Hi 120,
Originally Posted by
120mm
BTW - Selil, that was some post. Some day when I have time I would love to discuss how the division between science-philosphy-religion is artificial and weakens them all. But now, I am busy and must be guilty of "drive-by" posting.
Sounds like a wonderful way to kill many jugs of beer . Just to toss in my 0.0182 cents worth (aka .02 CDN), I wold have to say that you need to add in basic meta-epistemological stances into that discussion and look for correlations at the cultural level.
On to it's effects on small wars...
Why don't we try and develope a list of key strategic resources taking off on Van's start with potable water?
If I was tossing one together, it would include:
- Potable water
- Food supplies
- Medical supplies
- Weaponry
- Transportation
- Electronics / communications
- Social "replication" (including both replicating the members of the society [e.g. kids], and their education)
- Structures of interpretation / meaning (i.e. how do we understand all of this?)
Each of these resources should also have "or means of their production" added to them.
We also might want to look at developing a causal typology of "displacement". So, for example, a 10' rise in sea level would cause a mass exodus from Bangladesh, unless certain non-military actions take place (think BIG dikes!). This is a different scenario from the displacements in Darfur or Iraq, or from the American South in the early 1950's and the Rust belt in the 1980's
We might also consider possible scenarios of "good" coming from massive population displacements and try and develope pre-emptive scenarios. For example, Canada happens to have the largest reserves of potable water in the world and, also, a very low population density:
Canada US
area: 3,854,085 sq mi 3,718,695 sq mi
population
(2007 est.) 32,915,600 301,747,000
Population
density: 8.54 people / sq mi 81.14 people / sq mi
PD rank: 219 172
At the moment, just from personal observation, our winters have gotten warmer and our summers have gotten cooler.
If we were to see increasing desertifictation in the US, which we are, would we have a flow of US "refugees" across our border?
What if we were to look at South Africa instead?
Marc
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