur on a large scale, but this is not the ideal solution.  In terms of protecting against environmental degradation, I think alleviating the poverty trap is one part of the solution.  By allowing the poor to accumulate more capital and invest more in education and health, they will be able to focus more on conservation and sustainable use of the environment as well as better family planning and more investment in their children’s futures.

I wanted to take an analytical look at the Homer-Dixon research and his views on the role of environment and violence. I think that Homer-Dixon takes a really interesting approach in one of his first conclusions: that scarcities of renewable resources can produce civil violence, but that environmental scarcity mainly act by creating social effects- that are often misinterpreted as a conflict’s “immediate cause.”

I think that his statement here is extremely valid, but I’m also not sure if the two can be separated so easily. Scarcity naturally is going to cause social issues-I don’t think it’s possible for it to not cause social issues. While I agree, the social issues lead to violence, I’m not sure if it is fair to separate the social from environmental in this case. The environmental issues are social issues because they strain everyday life. The social issues wouldn’t arise without scarcity issues and together, they cause civil violence. However, I do agree that the social aspects of scarcity are highly linked to the environment. People don’t realize the scarcity until something being gone affects their everyday life, and once everyday life and social norms are changed, violence often ensues to attempt to gain social status back.

I think that Homer-Dixon’s idea about resource capture is very relevant and one of the few of his conclusions that the global-North can essentially relate to. Dwindling resources puts power distribution in the favor to those with a grip on the resource. Often, the North can look at the south and see food scarcity and water scarcity, but can in no way relate seeing as we have faucets with clean running water 24/7. But what happens when the resource is something that affects the global north, my thoughts lying on oil and diamonds. All of a sudden, the U.S., for instance, has a stance in the power distribution of those in charge of the oil distribution. Granted, as we discussed in class, much of our imports of oil come from Canada who remains peaceful, however, the US has a high stake in the industry itself. Our economy is so dependent on oil in everything we do, that if prices rise to an abnormal amount, we are looking at an economic tragedy. I think that Homer-Dixon only looks at this in terms of the poorest groups and how this affects them. I believe that this idea affects some of the world’s largest economies and should really be the driving force behind positive global development

I think a lot of Homer-Dixon’s conclusions are however, not monumental. He makes a lot of conclusions about social factors and I think that so much of his analysis is on social norms that we already understand as a part of society.  While yes, he places it in the environmental context, he isn’t unique in how he applies them and how they are specifically different from other social pressures. For instance, I think his separate conclusion that environmental scarcity is connected to weak state in poor countries. I think it’s just a bit trite- just about every poor country is corrupt to some extent (even the richer countries can be included) that a weak state has much more to do with other factors and not just the environment. Clearly environmental distinction will separate social groups- just as just about any other aspect of society. Everything contributes to one group being more powerful than another. I think that is a fact about everyday life, not a distinct conclusion about the environment.

The ingenuity-gap and Homer-Dixon

I wholeheartedly disagree with Homer-Dixon’s final pessimistic anti-cornucopian rationale. He states: “The most important of the seven factors above is the last: growing population, consumption, and environmental stresses will increase social friction. This will reduce the capacity of policymakers in developing countries to intervene as good social engineers in order to chart a sustainable development path and prevent further social disruption.” While I do believe humans across the globe are faced today with ever-mounting environmental pressures and adverse circumstances created by depletion and degradation, this simply underestimates human ingenuity just as much as the neo-Malthusians do.

Homer-Dixon, in his analysis, feels that humans cannot overcome conflict, which I feel is unrealistic. What would be the purpose of diplomats if human conflict was unable to be tackled? Scientists, economists, farmers, statisticians, and environmentalists need to work tirelessly to address these future concerns of population, consumption, and environmental stresses. Diplomats and politicians will need to address the mediation of conflicts created by scarcity, changing weather patterns, and other environmental shifts. Domestic and international cooperation can be used to overcome these challenges, albeit expecting some violent outburst in the process.

While the abovementioned issues are nowhere near mitigated, I believe that Homer-Dixon’s analysis has been proven false since the time of writing in 1991. Just as Malthus predicted doom much too soon, I do not believe that we are at the point of no-return regarding environmental conflict and its mitigation. Today more than ever, public and private institutions in the developing world are working to find solutions for agriculture that meet modern demands. High-level dialogue has become the norm for environmental conferences (with few concrete solutions, but still significant symbolically). Diplomats around the world seek solutions to environmental challenges with their counterparts every day.

