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"THINGS WILL BREAK LOOSE FROM THE HANDS OF THE WISE MEN" DARFUR, SCARCITY, AND CONFLICT
In 1985, with the Darfur region of Sudan deep in drought, a doctoral candidate named Alex de Waal met with a bedridden and nearly blind Arab sheikh named Hilal Abdalla. The elderly nomad and his tribesmen had pitched their camp across an unforgiving wasteland of rock and sand. Broad black tents rose like sails against the rough horizon. Thorn trees broke ground at lonesome intervals, sparse grazing for the tribe's camels. The student was longlimbed and gangly, bent forward with the eagerness of youth. The sheikh—tall, stately, stooped by age—asked him in. "His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism—water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags, and an old rifle," De Waal recalled years later. "He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end."
They dined on goat and rice and ate with their hands. De Waal was studying indigenous reactions to the dryness that gripped the region. The elderly nomad described things he had never seen before. Sand blew over fertile lands. The rare rain washed away alluvial soil. Farmers who had once hosted his tribe and his camels were now blocking their migration; the land could no longer support herder and planter both. Many of the sheikh's tribesmen had lost their stock and scratched at millet farming, relegated to sandy soil between plots of fertile land.
With his stick, the nomad sketched a grid in the sand, a chessboard de Waal understood to be the "moral geography" of the region. The farmers tended to their crops in the black squares, and the sheikh's people stuck to the white, cutting without conflict like chessboard bishops through the fields. The drought had changed all that. The God-given order was broken, the sheikh said, and he feared the future. "The way the world was set up since time immemorial was being disturbed," recalled de Waal, now a program director at the Social Science Research Council. "And it was bewildering, depressing, and the consequences were terrible."
Nearly twenty years later, when a new scourge swept across Darfur, de Waal would remember the meeting. Janjaweed fighters in military uniforms, mounted on camels and horses, laid waste to the region. In a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting the region's blacks, the armed militiamen raped women, burned houses, and tortured and killed men of fighting age. Through whole swaths of Darfur, they left only smoke curling into the sky. At their head was a six-foot-four Arab with an athletic build and a commanding presence. In a conflict the United States would call genocide, he topped the State Department's list of suspected war criminals. De Waal recognized him. His name was Musa Hilal, and he was the sheikh's son.




On the path from worried elder to militant son lie the roots of a conflict that has forced 2 million mostly black Africans from their homes and killed between 200,000 and 450,000 people. The fighting in Darfur is usually described as racially motivated, pitting mounted Arabs against black rebels and civilians. But the distinction between "Arab" and "black African" in Darfur is defined more by lifestyle than by any physical difference: Arabs are generally herders, Africans typically farmers. The two groups are not racially distinct. Both are predominantly Muslim. The fault lines have their origins in another distinction, between settled farmers and nomadic herders fighting over failing lands. The aggression of the warlord Musa Hilal—forged in a time of desertification, drought, and famine—can be traced to the fears of his father and to how climate change shattered a way of life.
I first visited the region in the spring of 2004, when I traveled to the town of Adré on the eastern edge of Chad and drove three hours south along the Darfurian border. Refugees had been crossing the dry riverbed that formed the frontier and provided the area with its only source of water. It was early morning when I followed a group of women and their mules down into its dry sands. The rising sun made contrails from the dust at their feet. The vegetation was low and scrubby. The women dug broad holes into the bed of the river and pulled out brownish water with plastic jugs. It was dangerous work. The Janjaweed were still active on the other side and had been watering their horses and camels nearby. While their violence was mostly confined to Darfur, the militia had begun to launch cross-border raids in search of cattle that had escaped their assault.
The women had nearly filled their water barrels when two new arrivals dropped from the brush on the far side and fell to their knees in Muslim prayer. They were both women in their fifties, prematurely wrinkled and bent by sun and poverty. When they rose, I asked one to tell me her story. Halime Hassan Osman and her companion had left Chad the night before, risking discovery to return to Darfur and dig in the ruins of their village. They had spent the day in fear, hiding in the bush, too terrified to eat or pray, and returned after another night of fretful walking. The only thing they had found to salvage was a few handfuls of grains and beans. It had been a rough journey, and it seemed strange to me that these two grandmothers had been chosen for the mission. "If the men go, they will kill them," Halime answered. "If it's a young woman, they rape her. That's why it's us, the old women, who go see."
