By Daniel Tseghay
Somewhere in The Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, a philosopher and social thinker, wrote about the conditions that make 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, leading us instinctively towards acts of kindness and charitable practices. 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. Who needs laws of property when there’s more around the corner?
I was reminded of this when I read an article by Stephan Faris in the April 2007 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 racial conflict based in 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 caused a warming of our collective climate, causing droughts and deforestation, and altering the balance that once existed in Darfur.
“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 helped begin a series of events leading to the killing of over 200,000, and the displacement of over 3 million, non-Arab Africans. The genocide in Darfur is one of the great tragedies of our time - caused in part by a threatened environment.
This probably comes as a surprise to most. The environment is generally considered apolitical - outside the realm of justice and conflict. We normally see war and genocide as being caused by social and group differences. What would the weather have to do with it? Well, a lot, it seems.
Now, it may be too late for Darfur. The conflict has already manifested itself and, although the lives of many innocent people can still be saved (and must), reconciliation of these two groups is probably a long-shot.
But, we can look to the future. We can pay more attention to the environment’s role in global justice; and take measures to lighten our ecological footprint. Perhaps by doing so, we can prevent deforestation and other things, thereby reducing the likelihood of other conflicts over limited resources.’
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