Homer-Dixon presents his “ingenuity-gap” as a reason for the likelihood of future conflict. While yes, this gap can create grievances and lead to violence in the long run, more has been done to further information-sharing and capacity-building trainings in the last decade and a half since Homer-Dixon wrote his article (1999). In general, again, diplomats are the ones to promote this information sharing between countries. Mistakes made in western Africa can lead to suggestions on how to improve practices in Argentina, for example. Public institutions should be the leaders in trying to bridge this “ingenuity-gap” through widespread dissemination of research findings. In this way, the developing world is less likely to be left behind technologically, because these ideas should not cost them. In the past, research-sharing and development activities were conducted by private corporations for the benefit of their products, which would later return a profit for this investment. We are at a critical juncture now where this cannot be the only source of innovation in our world, and this is where social innovators come in as the saviors.

In conclusion, public funding for research must increase and be targeted toward mitigating Homer-Dixon’s key problems of population, consumption, and environmental stresses so that people globally can reap its benefits. This would be the best method to hopefully prevent Homer-Dixon’s pessimistic view of human failure by diminishing the “ingenuity-gap” in the face of these adversities. 

Sea Level Rise, Environmental Justice, and The Windup Girl

          In the documentary The Island President, a news anchor at the 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP15) asked Mohammed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, if his country had any backup plan in the event that the climate negotiations in Copenhagen failed.  His response: “None.  We will die”.  Nasheed’s nation, the Maldives, encompasses roughly 2,000 small islands located in the Indian Ocean.  This developing country boasts a population of approximately 400,000 people, teems with oceanic biodiversity in the form of coral reefs, and maintains a robust tourism industry for the rich and famous.  The people of the Maldives have lived here for thousands of years in equilibrium with the ocean.  However, anthropogenic climate change has already begun to interrupt this peaceful equilibrium.  The Maldives average 4 feet and 11 inches above sea level.  Their highest point barely reaches 8 feet above sea level.  If the world does nothing to mitigate climate change, climate scientists have predicted that the resulting rise in sea levels will completely engulf the Maldives, destroying an entire national identity and creating hundreds of thousands of climate change refugees.  The plight of the Maldives begs the question of whether the wealthier, more powerful, high emissions countries that are contributing heavily to climate change are obligated to aid the Maldives and other less developed, poor island nations as they begin to feel the effects of climate change.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is set in 23^rd century, post-climate change Thailand.  Sea level rise seems to be the most drastic change in the post climate-change world; while the rising sea has destroyed many developing nations, Thailand struggles to maintain itself with a system of levees and sea walls that use a pumping mechanism to pump the rising sea underground.  Developed nations and their “calorie corporations”, such as AgriGen and PurCal, have also exploited developing nations in this post-climate change world.  The developing nations like Thailand constantly struggle with new “genehacked” diseases, food shortages, and pests.   The book constantly alludes to a better life in the US and the fact that the US has a monopoly on the grain and rice market.  Even post-climate change, the global North has continued to exploit the global South instead of feeling the moral obligation to help them combat and adapt to climate change, disease, and agricultural pests.  The futuristic Thailand in the novel is also home to thousands of poorly-treated Chinese refugees, called “yellow cards”, that seem to have come into the country after being massacred in their own country (possibly for scarce resources).  This could be what happens to the citizens of the Maldives once their entire nation drowns under the rising ocean and they must ask other countries to take them in as climate change refugees.  More broadly, this exploitation and lack of moral concern for the global South mirrors Mohammed Nasheed’s situation in the Maldives.  Or better yet, it is the potential future of the global South post-climate change. 

The current real-life situation in the Maldives and the potential future that awaits the global South in The Windup Girl beg the question of what responsibilities the global North has to aid the global South, if any.  The global North is constantly blamed (and in my opinion, rightly so) for international environmental degradation, resource scarcity, and climate change.  As the creators of the problem and as the wealthier half of the world, many believe that the North is obligated to mitigate their emissions and aid nations such as the Maldives with climate change adaptation (infrastructure, clean water, etc).  Others may argue that in doing this, the North is imposing their will on the South and now allowing them to develop their economies and go through the same industrial process as the North did in the early 1900s.  Yet others may argue that the North has no obligation to help the South at all.  In my opinion, the North should be required to mitigate their emissions and aid the South not just with adaptation efforts, but with sustainable economic growth and focuses on things like research and development of clean energy and better infrastructure for public transport.  In this way, the North will be responsible for their emissions and will allow the South to have the opportunity to develop their economies, albeit in a more sustainable manner.  Hopefully, in this way, we can avoid the post-climate change future presented in The Windup Girl.

Generipping and Regressive Technology?

While at times this book seemed unnecessarily long, I found the last 100 pages or so to be at least moderately thrilling and able to hold my attention. From a literary standpoint, I enjoyed the set-up of the novel. I felt the chapters divided by different characters and story lines helped to give the overall storyline some context in this futuristic world. I do think, however, that the novel could have been improved with an introduction or some sort of background information on the “expansion,” the system of government in place, or what Des Moines really was.

