This article is an abridged version of a paper prepared for the Global Environmental Change Committee of the Social Science Research Council and for a conference on "Emerging Trends in Global Security" convened by York University in October, 1990. The full paper is available from the author. Portions have appeared in "Environmental Change and Economic Decline in Developing Countries," International Studies Notes, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter 1991), pp. 18-23; "Environmental Change and Human Security," Behind the Headlines, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Toronto: Canadian Institute for International Affairs, 1991); and "Environmental Change and Violent Conflict," American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Occasional Paper No. 4 (June 1990). For their helpful comments, the author is grateful to Peter Cebon, William Clark, Daniel Deudney, Darya Farha, Peter Gleick, Ernst Haas, Fen Hampson, Roger Karapin, Jill Lazenby, Vicki Norberg-Bohm, Ted Parson, George Rathjens, James Risbey, Richard Rockwell, Thomas Schelling, Eugene Skolnikoff, Martha Snodgrass, Janice Stein, Urs Thomas, Myron Weiner, and Jane Willms. Financial support for research and writing was received from The Royal Society of Canada, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

1. See, for example, Janet Welsh Brown, ed., In the U.S. Interest: Resources, Growth, and Security in the Developing World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990); Neville Brown, "Climate, Ecology and International Security," Survival, Vol. 31, No. 6 (November/December 1989), pp. 519-532; Peter Gleick, "Climate Change and International Politics: Problems Facing Developing Countries," Ambio, Vol. 18, No. 6 (1989), pp. 333-339; Gleick, "The Implications of Global Climatic Changes for International Security," Climatic Change, Vol. 15, No. 1/2 (October 1989), pp. 309-325; Ronnie Lipschutz and John Holdren, "Crossing Borders: Resource Flows, the Global Environment, and International Security," Bulletin of Peace Proposals, Vol. 21, No. 2 (June 1990), pp. 121-33; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, "Redefining Security," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 162-177; Norman Myers, "Environment and Security," Foreign Policy, No. 74 (Spring 1989), pp. 23-41; Michael Renner, National Security: The Economic and Environmental Dimensions, Worldwatch Paper No. 89 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1989); and Arthur Westing, ed., Global Resources and International Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (Oxford: New York, 1986). For a skeptical perspective, see Daniel Deudney, "The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security," Millennium, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Winter 1990), pp. 461-476.

2. Readers interested in a careful argument for an expanded notion of security that includes environmental threats to national well-being should see Richard Ullman, "Redefining Security," International Security, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Summer 1983), esp. pp. 133 and 143.

3. For example, see David Wirth, "Climate Chaos," Foreign Policy, No. 74 (Spring 1989), p. 10.

4. Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 39 and 95; William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity: A Prologue to a Political Theory of the Steady State (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977), pp. 214-217.

5. Fen Hampson, "The Climate for War," Peace and Security, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn 1988), p. 9.

6. Jodi Jacobson, Environmental Refugees: A Yardstick of Habitability, Worldwatch Paper No. 86 (Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1988).

7. Peter Gleick, "Climate Change," p. 336; Malin Falkenmark, "Fresh Waters as a Factor in Strategic Policy and Action," in Westing, Global Resources, pp. 85-113.

8. Peter Wallensteen, "Food Crops as a Factor in Strategic Policy and Action," Westing, Global Resources, pp. 151-155.

9. Ibid., p. 146-151.

10. Ted Gurr, "On the Political Consequences of Scarcity and Economic Decline," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 1985), pp. 51-75.

11. "The disappearance of ecological abundance seems bound to make international politics even more tension ridden and potentially violent than it already is. Indeed, the pressures of ecological scarcity may embroil the world in hopeless strife, so that long before ecological collapse occurs by virtue of the physical limitations of the earth, the current world order will have been destroyed by turmoil and war." Ophuls, Ecology, p. 214.

12. In his classic formulation, the economist Thomas Malthus claimed that severe human hardship was unavoidable, because human population grows geometrically when unconstrained, while food production can only grow arithmetically. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Penguin, 1970 [1798]), pp. 70-71.

13. See Stephen Schneider in Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century? (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1989), chapter 7.

