The San Francisco Chronicle reports on UC Berkeley geography professor Michael Watts, who just won a Guggenheim award to pursue his research into the "correlation" between oil and violence.
Watts says "Oil is a very peculiar commodity," that seems to "engender violence in those places where it is produced."Before we go any further, allow me to make the following observations:When the Earth bleeds oil, why do humans spill blood?
Why is "black gold" a common link in many of the worst conflicts of our time -- the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and mass violence spanning the globe from Colombia to Nigeria?
a) Alberta is no more violent than Manitoba; Norway is no more violent than Sweden; Scotland is no more violent than Wales; Texas is no more violent than New Mexico; Alaska is no more violent than Hawaii
b) Rwanda, Cambodia, Lebanon, Bosnia and Liberia do not have noticeable quantities of oil, but they have had noticeable quantities of violence.
I'm tempted to conclude that something other than oil is at work here -- like, maybe a coincidence that some of the world's oil reserves happen to be located in some of the places that also happen to have terrible social problems? Nevertheless, it shouldn't be much of a surprise to see all kinds of bogus theories that it's "all about the O-O-O-I-L" coming from disreputable 1970s-era Marxist pseudo-scholars.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 30, 2003 06:57 AMAt the end of the Cold War, there was a sudden spurt of "scholarship" that argued that the coming wars would all be about resources, but now it would be about water and clean air.
It was actually posited that states might start invading one another because of air pollution (e.g., Japan attacking China for producing acid rain).
This sort of nonsense (neo-Malthusian, almost, in the first case) seems very little different from the idea that, somehow, oil makes folks fundamentally more violent. Mostly b/c there's little evidence supporting such theorizing, but plenty of tenured chairs at stake.
Posted by: Dean on April 30, 2003 05:46 AMScotland IS more violent than Wales.
Posted by: Douglas on April 30, 2003 02:19 PMits the usual claptrap from the environmentalists who somehow see something "mystical and special" in the "natural" state of things.
If they want to they can go and live back in the woods and ride horses.
They are irrational.
Posted by: David Klotz on May 1, 2003 02:52 AM