For me, on of the most interesting elements of “The Windup Girl” was the corruption throughout the novel. While reading, I had the same uncomfortable feeling as I sometimes get when watching “House of Cards;” that feeling you get when a character is about to be ruined and you know it, but they do not see it coming. Corruption ran rampant wherever you looked in this city. Hock Seng’s plan to steal from SpringLife’s safe to rebuild his own empire, Carlyle’s blackmailing of city officials with the rainy season protections, Jaidee’s decision to anger Trade; the list is unending. Ironically, it seems that the only person in this novel with a shred of morality left is the soulless creature, Emiko. 

The book’s ending really made me rethink my perspective on this futuristic world and its protagonists. The old gaijin in the boat’s proposal seems to take generipping to a new level. However, with the amount of genetic modifications to all other living-creatures in this futuristic world, it is surprising to me that generippers had not yet decided to create humans themselves in test tubes. Yes, they do, in a way, to create New People like Emiko, but they do not consider them to be “real” people with souls and free will. Emiko appears to discover her own free will throughout the story, a flaw by her designers. But this gaijin’s proposal makes complete sense in their world: create blister rust and other disease resistant people, rather than resistant foods. With this world’s mixed-up sense of reality and morality, test tube humans do not seem like a far-off possibility for the survival of their species. If they could truly design humans to the specifications necessary, as the gaijin proposed, their world would be better for it.

This leads me to my final point. The technology in this novel is baffling with the mix of futuristic and regressive technologies. These people live in a post-petroleum world, counting carbon credits and living simply. Even the richest people in the novel seem to live simply with little carbon emissions, like Carlyle and Anderson. I do not understand why their army operated off of petroleum and coal (relatively “ancient” technologies in their world) but yet they have the ability to gene rip nearly every species. Their biotechnology seems to be far more advanced than their energy technology. I would say that their society lives the way they do based off of our generation’s destruction (maybe the expansion) but there was simply not enough background information to understand how the destruction was caused.

A future world I don't want to live in

I can actually say that I thoroughly enjoyed this novel- I found myself confused a lot, it was pretty depressing, and it took a while to reach the climax, but I was still really engaged with the plot. I enjoyed that there really was no protagonist- because essentially everyone was bad. It was an interesting twist.

A book like this one is very different from other post-apocalyptic worlds that authors have written about- most recent in my mind was “The Road,” and this tale was extremely different. I think that the sci-fi part of the novel took away just a little bit of the legitimacy of the novel from a scientific perspective—but most of it also wasn’t too unrealistic. Our world is moving in a direction of gene-ripping and being able to create human beings unnaturally, so the idea of a Windup girl isn’t impossible.

I believe that the novel needed to give context to the environmental disaster that they lived in. We knew about the expansion and the contraction, but giving no context made it difficult to envision the current world that the characters lived in. The lesson of the book from the last two pages was “we need trade and globalization, we can’t survive on our own.” Beside the fact that I thought it was said so blatantly that it just seemed like an easy plug, I wanted to know how this related to the disasters that got these characters to what they were. From analyzing the few clues that the author gave us, my thoughts were the “expansion” was the age of globalization, and like many things that expand, they often burst, which let them into the “contraction,” or isolationism.

I think it was an interesting that the author made technology regressive, not progressive (something we discussed in our group in class). This futuristic world should have technology we don’t see today, however, we can assume from the details in the novel that humans were unable to find an alternative energy source to foster new technology. As previously mentioned, we have no context of what happened before the era that the characters currently live in- so we don’t know if resource shortages caused the problem, human error, etc. The characters lived essentially in a petroleum-free world, something we so heavily depend on today. By taking away our most common energy source, we can see where we end up- even the radios are hand cranked.

The summary of the novel on the back of the book said in this world, calories were currency. This concept wasn’t really developed and I think would have been strongest tool to connect the future with apocalyptic decline and regressive society. However, money was still extremely prevalent as the main currency because bribes were the only way to survive. If calories truly were currency, I believe readers would better understand the urgency to act today to ensure proper food development and security. However, the overriding theme of the book was that the East was still dependent on America for the GMO food such as U-Tex rice. Calories as currency would have taken the reader back to the time where bartering good and services was a means for survival. I actually think this concept encourages readers to act less- Americans see that they are still okay for survival and the rest of the world is dependent on them- in no way does this help today’s society become proactive. Imagine if the book was reversed and it took place in America and we were dependent on the far-East for survival. That role switch could make the difference of a reader imagining themselves in that world or just imagining other people in that world.