Packing heat: Why violence boils over on a warming planet | Grist
A Kenyan pastoralist killed in a cattle raid; an Afghan farmer trusting the Taliban to protect his poppy crop; more crackdowns along the U.S.-Mexico border; the Arab Spring -- are these isolated incidents of region-specific violence and turmoil? Or can they all claim a common root cause: climate change?
Journalist Christian Parenti, author of the new book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, makes the case that climate change has contributed to all of these upheavals.
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In the face of this crisis, in this country, the state is either going to be a more repressive, environmentally triggered, climate crisis-oriented police state that develops, or it's going to be a state that reengages with economic planning, economic retribution, a green New Deal, a mixed economy -- basically Green Keynesianism.
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Regarding the Grist article, here is another one from Grist with an excerpt that suggests a different reason for Mexico's problems:
"So how, precisely, did the drug trade become such a prominent player in Mexican society? That question does not get asked enough. I'd argue that the drug trade has grown roughly in proportion to the long, slow decline in the legitimate Mexican economy.
To put the story briefly, Mexican policymakers in the 1980s decided to "modernize" the economy by pushing millions of smallholder farmers off of their land and into jobs in what was supposed to become a booming manufacturing sector. The idea was that Mexico would become the manufacturing base for the United States. The effort culminated in the passage of NAFTA in 1994, which allowed goods and investment capital (but not people) to flow freely across the border.
But the pro-trade policy, still pursued by the present government, has failed miserably. Millions of farmers did exit the land, but the manufacturing boom promised by NAFTA never fully materialized. China, where labor is even cheaper and more plentiful, emerged as our manufacturing base instead. In place of a manufacturing miracle, the Mexican people got an economic void -- which the drug trade has more or less filled."
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2011-01-10-why-mexico-is-such-a-mess/PALL/print
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