If you do not want to be unpopular, just remember to criticise Mr. Bush and his ``War on Terror''. However, after we attribute conflicts to everything from imperialism to terrorism, from religion to civilisation, I am glad to see finally some opinions which reflect on the trapped, or failure state in many arid areas, from a different aspect which has very little to do with politics and military. The article states that:
Washington looks at many of these clashes and erroneously sees
Islamist ideology at the core. Our political leaders fail to realize
that other Islamic populations are far more stable economically,
politically and socially—and that the root of the crisis in the dryland
countries is not Islam but extreme poverty and environmental stress.
The article gracefully followed this issue by discussing what is the cause of these areas' unfavourable state, why military approach is not working and what economic and environmental measures should be taken to salvage these areas and people. The measures include solving water shortage, increasing productivity, building infrastructures and establishing export market. However, to apply the article's suggestion without consideration to all arid environments in such crisis may not be justified. As each area have differing situation and conditions, and the history before they fall to the undesirable state may be worthy looking at.
I would argue that resilience, and afterwards adaptive cycle and panarchy, can be used as a framework when studying such problems. The objective of improvement, is not only bring people out of poverty, but also ensure that they do not fall into poverty again when another drought or war strikes, i.e. make them more resilient to changes.
To achieve this, one question must be answered is "what state on earth is the system in?". If we use the ball and basin analogy, we say the system is "trapped" in a state because there is some forces that stop the system from shifting state, just like the terrain around a basin stops the ball from falling out. These forces may be brought by the interactions of slowly and fast changing variables. The article in SA noticed fast changing variables but often the slow ones are more fundamental.
It can be very tricky to find the slowly changing variable, especially in a complex system. An examination of the system's history sometimes can help. By identifying different periods when the system is more organised or chaotic, or when it is more resilient or more rigid, and compare variables we can get hold of, we may be able to identify slowly changing variables. We can also identify significant changes in the history and examine its impact. This is where the adaptive cycle comes into play. The problem with this approach, however, is that the measures of resilience, connectedness and capital (the three dimensions in the cycle metaphor) are still quite subjective nowadays. But comparison and qualitative analysis is possible.
From the adaptive cycle we can find out how the slowly changing variables influenced the resilience, connectedness and capital varied throughout the history, god-willing, we will be able to tell how they influence the system today. The next step, given slowly changing variables, is to optimise fast changing variables so as to change the shape of the "basin" so the "ball" can fall into a better basin (if any, that is) than the current one.
Back to measures proposed by the SA article, they are all trying to change the fast changing variables, such as water availability and grassland productivity. However without knowledge of slowly changing variable, such as soil texture, organic content, and/or precipitation, such manipulation may well be futile. Not to mention there are also socioeconomic factors in play, e.g. local customs, the psychology of local people and occupant, and the impact of foreign culture. These are even more intriguing to define and quantise.
In a word I think it is correct to begin to address dryland crisis from environment and economy sector instead of military and ideology ones. Yet the frustrating complexity should be covered if long term interest of the system is desirable. So far the most promising helper seems to be the resilience/panarchy network.
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