14. The development of chaos theory has contributed to this understanding. A chaotic system has nonlinear and feedback relationships between its variables that amplify small perturbations, thereby rendering accurate prediction of the system's state increasingly difficult the further one tries to project into the future. In chaos (not to be confused with randomness), deterministic causal processes still operate at the micro-level and, although the system's state may not be precisely predictable for a given point in the future, the boundaries within which its variables must operate are often identifiable. See James Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, and Norman Packard, "Chaos," Scientific American, Vol. 255, No. 6 (December 1986), pp. 46-57; James Gleick, Chaos: Making of a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).

15. Wallace Broecker, "Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse?" Nature, Vol. 328, No. 6126 (July 9, 1987), pp. 123-126. See also James Gleick, "Instability of Climate Defies Computer Analysis," New York Times, March 20, 1988, p. 30. William Clark has made a similar point about interlinked physical, ecological, and social systems: "Typically in such systems, slow variation in one property can continue for long periods without noticeable impact on the rest of the system. Eventually, however, the system reaches a state in which its buffering capacity or resilience has been so reduced that additional small changes in the same property, or otherwise insignificant external shocks, push the system across a threshold and precipitate a rapid transition to a new system state or equilibrium." See William Clark, On the Practical Implications of the Carbon Dioxide Question (Laxenburg, Austria: International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, 1985), p. 41.

16. J.C. Farman, B.G. Gardiner, and J.D. Shanklin, "Large Losses of Total Ozone in Antarctica Reveal Seasonal ClO;yx/NO;yx Interaction," Nature, Vol. 315, No. 6016 (May 16, 1985), pp. 207-210. Significant depletion of stratospheric ozone over Antarctica began in the 1970s, but was not identified until the 1980s because ozone-measuring satellites had been programmed to discard anomalous results. See Schneider, Global Warming, p. 226.

17. See, for example, the speeches on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Senators Nunn, Gore and Wirth, June 28, 1990, Congressional Record--Senate, pp. S8929-S8937.

18. Discussions of the relationship between environment and society date back to the classical Greeks. In the early twentieth century, many explanations tended towards a simplistic "environmental determinism" that gave little regard to the role in human-environmental systems of feedback loops, human adaptability, and social institutions. See, for instance, Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915). This perspective has seen something of a resurgence in recent decades; see, for example, Margaret Biswas and Arit Biswas, eds., Food, Climate and Man (New York: Wiley, 1979). A survey of some of the best modern literature is William Clark, "The Human Dimensions of Global Change," in Committee on Global Change (U.S. National Committee for the IGBP), Toward an Understanding of Global Change: Initial Priorities for U.S. Contributions to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP) (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988), pp. 134-213. On the social impact of climate change, see Robert Kates, Jesse Ausubel, and Mimi Berberian, eds., Climate Impact Assessment: Studies of the Interaction of Climate and Society, Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) No. 27 (New York: Wiley, 1985).

19. Angus MacKay, "Climate and Popular Unrest in Late Medieval Castile," in T.M. Wigley, M.J. Ingram, and G. Farmer, Climate and History: Studies in Past Climates and Their Impact on Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 356-376. For other historical case studies of climate-society interaction, see Hubert Lamb, Weather, Climate and Human Affairs (London: Routledge, 1988).

20. Anger over food scarcity was sometimes turned against Jews and conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity after Iberian pogroms in the late fourteenth century), and sometimes against small shopkeepers who were accused of the "sins" of creating shortages and overpricing food.

21. William Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: The Ecological Origins of the Soccer War (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979).

22. For instance, see Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and John Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977), p. 908.

23. El Salvador was the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere (190 people per square kilometer in 1976; compare India at 186), with a population growth rate of 3.5 percent per year (representing a doubling time of about twenty years). Most of the country had lost its virgin forest, land erosion and nutrient depletion were severe, and total food production fell behind consumption in the mid-50s. Per capita farmland used for basic food crops fell from 0.15 hectares in 1953 to 0.11 hectares in 1971.

24. Durham, Scarcity and Survival, p. 54.

25. The importance of variables intervening between population density and conflict is emphasized in Nazli Choucri, ed., Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Population and Conflict (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984); see also Jack Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991).

26. See especially Gareth Porter and Delfin Ganapin, Jr., Resources, Population, and the Philippines' Future: A Case Study, WRI Paper No. 4 (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute [WRI], 1988).