The refugees were camped in the high ground just inside Chad, in makeshift shelters of bent reeds and woven grass among the mud houses of a nearby village. On the wall of the local dispensary, the community's only concrete building, children had used charcoal to draw crude sketches of men and machine guns and planes dribbling bombs.
A fifty-five-year-old man named Bilal Abdulkarim Ibrahim showed me where he had been shot twice while saving his daughters from being raped. "I said, ‘I will die. I cannot let you rape my girls in front of me.'" His attackers had tied a cord around his testicles and pulled, beating his wife when she tried to cut him loose. He only escaped when an older, white-bearded militiaman ordered his release. Fatum Issac Zakaria, a young girl, was seven months pregnant when she and three others were raped during an attack on her village. "We didn't want to go with them," she said. "They beat us all the way into the forest. They said, ‘You are the wives of the rebels.' They insulted us. They said, ‘You are slaves.'" That night as I was leaving, I saw flames rising from inside Sudan. They glowed for about ten minutes, then faded away. It was the Janjaweed, the refugees told me, torching the last of their homes.


Until the rains began to fail, the sheikh's people had 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 with the drought, the nomads ranged farther for their food, and the farmers began to fence off their land—even fallow land—for fear it would be ruined by passing herds. Sometimes they'd burn the grass upon which the animals fed. A few tribes drifted elsewhere or took up farming, but the camel-herding Arabs stuck to their fraying livelihoods—nomadic herding was central to their cultural identity.
The name Darfur means "Land of the Fur," called so for the largest single tribe of farmers in the region. But the vast region holds the homelands—the dars—of many tribes. In the late 1980s, landless and increasingly desperate Arabs banded together to wrest their own dar from the black farmers, publishing in 1987 a manifesto of racial superiority. It began with complaints of underrepresentation in the government and concluded with a threat to take matters into their own hands: "We fear that if this neglect of the participation of the Arab race continues, things will break loose from the hands of the wise men to those of the ignorant, leading to matters of grave consequences."
Clashes had broken out between the Fur and camel-herding Arabs, and in the two years before an uneasy peace was signed in 1989, three thousand people, mostly Fur, were killed, and hundreds of villages and nomadic camps were burnt. More fighting in the 1990s entrenched the divisions between Arabs and non-Arabs, pitting the pastoralists against the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massaleit, the three tribes that would later form the bulk of the rebellion against the central government. In these disputes, Khartoum often supported the Arabs politically. Sometimes—in an attempt to create a bulwark against revolutionaries from southern Sudan—the government provided arms.
When a rebellion began in Darfur in 2003, it was at first a reaction against Khartoum's neglect and political marginalization of the region. But while the rebels initially sought a pan-ethnic front against a distant, uncaring regime, the schism between those who opposed the government and those who supported it soon broke largely on ethnic lines. The camel-herding Arabs became Khartoum's staunchest stalwarts.
Nomadic Arab militia launched a brutal campaign to push the black farmers from Darfur. They wore military uniforms, sometimes drove military vehicles, and coordinated their attacks with Sudanese aerial bombing. Even so, the conflict was rooted more in land envy than in ethnic hatred. "Some of the Arab pastoral tribes, particularly the camel herders, did not have their own dar, so were always at the mercy of other tribes for land," said David Mozersky, the International Crisis Group's project director for the Horn of Africa. "This was fine for hundreds of years, since the system provided land for these groups as they moved. But as desertification worsened and as fertile land decreased, some of these pastoralists sought to have their own land, which wasn't really an option in Darfur. This was one of the main factors that Khartoum used to manipulate and mobilize these Arab tribes to join the Janjaweed and fight on their side. Interestingly, most of the Arab tribes who have their own land rights did not join the government's fight."


I returned to Chad later that year, to the refugee camp of Oure Cassoni, 170 miles north of Adré into the advancing desert. By then, the countryside on the other side of the border had been nearly depopulated. Most of those who were arriving had spent weeks fleeing the Janjaweed, seeking refuge in the hills, following the grass and water, trying to hold on to the last of their livestock, before they finally lost them and headed for the border.
Oure Cassoni was a place you'd go to only when you had nothing left. The surrounding desert was flat and featureless, cut by broad, shallow rivers that flooded when it rained and dried when it didn't. The trees spread out for water—low, thorny scrubs separated by wind-carved sand. Between them, nothing grew, not even dry grass. The horizon unfolded in a shallow arc, as if at sea. Dust devils spun themselves out against the noontime heat. The evenings blew in sandstorms from Darfur. They reared up as if to block the sun, turned everything sepia, then whipped down, leaving tents flattened and torn.
