Post on The Coming Anarchy

All in all, this piece was pretty depressing. Whenever the environment is brought up, and how much humanity has destroyed it, I can't help but feel utterly useless amongst a huge battle. But in this sense, I feel that Kaplan was right. Whenever there is a lack of resources for a population- be it food, water, land- conflict arises. Why wouldn't it?- People need to be able to survive. Also I agree with Kaplan's bold statement that political and stragetic impact of surging population, spreading disease and the other impending diasters will become the biggest challenge for a foreign policy. How do you begin to save humanity from the unnaturally-caused natural doom? It is clear to me that whoever controls the resources, like the Turks and their Ataturk Dam, controls the world. I think that like at Golden Mountain resources must be minimally used, and not just in underdeveloped, overpopulated areas, but in the Western states as well. This article reminds me of a Native American essay I read two years ago basically stating that the world as we knew it would cease to exist in 50 years, with how carelessly and rapidly we were expunging our resources.

I completely agree with Kaplan when he brings up the fact that most the states in this world were socially constructed by colonialists. The drawn up border lines don't accurately reflect the different cultures of the people within them. This leads to conflict and a big question of how to resolve the problem. There isn't enough land to distribute fairly, and maybe it would be ideal if every civilization were able to break apart from their state in order to be more easily managed, but the segmentation wouldn't help the environmental issue, it would harm it. It would be extremely difficult to share resources, have big conservation efforts and so on when each civilization feels entitled to it. Then the terrifying question comes to mind of is there ever a winner, besides for annhilation of a people, in the wars against culture or necessities for survival? Won't both peoples be right?

With all this turmoil and a lack of options, I think people will turn to chaos like Kaplan said, taking their fate and what they think is the fate of their culture into their own hands.