27. Other works on the Philippines used in this article are Gary Hawes, "Theories of Peasant Revolution: A Critique and Contribution from the Philippines," World Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1 (January 1990), pp. 261-298; Gregg Jones, Red Revolution: Inside the Philippine Guerrilla Movement (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1989); World Bank, Philippines: Environment and Natural Resource Management Study (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1989).

28. Leonard notes that, around the planet, population growth, inequitable land distribution, and agricultural modernization have caused huge numbers of desperately poor people to move to "remote and ecologically fragile rural areas" or to already overcrowded cities. See Jeffrey Leonard, "Overview," Environment and the Poor: Development Strategies for a Common Agenda (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1989), p. 5.

29. For example, researchers might need to be able to show how countless individual actions affect global climate variables (thus moving "up" through several levels of analysis), and how, in turn, these global variables influence conflict behavior (thereby moving back "down" to group and individual behavior).

30. A naturalistic view of social science holds that there is no qualitative difference between the domains of investigation of the natural and social sciences, suggesting that the procedures used for research and explanation can be basically the same in both domains.

31. For over three decades, issues surrounding intentionality and causal generalization have been the subject of heated debate in philosophy of mind, language, and science. For the purposes of this article, however, I treat as unproblematic causal generalizations that include physical and social variables.

32. My comments here principally refer to the influential "neorealist" school. See in particular Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

33. Most notably, it can help them gauge the causal power of distant environmental forces, identify potentially important interactions of simultaneous environmental problems, specify intervening variables, and identify causal links across levels of analysis.

34. Over short and medium terms, activity per capita is also a function of the economy's current capital stock, which reflects the society's prevailing level and type of technological development. Over the long term, we can assume that a society's technology is a result of two components of Figure 1: certain ideational factors (most importantly, beliefs about the nature of physical reality held by particular knowledge-oriented groups in the society) and available physical resources. I use the adjective "ideational" to emphasize that factors such as institutions, social relations, and beliefs are products of the human mind.

35. Numerous writers, especially those considering the social impact of climate change, have generated similar diagrams. See in particular the excellent survey article by Richard Warrick and William Riebsame entitled "Societal Response to CO2-Induced Climate Change: Opportunities for Research," Climatic Change, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1981), pp. 387-428. Two points should be noted about Figure 1: First, there are many ways it could be made more accurate, but at the cost of greater complexity. For example, there are feedback loops from social effects and conflict to environmental effects. The diagrams in this article highlight what I believe are the variables and causal linkages most important to our discussion. Second, each variable in Figure 1 aggregates many sub-variables. For instance, "activity per capita" encompasses sub-variables ranging from the extent of cattle ranching to the rate of automobile use. Consequently, an arrow in Figure 1 may represent either a positive or a negative correlation, depending on the specific sub-variables considered. In Figures 2-4, which identify more specific variables, all arrows represent positive correlations.

36. Experts vigorously dispute the effects of population growth on the environment, economic well-being, and social organization. Julian Simon is optimistic in The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Paul and Anne Ehrlich reiterate their well-known pessimism in The Population Explosion (London: Hutchinson, 1990). The question is surveyed by Geoffrey McNicoll in "Consequences of Rapid Population Growth: An Overview and Assessment," Population and Development Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 1984), pp. 177-240.

37. Recognition of the role of these factors distinguishes simplistic environmental determinism from sophisticated accounts of the nature of the environmental threat posed to humankind. Perhaps the most extreme example of the former in the environmental-security literature is Brown, "Climate, Ecology and International Security," pp. 523-524. Brown implies that climate change was an important and relatively proximate cause of social upheaval in Europe in the 1840s, imperial expansion between 1850 and 1940, the Cold War, and the 1974 Ethiopian coup.

38. Social vulnerability and adaptability have been the focus of much research and thought. See Warrick and Riebsame, "Societal Response." On the conditions and variables that determine vulnerability, see Diana Liverman, "Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change," in Roger Kasperson, et al., eds., Understanding Global Environmental Change: The Contributions of Risk Analysis and Management, report of an international workshop at Clark University, October 11-13, 1989 (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University, 1989), pp. 32-33.