The nearest inhabitation, Bahai, was a rundown border town south of the camp, a scattering of concrete-block compounds with a population far smaller than its new, northern neighbor. "Bahai is a terrible place for a camp," Tim Burroughs, the environmental health officer for the International Rescue Committee, which was running the operation, told the Christian Science Monitor. "It's where the Sahara begins. There are plenty of dunes, you see houses overtaken by sand, you see villages abandoned." Groundwater was scarce. Aid workers drew water from a murky artificial lake at the border with Darfur, just three miles from the camp. Rebels were staged nearby and were rumored to be filling up their water tanks at the treatment center. In fifty years, Burroughs said, the area would likely be unable to sustain life.
The latest arrivals from Darfur had gathered outside the camp to wait for admission. The men wore robes of white or gray. The women were dressed in the incongruous colors of spring flowers. In the early morning, the refugees would tend to their mule if they had one and arrange their belongings if they had any. Everything slowed with the climbing sun. I moved from one group to another. The thorn-shaped leaves of the low trees offered little protection against the heat, so the refugees draped the branches with rugs, woven plastic mats, and empty rice bags. A small tree might shelter four or five people. No square inch of shade was wasted.
A sixty-five-year-old grandmother named Mariem Omar Abdu had fled from her burning village three months earlier. She had watched from the bushes as men in military clothes shot three of her grandchildren. Their bodies were left where they fell. "We feared for ourselves," she said. "They killed our children. We feared the same would happen to us." She had watched as soldiers tied up three men from her village, beat them, loaded them on a truck, and drove them away.
Zahara Abdulkarim, a woman holding a small child, had large eyes with brows that curled up in a natural frown of concern. Her skin was smooth and unusually dark. Her robes were black. She had awoken one morning to the buzz of planes overhead, the bark of bombs from the far side of her village, and the rush of flames from inside her home. She ran out into her mud-walled courtyard and into the arms of the Janjaweed. One had a knife, and one had a whip. Both wore military uniforms. As they forced her to the ground, she saw her husband's body lying in the dirt. One held her while the other raped her. They called her a dog and a donkey, and when they were finished the man with the knife slashed deep across her thigh, a few inches above the knee. The mark signified slavery, they told her. She had been branded like a camel. "They want to replace this black skin with Arabs," she said.
Her analysis was echoed by the findings of Brent and Jan Pfundheller, retired law-enforcement officers who had spent a month in the camps conducting more than a thousand interviews in an attempt to quantify human-rights violations for the United States State Department. Men as well as women had been raped with sticks and rifle barrels and threatened with more of the same if they didn't leave. "One of the most common was, ‘If you like this, stay in Sudan. If you don't like this, go to Chad,'" said Jan.
The attackers usually killed the men and boys, but allowed the women and girls to escape. Children were torn from their mothers' arms and checked for gender. "They'd take a girl, throw her to the ground," said Brent. "They'd take a boy, stab him. It takes a long time to make another generation of fighting age." Nobody was safe. The Janjaweed burned mosques and killed religious leaders. In one village, they burned five black imams alive. In another, invaders took a Koran from the mosque, threw it to the ground, and urinated on it. Men were killed at prayer, and one imam and his son were raped, then taken away. "We've worked in Bosnia and Kosovo, so there are certain things you expect," said Jan. "But I was shocked by the scope of the tragedy."


Why did Darfur's lands fail? For much of the 1980s and 1990s, environmental degradation in Sudan and other parts of the Sahel, the semiarid region just south of the Sahara, was blamed on the inhabitants. The dramatic decline in rainfall between the last forty years and the previous forty was attributed to mistreatment of the region's vegetation by the local population. Deforestation and overgrazing, the dominant theory went, exposed more rock and sand, which absorb less sunlight than plants, instead reflecting it back toward space. This cooled the air near the surface, drawing clouds downward, reducing the chance of rain, and continuing the cycle. "Africans were said to be doing it to themselves," said Isaac Held, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But by the time of the Darfur conflict, scientists had identified another cause. Climatologists fed historical sea-surface temperatures into a variety of computer models of atmospheric change. What they discovered was that rising temperatures in the tropical and southern oceans, combined with cooling in the North Atlantic, was enough to disrupt the African monsoons and produce the changes in the weather that had been recorded. The degradation of Darfur's lands was a consequence, not a cause, of the drop in rainfall. "This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing," said Columbia University's Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses. The roots of the drying of Darfur, she and her colleagues had found, lay in changes to the global climate.
