3. FISHERY DEPLETION: Resource wars escalate, causing extinction.

In 1999 the Oslo Peace Research Institute issued a ground-breaking paper by Indra de Soysa and Nils Gleditsch which drew attention to the fact that, in the first decade of the post-Cold War era, most conflicts began with develop- ment failure and contests between the different players over those fundamen- tal resources for life: food, land and water. “The new internal wars, extremely bloody in terms of civilian casualties, reflect subsistence crises and are largely apolitical,” they said (De Soya and Gleditsch 1999). This represented a chal- lenge to the long-held academic view that scarcity is a product of war—rather than war a being product of scarcity. In fact, humans have always contested key resources vi et armis—and politics, religion, patriotism and ethnicity are just the way we tend to marshal ourselves into opposing groups around them. Peter Gleick’s work on water conflicts lends substance to the warnings of two UN chiefs, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Ban Ki-Moon, of the increased danger of wars breaking out over this indispensable resource as scarcity takes hold. ‘Food wars’ (including so-called ‘fish wars’) have erupted on numerous occasions in Africa—where the Rwandan genocide and drawn-out bloody con- flicts in Darfur and the Horn of Africa are particular examples—but also in Central America and Asia (Messer et al. 1998). These fights are almost always over the fundamentals of human survival and tend to originate as civil conflicts, which then spiral out of control to embroil neighbour states and even the superpowers.

In the emerging era of resource instability, described in Chap. 3, the risk of war is liable to increase in proportion to the scarcity of essential resources, be they water, farm land, food itself, oil, gas or strategic minerals. The possibiity that some of these conflicts will involve the discharge of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons cannot be discounted. For example, in their Age of Consequences report, Kurt Campbell and colleagues at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) foreshadowed that with the famines and global disruption arising out of severe climate change (2.6 °C, in their sce- nario) “It is clear that even nuclear war cannot be excluded as a political consequence. Moreover, so-called “limited nuclear war” in any part of the world can escalate to a full-scale nuclear exchange among the big nuclear powers.” With catastrophic change of 5° or more, “The probability of conflict between two destabilized nuclear powers would seem high.” Furthermore “Armed conflict between nations over resources and even territory, such as the Nile and tributaries, is likely, and nuclear war is possible” (Campbell et al. 2007).