39. Gurr, "Political Consequences of Scarcity," pp. 70-71.

40. I have left off this list a number of environmental problems. Declining biodiversity, for example, might contribute to acute conflict (by weakening agricultural productivity over the long term), but even more indirectly than the seven environmental stresses discussed here. Increased dumping of toxic wastes in the South, and accidents in the South involving subsidiaries of Northern companies (such as the Bhopal tragedy), will probably do no more than strain economic and diplomatic relations, although such incidents could lead to sporadic, localized violence. Perceptions of environmental damage or potential damage (whether or not the perceptions are justified) might also induce tensions; for instance, the siting of a nuclear plant close to an international border could lead to protests in neighboring countries. However, it seems unlikely that such perceptions by themselves could cause widespread conflict.

41. Readers interested in technical background on these problems should consult World Resources 1990-91 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) and World Resources 1988-89 (New York: Basic Books, 1988). This publication, produced biennially by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme and other organizations, is widely regarded as the most accessible, accurate, and comprehensive source for information on global change issues. The more popular State of the World report published annually by the Worldwatch Institute is useful but sometimes selective and tendentious.

42. However, as Broecker has pointed out, nonlinear or threshold effects in the atmospheric system could produce a sudden shift of the climate to a new equilibrium by altering, for example, the direction of major ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. Broecker, "Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse?" p. 124.

43. However, the uncertainties remain substantial for deforestation. See Vaclav Smil, Energy, Food, Environment: Realities, Myths, Options (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 231-237.

44. WRI, et al., World Resources 1990-91, p. 111.

45. Robert Worrest, Hermann Gucinski, and John Hardy, "Potential Impact of Stratospheric Ozone Depletion on Marine Ecosystems," in John Topping, Jr., ed., Coping with Climate Change: Proceedings of the Second North American Conference on Preparing for Climate Change (Washington, D.C.: The Climate Institute, 1989), pp. 256-262.

46. T.M.L. Wigley, "Impact of Extreme Events," Nature, Vol. 316, No. 6024 (July 11, 1985), pp. 106-107. Since the probability distributions for most climate variables describe a bell curve, Wigley calculates that a shift in the mean by one standard deviation would change a 1-in-20-. year extreme to one that occurs on average 1 year in 4, while the 1-in-100-year extreme would become a 1-in-11-year event.

47. See, for example, Lester Brown, "Reexamining the World Food Prospect," in Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 1989 (New York: Norton, 1989), pp. 41-58.

48. Useful discussions of these systems include World Commission on Environment and Development (commonly known as the Brundtland Commission), "Food Security: Sustaining the Potential," in Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapter 5, pp. 118-. 146; WRI, et al., World Resources 1988-89, pp. 18-21, 51-68, and especially 215-234, 271-284; WRI, et al., World Resources 1990-91, pp. 5-6, 83-100; United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), The State of Food and Agriculture 1989 (Rome: FAO, 1989), pp. 65-74.

49. Porter and Ganapin, Resources, Population, and the Philippines' Future, p. 24. These authors call this "perhaps the most rapid destruction of forest reserves in the world." The figures cited refer to adequately stocked forested land, and are approximate.

50. Christopher Finney and Stanley Western, "An Economic Analysis of Environmental Protection and Management: An Example from the Philippines," The Environmentalist, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1986), p. 56.

51. Experts generally describe a country as "land scarce" when 70 percent or more of the arable land is under production. In Asia about 82 percent of all arable land is cultivated. See WRI, et al., World Resources 1990-91, p. 5.

52. Nafis Sadik, The State of the World Population 1990 (New York: United Nations Population Fund, 1990), p. 8.

53. WRI, et al., World Resources 1990-91, p. 87. Nearly 73 percent of all rural households in developing countries are either landless or nearly landless. Using this figure, Leonard estimates that "935 million rural people live in households that have too little land to meet the minimum subsistence requirements for food and fuel. These data exclude China, which could add as many as 100-200 million more people to the category." See Leonard, "Overview," p. 13.

54. Experts give "desertification" a variety of meanings. In general, it implies a complex syndrome of very low soil productivity, poor rain-use efficiency by vegetation, and consequent adverse changes in the hydrological cycle. It can therefore encompass several of the variables identified in Figure 2. See Michel Verstraete, "Defining Desertification: A Review," Climatic Change, Vol. 9, No. 1/2 (August/October 1986), pp. 5-18.