To what extent those changes can be blamed on human activities remains an open question. "Hurricanes rely on a similar pattern of warming," said Giannini. Just as it's possible to trace global warming through rising ocean temperatures to strengthening storms without being able to conclusively link a particular hurricane to increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it is with Darfur. Scientists agree that greenhouse gases have warmed the tropical and southern oceans, and evidence indicates that sulfate aerosols from industrial pollution kept the North Atlantic cooler. But just how much man-made causes—as opposed to natural drifts in oceanic temperatures—are responsible for the drought that struck Darfur is as debatable as the relationship between global warming and the destruction of New Orleans. "Nobody can say that Hurricane Katrina was definitely caused by climate change," said Peter Schwartz, the coauthor of a 2003 Pentagon report on climate change and national security. "But we can say that climate change means more Katrinas. For any single storm, as with any single drought, it's difficult to say. But we can say we'll get more big storms and more severe droughts."
Darfur may be a canary in the coal mine, a foretaste of climatically driven political chaos. Even mild climatic shifts over the past thousand years, the kind that have occurred naturally, seem to have the power to spark conflict. David Zhang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, scoured China's dynastic archives for records of war and rebellion and compared them with the historical temperatures in the northern hemisphere as gleaned from analysis of tree rings, coral, boreholes, and ice cores. In the span between the eleventh and twentieth centuries, Zhang and his colleagues counted fifteen periods of intense fighting. All but three of them occurred in the decades immediately following extended periods of unusual cold. The most dramatic peak in warfare occurred when China—and Europe—was plunged into the Little Ice Age. "At that time, globally, you see a very, very sad situation," said Zhang. "In Europe, you had the Seventeenth-Century Crisis, you had the Thirty Years' War."
In China, Zhang had found, cooling temperatures reduced agricultural yields, leading to famine, rebellion, and war. "We also found that dynastic collapses also followed the oscillating temperature cycles over the past millennium," Zhang wrote in the scientific journal Human Ecology. "Almost all of the dynastic changes occurred in cold phases, with the exception of the Yuan dynasty, which collapsed eight years after the end of a cold phase, although it had lost most of its territory in the ‘Late Yuan' peasant uprisings during the cold phase. The delayed collapse was largely a result of power struggles among different rebel groups." But what rattled Zhang most was the scale of the historical climatic change as compared to the warming the world has experienced this century. "If you look at the average temperature, it was 0.3 degrees centigrade cooler [than the historical average]," he said. "Nonetheless, the impact is so big. Right now we're 0.7 centigrade higher than the average. I don't know what's going to happen."
The effects of global warming will be felt all over the world, often in unexpected ways and surprising places. "Sudan's tragedy is not just the tragedy of one country in Africa," said Achim Steiner, director of the United Nations Environment Programme. "It is a window to a wider world underlining how issues such as uncontrolled depletion of natural resources like soils and forests allied to impacts like climate change can destabilize communities, even entire nations. It illustrates and demonstrates what is increasingly becoming a global concern. It doesn't take a genius to work out that as the desert moves southwards there is a physical limit to what ecological systems can sustain, and so you get one group displacing another. Societies are not prepared for the scale and the speed with which they will have to decide what they will do with people."
It's difficult to know where global warming will strike hardest, so the best way to predict where climate-induced conflicts might break out is to identify the countries least able to withstand the stress. "It's best not to get too bogged down in the physics of climate," said Nils Gilman, an analyst at Global Business Network, a strategic consultancy based in San Francisco, and the author of a 2007 report on climate change and national security. "Rather you should look at the social, physical, and political geography of regions that are impacted. It's not like Darfur would have been a happy part of the world if not for climate change." Tensions between herders and farmers existed long before Darfur began to dry. With climate change they erupted into war.
Early hotspots are likely to be in Africa south of the Sahara and in places like Central Asia or the Caribbean, where institutions are weak, infrastructure is deficient, and the government is incompetent or malevolent. International Alert, a group that focuses on conflict resolution, has compiled a list of forty-four countries that climate change will put at high risk of armed conflict, including Iran, Indonesia, Israel, Algeria, Nigeria, Somalia, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The crisis in Darfur has already spilled over into Chad and the Central African Republic. Nomads from Sudan are pushing deep into the Congolese rain forest. When the United Nations Security Council held its first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change in 2007, the Ghanaian representative stood up to declare that he hoped the "repeated alarm" about the threats posed by global warming would "lead to action that is timely, concerted, and sustainable." In his country, he said, nomadic Fulani cattle herdsmen were buying high-power assault rifles to defend their animals from angry local farmers. Climate change had expanded the Sahara desert, forcing the pastoralists into agricultural lands.
