Nature's Pitchfork.

• Author: Jones, Eric
• Position: Review

Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 270 pp., $27.05.

YOU MAY thrust nature out with a pitchfork, so the tag from Horace goes, but she will quickly return. No doubt this was meant to apply to garden weeds but it equally accords with the study of international relations. There is a subtext to the social sciences, in which every so often an attempt is made to show that human affairs are in the grip of powerful natural agencies, or at least that they are strongly influenced by them. Thomas Homer-Dixon's Environment, Scarcity, and Violence follows in this vein. Homer-Dixon sets out to re-establish what he calls "nature-social" explanations of possible threats to national and international security, Although his thesis proves more nuanced than bald environmental determinism, the purpose of the volume is to trace various paths by which the natural world may give rise to intra- or inter-state conflict.

There is an obvious argument for "bringing nature back in" to the interpretation of world politics. Just as the diversity of soils and climates means that production costs under any given technology are unlikely to be the same everywhere, so too will the costs of trading with others or fending off aggressors vary from place to place. Nevertheless, efforts to establish the role of nature in social phenomena have been episodic. Every so often, meteorologists try to account for historical events on the basis of climatic changes. The most resounding environmental explanation was probably Karl Wittfogel's "Oriental Despotism" thesis, which attributed underdevelopment in Asia to the flourishing of repressive empires that supposedly arose wherever farming depended on centralized irrigation and flood control in great river valleys. Wittfogel fell afoul of the Stalinists, who would accept no deviation from the Marxist orthodoxy that proper (i.e., communistic) social organization could over-come all natural obstacles. One might think capitalism also challenges Wittfogel's thesis, since modern economic growth in Asia patently shows that the continent has not in fact been the prisoner of natural constraints. Most modern commentators seem to take this line. They feel obliged to acknowledge that the environment is "a good thing" that should be preserved at almost any cost, while ignoring the effect the natural world may actually have on human affairs.

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