55. Smil gives a startling account of the situation in China. From 1957 to 1977 the country lost 33.33 million hectares of farmland (30 percent of its 1957 total), while it added 21.2 million hectares of largely marginal land. He notes that "the net loss of 12 million hectares during a single generation when the country's population grew by about 300 million people means that per capita availability of arable land dropped by 40 per cent and that China's farmland is now no more abundant than Bangladesh's--a mere one-tenth of a hectare per capita!" See Smil, Energy, Food, Environment, pp. 223 and 230.

56. There is scientific debate about the likely magnitude, rate, and timing of greenhouse warming and about its climatic, ecological, and social impacts. The current consensus is summarized in the reports prepared by Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme. The complete report of Working Group I has been published as J.T. Houghton, G.J. Jenkins, and J.J. Ephraums, eds., Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For a thorough assessment of climate change and agriculture, see M.L. Parry, T.R. Carter, and N.T. Konijn, eds., The Impact of Climatic Variations on Agriculture, Volume 1: Assessments in Cool Temperate and Cold Regions; Volume 2: Assessments in Semi-arid Regions (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1989).

57. See R.A. Warrick, R.M. Gifford, and M.L. Parry, "CO2, Climatic Change and Agriculture: Assessing the Response of Food Crops to the Direct Effects of Increased CO2 and Climatic Change," in Bert Bolin, et al., eds. The Greenhouse Effect, Climatic Change, and Ecosystems, SCOPE No. 29 (New York: Wiley, 1986), pp. 393-474.

58. Janice Longstreth, "Overview of the Potential Health Effects Associated with Ozone Depletion," in Topping, Coping with Climate Change, pp. 163-167.

59. The FAO estimates that up to 2.5 billion people in the developing world will face acute fuelwood shortages by the year 2000. FAO, Fuelwood Supplies in the Developing Countries, FAO Forestry Paper No. 42 (Rome: FAO, 1983).

60. The term "green revolution" refers to the dramatic gains in crop output in the developing countries from the 1960s into the 1980s due to higher-yielding grains and the intensive use of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides.

61. Leonard, Environment and the Poor, p. 27.

62. For a case study of Indonesia, see Robert Repetto, "Balance-Sheet Erosion--How to Account for the Loss of Natural Resources," International Environmental Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 103-137.

63. Robert Repetto, "Wasting Assets: The Need for National Resource Accounting," Technology Review, January 1990, p. 40.

64. Repetto carefully analyzes soil types, cropping practices, logging, and erosion rates in upland areas of Java. Applying a 10 percent discount rate to the future stream of lost income, Repetto calculates the total economic cost of one year of erosion to be $481 million; this is about 40 percent of the annual value of upland cropland production. He writes: "Nearly 40 cents in future income is sacrificed to obtain each dollar for current consumption." He also estimates that off-site costs, including the higher expense of clearing waterways and irrigation channels of silt, come to $30-$100 million a year. Repetto, "Balance-Sheet Erosion," pp. 129-132.

65. E.g., Jacobson, Environmental Refugees.

66. Lester Brown and John Young, "Feeding the World in the Nineties," in Worldwatch Institute, State of the World: 1990 (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 61.

67. WRI, et al., World Resources 1988-89, p. 52.

68. In 1985, for example, average caloric intake was insufficient for health, growth, and productive work in eight countries in Asia, and six in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ibid., p. 53.

69. From 1962-72, global cereal production increased at an annual rate of 3.7 percent; from 1972-82, at 2.5 percent; and from 1982-86, at 2.1 percent. See Pierre Crosson and Norman Rosenberg, "Strategies for Agriculture," Scientific American, Vol. 261, No. 3 (September 1989), p. 130.

70. FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 1989, p. 13.

71. For a thorough review, see Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987).

72. Simon, The Ultimate Resource. Population growth, by Simon's analysis, is not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, it may be helpful because it increases the labor force and the pool of potential human ingenuity. See also Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (Chicago: Aldine, 1965).

