E-mail Story
Print Friendly
Send E-mail
Reprint story
Speakup and View Comments
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
'The Ecology of National Security'
By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
The Tigris and Euphrates rivers have "national security problem" written all over them.
Rising in Turkey, they cross two tense national borders, traveling through Syria before they reach Iraq.
Once there, the rivers provide the bulk of Iraq's water supply.
But before their water reaches Iraq, half of it is diverted upstream by Turkey and Syria for their own uses.
It was into that tense part of the world that Sandia National Laboratories scientist Howard Passell and his colleagues took their environmental tool kit two years ago, to help in a search for solutions.
Armed with computer models to help the nations of the region think about coping with limited water supplies, Passell and his colleagues are trying to tackle the problem from the bottom up, as a water problem rather than a clash of nations.
It is an example of what Passell calls "the ecology of national security."
Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues.
"They're all related to the same set of problems," Passell said in a recent interview.
Ecology is the study of how complex systems of living things fit together, how they get the water and energy they need to survive in a frequently hostile environment. Passell, a bearded 52-year-old ecologist and water expert, brings that sensibility to the task of national security.
Sandia, at heart a nuclear weapons lab, is known more for conventional national security than for the fuzzy work of ecology. But the connections between environment and national security are increasingly gaining traction in the national security community.
A recent study from a dozen retired U.S. admirals and generals found that, around the world, drought, flooding, sea level rise and habitat shifts associated with climate change pose "a serious threat to America's national security."
The Central Intelligence Agency recently opened a new center to study "the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and heightened competition for natural resources."
Consider the problems of Gaza, the Palestinian territory on the Mediterranean Sea sandwiched between Israel and Egypt.
Armed conflict between Gaza and its Israeli neighbors is easy to think of as a classic 21st century national security problem, complete with national armies and free-flowing terrorists.
But Passell points to Gaza's water shortages.
The underground water supplies that 1.5 million Gaza residents depend on "are in danger of collapse as a result of years of over-use and contamination that have been exacerbated by the recent conflict," according to a recent report from the U.N. Environment Programme.
An island isolated by the political situation around it, and running out of the resources needed to sustain its densely packed population, "Gaza is a classical ecological crisis," Passell said.
Scholars call things like Gaza's water "ecosystem services" — goods and services needed by human societies that are provided by the environment.
Wetlands that cleanse river water of contaminants are one example. Biodiversity that provides the raw material for our evolving food supplies is another. Groundwater, surface water and a climate stable and benign enough to grow food is a third.
As those services fail, trouble looms, Passell and a group of colleagues wrote in a recent report.
They point to conflict over food shortages in the past two years in Haiti, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Those food shortages are linked to a complex web of problems, from dwindling groundwater reserves and climate change to the use of cropland to grow biofuels instead of food.
The list of ecosystem services-driven problems offered by Passell and his colleagues is depressingly long: the loss of wetlands, the decline of fisheries, the loss of sediments that feed the vast river deltas on which a substantial portion of Earth's population farms and lives.
Passell believes all of those are potential flash points, as well as the source of chronic long-term global problems.
"Failing ecosystems and the decline of ecosystem services at regional and global scales," Passell and his colleagues wrote, "pose a long-term threat to U.S. national security as great as the more conventional threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and war."
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach John Fleck at 823-3916 or jfleck@abqjournal. com.
| We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. |
|
|
