Global warming and Darfur

Somewhere in The Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume writes about the conditions that make the rules of justice necessary. If human beings were preternaturally kind and generous towards one another - if we treated others like they were one of our relations – we wouldn’t need any principles of justice. Our natural instincts would do the work of justice. Also, if we remained greedy, avaricious, and competitive, but happened to live in a world of plenty, where every one of our needs would be satisfied without much delay and without fear of depletion, justice would once again prove useless. In such an ideal world, we simply wouldn’t need principles of justice to allocate goods and defend property rights.

I was reminded of this when I read an article by Stephan Faris in the April edition of the Atlantic Monthly called “The Real Roots of Darfur”. His argument is that the conflict between the African farmers and the Arab herders in the western region of Sudan, the Darfur, is the result of a depletion of resources due to global warming rather than a difference in race and the belief that one is superior to the other.

According to Faris, in the not-to-distant past the farmers and herders coexisted without tension.

“Until the rains began to fail, the sheik’s people lived amicably with the settled farmers. The nomads were welcome passers-through, grazing their camels on the rocky hillsides that separated the fertile plots. The farmers would share their wells, and the herders would feed their stock on the leavings from the harvest.”

But our factories, power plants, and automobiles, have altered this balance.

“Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support both herder and farmer…with the drought, the farmers began to fence off their land – even fallow land – for fear it would be ruined by passing herds...In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs began banding together to wrest their own [tribal lands] from the black farmers.”

These developments began a series of of events leading to the killing of over 200,000, and the displacement of over 3 million, non-Arab Africans.