73. Ehrlich, Ehrlich, and Holdren, Ecoscience; Ehrlich and Ehrlich, The Population Explosion.

74. Simon, The Ultimate Resource, p. 345.

75. For example, if average topsoil creation on farmed land is about 0.25 millimeters per year (or about 3.25 tons/hectare), then to be sustainable, agriculture should not, on average, produce soil loss greater than this amount. According to neo-Malthusians, such a limit on human activity should rarely be breached: topsoil is a resource essential to human well-being; human beings cannot create it themselves; and petroleum-based substitutes such as fertilizers and pesticides are only short-term remedies.

76. On chaotic processes, see footnote 14. Our technological interventions might increase the probability of dramatic threshold effects in environmental-social systems. For example, the cultural ecologist Roy Rappaport notes that our quest for higher crop yields has produced "some of the most delicate and unstable ecosystems ever to have appeared on the face of the earth." Roy Rappaport, "The Flow of Energy in an Agricultural Society," Scientific American, Vol. 225, No. 3 (September 1971), p. 126.

77. Development experts dispute the extent to which such social engineering is possible. On the determinants of the "social capability" to seize opportunities for economic growth, see James Bradford De Long, "The `Protestant Ethic' Revisited: A Twentieth Century Look," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 229-241.

78. Sadik, The State of World Population 1990; Griffith Feeney, et al., "Recent Fertility Dynamics in China: Results from the 1987 One Percent Population Survey," Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (June 1989), pp. 297-321.

79. Demographers have long assumed that developing countries would pass through a "demographic transition" similar to that exhibited by currently developed countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which a decline in death rate was eventually followed by a compensating decline in birth rate. This transition is thought to have resulted from increased material prosperity and certain social changes, such as higher literacy rates and the emancipation of women. However, if some developing countries cannot maintain a steady growth in social and economic prosperity, their demographic transition may be in doubt.

80. Assuming that the necessary foreign exchange or financial aid is available, such imports might seem a reasonable way to compensate for Southern shortfalls, even over an extended period. However, a dependence on agricultural areas in the North will make importers vulnerable to vagaries of climate, economics, and politics in the exporting countries. As the redundancy of food-growing regions is reduced, the likelihood of a sudden and severe global shortfall increases.

81. While I contend that cornucopian policies are unlikely to prove successful in the long run, their failure will occur in different ways and at different rates in different societies. Notably, some rapidly industrializing societies--such as Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia--seem to have successfully shaped their social, economic, and political structures to promote the production of material wealth. As this development is often at stunning cost to the environment, it represents in part a massive conversion of current and future ecological wealth to current economic wealth, in the form of physical and intellectual capital and materials for consumption. This wealth may give these countries greater ability to respond and adapt to environmental change, thus weakening the force of the fifth factor above. But the other six factors will still have force, which suggests that these societies are only postponing the crisis, not escaping it.

82. John Dollard, et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939); Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962). On relative deprivation, see James Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," American Sociological Review, Vol. 6, No. 1 (February 1962), pp. 5-19; Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Ted Gurr and Raymond Duvall, "Civil Conflict in the 1960s: A Reciprocal Theoretical System with Parameter Estimates," Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (July 1973), pp. 135-169.

83. See M. Sherif, Group Conflict and Cooperation: Their Social Psychology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Henri Tajfel, ed., Differentiation between Social Groups (London: Academic Press, 1978); Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Edward Azar and John Burton, International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (Sussex, U.K.: Wheatsheaf, 1986); Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (London: Free Press, 1956); Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

84. As Alexander Wendt notes, the view of structure as constraint is only one of three possible positions on the issue. Structure can also be thought of as generating the actors rather than constraining them, or structure and actor can be seen as dialectically related--that is, as Anthony Giddens suggests, generating but not reducible to each other. Alexander Wendt, "The Agent-. Structure Problem," International Organization, Vol. 41, No. 3. (Summer 1987), pp. 335-370; Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1984).

85. Those scholars who emphasize such constraints usually also acknowledge the causal importance of internal factors, such as the actor's particular interests and beliefs. By stressing power relations almost exclusively, perhaps Waltz comes closest to presenting a purely structural theory of international behavior and war. De Mesquita contends that the geographic proximity of actors is an important structural determinant of international conflict, while Choucri and North emphasize differences in states' resource endowments. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); and Nazli Choucri and Robert North, Nations in Conflict (San Francisco: Freeman, 1975).

