THE Minister's eyes were like yolks, an after-effect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also a voice of hope about to expire.
Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ball-point-blue Atlantic composed the background.
None of it seemed beautiful, though.
"In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse - the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society."
I understood. The forty-five-minute journey from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea, in heavy traffic was through one never-ending shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would never have given credence.
The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were coated with black slime. The streets were one long puddle of floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach.
In twenty eight years Guinea's population will double if growth goes on at current rates. Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guinean countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is now beginning to take its revenge.
Mention "the environment" or "diminishing natural resources" in foreign policy circles and you meet a brick wall of scepticism or boredom. To conservatives especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public policy foundations have contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let pile up on their desks.
But it is time to understand "the environment" for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh - developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts - will be the core foreign-policy challenge of the post-Cold War world.
In the twenty-first century, water will be in dangerously short supply in such diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube, a classic ease of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and historical ones.
American Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F. Kennan's famous article, signed "X", published in Foreign,, Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued for a "firm and vigilant containment" of a Soviet Union that was imperially, rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign policy will one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal International Security.
The article, published in the autumn of 1991 by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme at the University of Toronto, was titled "On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict."
In Homer-Dixon's view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish. Just as there will be environmentally-driven wars and refugee flows, there will be environmentally-induced praetorian regimes - or, as he puts it, "hard regimes". Countries with the highest probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened by a declining resource base yet also have "a history of state (read `military') strength". Candidates include Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria.
Over the next fifty years, the earth's population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. Though optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of Sciences has pointed out, 95 per cent of the population increase will be in the poorest regions of the world, where governments now - just look at Africa - show little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements.
Homer-Dixon writes, ominously: "Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human adaptability in today's environmental-social system, but as time passes their analysis may become ever more compelling."
While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a "post-historical" realm, living in cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shanty towns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in.
"In the developing world, environmental stress will present people with a choice that is increasingly towards totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon concludes that "as environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential social disruption will increase."
Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office. "The darker the map colour, the worse the degradation," he explains. The West African coast. the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China and Central America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related to winds, chemicals, and water problems. "The worst degradation is generally where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where the soil is the best. So we're degrading earth's best soil."
China, in Homer-Dixon's view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation. Its current economic "success" masks deeper problems. "China's 14 per cent growth rate does not mean it's going to be a world power. It means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying."
REFERRING to the environmental research of his colleague the Czech-born ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time as the quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and salinisation. He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with eroded silt. and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a misconception that China has got its population under control.
Large-scale population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of warlordism and a weak tradition of central government - again as in Africa. "We will probably see the centre challenged and fractured, and China will not remain the same on the map," Homer-Dixon says.
In the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard University published a thought-provoking article called "The Clash of Civilizations?" The world, he argues, has been moving during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict.
Economic modernisation is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and fastest-developing city in India. Bombay, that has seen the worst inter-communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. The interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the distribution of natural resources becomes clear in the shanty towns of the Turkish capital Ankara.
Slum quarters in African cities such as Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey, though, the closer I got to the shanty town Altindag, or Golden Mountain, the better it looked, and the safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in traveller's cheques in the other, yet I felt no fear.
In Ankara, Golden Mountain was a real neighbourhood. The architectural bedlam of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a home-order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few plants by a window, and a stove. My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its existence demonstrates how formidable," is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim culture is made.
Resource distribution is strengthening Turks vis-a-vis Arabs and Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of water - the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey's Southeast Anatolia Project, involving 22 major dams and irrigation systems, is impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by Turks. The project's centrepiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam, upon which are, emblazoned the words of modern Turkey's founder:
"Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene" ("Lucky is the one who is a Turk").
Unlike Egypt's Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria's Revolution Dam, on the Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me: "It is true. We can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to regulate their political behaviour."
The diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians will, in contrast, have little effect on the early- and mid-21st century map of the region. Israel, with a 6.6 per cent economic growth rate based increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, fortified by a well-defined political community that is an organic outgrowth of history and ethnicity.
Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fuelled by mass migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 per cent. "Just as it makes no sense to ask why people eat or what they sleep for," writes Martin Van Creveld, a military historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in The Transformation Of War, "so fighting in many ways is not a means but an end." When I asked Pentagon officials about the nature of war in the twenty-first century, the answer I frequently got was: "Read Van Creveld." The top brass are enamoured of this historian not because his writings justify their existence but, rather, the opposite Van Creveld warns them that huge state military machines like the Pentagon's are dinosaurs about to go extinct, and that something far more terrible awaits us.
The degree to which Van Creveld's Transformation Of War complements Homer-Dixon's work on the environment, Huntington's thoughts on cultural clash, my own realisations in travelling by foot, bus, and bush taxi in more than 60 countries is startling.
Look at the Indian subcontinent. Given that in 2025 India's population could be close to 1.5 billion, that much of its economy rests on a shrinking natural-resource base, including dramatically declining water levels, and that communal violence and urbanisation are spiralling upward, it is difficult to imagine that the Indian state will survive the next century.
India's oft-trumpeted Green Revolution has been achieved by overworking its croplands and depleting its watershed. Norman Myers, a British development consultant, worries that Indians have "been feeding themselves today by borrowing against their children's food sources.
Pakistan's problem is more basic still, like much of Africa, the country makes no geographic or demographic sense. It was founded as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, yet there are more sub-continental Muslims outside Pakistan than within it. With as much as 65 per cent of its, land dependent on intensive irrigation, with wide-scale deforestation, and with a yearly population growth of 2.7 per cent (which ensures that the amount of cultivated land per rural inhabitant will plummet), Pakistan is becoming a more and more desperate, place. As irrigation in the Indus River basin intensifies to serve two growing populations, Muslim-Hindu strife over falling water tables may be unavoidable.
"India and Pakistan will probably fall apart," Homer-Dixon predicts. "Their secular governments have less and less legitimacy as well as less management ability over people and resources.
RETURNING from West Africa last autumn was an illuminating ordeal. Once we were in New York, despite the midnight hour, immigration officials at Kennedy Airport held up disembarkation by conducting quick interrogations of the aircraft's passengers - this was in addition to all the normal immigration and customs procedures. It was apparent that drug smuggling, disease, and other factors had contributed to the toughest security procedures I have ever encountered.
Then, for the first time in over a month, I spotted business people with attache cases and laptop computers. When I had left New York for Abidjan, all the business people were boarding planes for Seoul and Tokyo, which departed from gates near Air Afriques. The only non-Africans off to West Africa had been relief workers in T-shirts and khakis.
But Afrocentrists are right in one respect: We ignore this dying region at our own risk. When the Berlin Wall was falling, in November of 1989, I happened to be in Kosovo, covering a riot between Serbs and Albanians. The future was in Kosovo, I told myself that night, not in Berlin. The same day that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat clasped hands on the White House lawn, my Air Afrique plane was approaching Bamako, Mali, revealing corrugated-zinc shacks at the edge of an expanding desert. The real news wasn't at the White House, I realised. It was right below.