86. See in particular Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

87. The adjective "simple" does not mean "unimportant." Rather, it distinguishes this type of conflict from others that involve psychological and social processes more complex than those posited by rational-choice theorists.

88. Alan Cowell, "Water Rights: Plenty of Mud to Sling," New York Times, February 7, 1990, p. A4; "Send for the Dowsers," The Economist, December 16, 1989, p. 42.
89. On January 13, 1990, Turkey began filling the giant reservoir behind the Ataturk Dam, the first in this complex. For one month Turkey held back the main flow of the Euphrates River, which cut the downstream flow in Syria to about a quarter of its normal rate.

90. Peter Gleick, "Climate Change and International Politics," pp. 333-339.

91. The issue of Euphrates water is entwined with concerns about territorial integrity and relations with ethnic minorities. Consequently, although water scarcity is a source of serious tensions between Syria and Turkey, and may trigger interstate violence in the future, this dispute is not a pure example of a simple-scarcity conflict. As suggested above, pure examples may be impossible to find.

92. Myron Weiner, "The Political Demography of Assam's Anti-Immigrant Movement," Population and Development Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (June 1983), pp. 279-292.

93. Ullman, "Redefining Security," p. 143.

94. McAdam, Political Process, p. 41.

95. A wealth of literature exists on the theoretical and empirical relationships between economic deprivation and civil strife. Mark Lichbach provides a survey in "An Evaluation of `Does Economic Inequality Breed Political Conflict?' Studies," World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (July 1989), pp. 431-470.

96. Population displacement into urban areas may be of particular importance. Many cities in developing countries are already surrounded by sprawling squatters' settlements rife with disease, crime, and violence. Whether these poor millions will be a source of civil strife remains to be seen. Ullman suggests that modern revolutions have rarely started in cities, because recent arrivals in urban areas are usually too preoccupied with retaining and expanding their economic niches to join revolutionary organizations. See Ullman, "Redefining Security," p. 142. But urban masses may not remain so quiescent in the future. Heavy urban subsidization in many developing countries of food, transport, and other amenities indicates that governments believe there is a real threat of unrest in the cities.

97. Hawes, "Theories of Peasant Revolution," pp. 297-298.

98. In technical terms, we need to use the techniques of anthropology, ethno-methodology, and interpretivism to develop a detailed "internal" understanding of these societies. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

99. Jonathan Wilkenfeld, "Domestic and Foreign Conflict Behavior of Nations," Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 5 (1968), pp. 56-69.

100. See Theda Skocpol, "Social Revolutions and Mass Military Mobilization," World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 2 (January 1988), pp. 147-168.

101. "Praetorian" is a label used by Samuel Huntington for societies in which the level of political participation exceeds the capacity of political institutions to channel, moderate, and reconcile competing claims to economic and political resources. "In a praetorian system, social forces confront each other nakedly; no political institutions, no corps of professional political leaders are recognized or accepted as the legitimate intermediaries to moderate group conflict." Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 196.

102. Ophuls notes that ecological scarcity "seems to engender overwhelming pressures toward political systems that are frankly authoritarian by current standards." Ophuls, Ecology, p. 163.

103. Heilbroner, Inquiry, pp. 39 and 95. These North-South disputes would be the international analogues of domestic relative-deprivation conflicts.

104. Ullman, "Redefining Security," p. 143.

105. Edward Muller and Mitchell Seligson, "Inequality and Insurgency," American Political Science Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (June 1987), pp. 425-452.

106. See Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 77-83; and Mitchell Seligson and Edward Muller, "Democratic Stability and Economic Crisis: Costa Rica, 1978-83," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 1987), pp. 301-326.

107. Ekkart Zimmermann and Thomas Saalfeld, "Economic and Political Reactions to the World Economic Crisis of the 1930s in Six European Countries," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 3 (September 1988), p. 326.

108. The argument that democracies are less inclined to war is often traced to Kant. For a thorough discussion, see Michael Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review, Vol. 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151-1170. This kind of second-stage intervention may be particularly difficult because environmental change may reduce the prospects for success of democratic regimes.

109. See Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

110. Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics, pp. 94 and 191; A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Jack Levy, "Research Note: Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War," World Politics, Vol. 40, No. 1 (October 1987), pp. 82-107.

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