As global warming threatens to push countries all over the world into conflict, those looking to head off future crises will want to know what volatile mix of land pressures and local politics will push a tense region over the edge. "The first thing you do is look around the world for regions where you have a very large population of people who are directly dependent on limited resources: local cropland, water supplies, forest," said Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Waterloo who has studied the links between environment and conflict for nearly two decades. "Then you look for places where the resources are already severely degraded. Water is really scarce. Cropland is damaged. Deforestation is widespread."
"The next thing you look for is places where the governments and social coping mechanisms are in real trouble," he said. "These are places where governments are corrupt, where ethnic divisions are already deep, where capital is limited, where there is poverty. That combination—of corruption, deep ethnic division, and inadequate capital—creates enormous vulnerabilities. You add climate change on top of that? Bingo. You've got a complex crisis."



HAITI'S PROBLEMS ARE ONLY TANGENTIALLY LINKED TO GLOBAL warming, but a comparison with its neighbor offers a glimpse at the challenges Darfur and other countries like it might face in an environmentally stressed future. The Dominican Republic shares the troubled country's island, but not its endemic deforestation and erosion. While Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover, the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees. The difference is visible not only from the air, where the border is demarcated with an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown, but also in the two countries' death tolls. When Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic in 2004, it killed eighteen people. In Haiti, where the storm didn't even make landfall, more than three thousand lives were lost under floodwaters and mudslides. Deforestation had left the slopes too weak to be able to retain the downpour.
Global warming is likely to make Haiti's situation worse, as rising variability in the weather means more floods and more droughts. Stronger rains will wash away fields, roads, and buildings. Failing crops will bring ruin to the countryside and chaos to the cities. In April 2008, rising food prices, fueled in part by climate change, sparked unrest in the country's urban areas. The cost of basic staples—beans, rice, milk—had jumped by 50 percent, exhausting the patience of a country where the poorest regularly ease their hunger with meals made of mud. Protests turned to riots. Shops were looted. Cars were burnt. At least six people were killed, including a United Nations peacekeeper from Nigeria shot while trying to contain the violence. After a week of chaos, lawmakers voted to dismiss the country's prime minister, claiming he had lost the confidence of the electorate.
But, even without the added burden of climate change, Haiti would likely have remained much poorer than its neighbor. Its environmental problems have become entangled in its political woes, making both harder to fix. Decades of poverty, population growth, and near anarchy have stripped the countryside of its forests and split farms into small, infertile plots. "What you see in Port-au-Prince—the concentration of people in the slums, which creates violence, which creates disease—it's because the people cannot produce more in the countryside," said Max Antoine, executive director of Haiti's Presidential Commission on Border Development, tasked with reforesting the area near the Dominican Republic. "So they leave their lands and come to the city hoping to find a better life. And of course they can't find a better life. So what do they do? They have to eat. So they start being gangsters. They become susceptible to drug dealers."
To get a look at the challenges under which the country is struggling, I put the slums at my back and drove out of Port-au-Prince. The road had been recently worked on, and we quickly overtook pickup trucks packed with passengers huddled against the dust. At the city's farthestflung gas station, five horses lay in the road, their bellies swollen with death. I held my breath as we eased around them. I had wound my window down against the warmth and did not want to find out if they smelled as bad as they looked.
Just outside of town, the tropical hills had the look of a desert landscape, smooth and nearly treeless, broken in white gashes where the land had given away. It was as if natural selection had favored the short or spindly, not so much as a way to survive the heat as much as to escape the machete. Where the road had been widened, fresh cuts in the hillside revealed one cause of the country's woes. In cross sections that would have towered over a freight truck, only the top few inches of the strata exposed brown, fertile soil. With nothing but dangling grass roots to anchor it to the dusty, white limestone, it wouldn't have taken much to wash the earth away.
What makes Haiti's problems so intractable is the complex and painful ways they feed on each other. The impoverished country depends on trees for 71 percent of its energy use: firewood in the countryside, wood charcoal in the cities. For an impoverished peasant, stripping the forests has become a way to get by. "If I'm a farmer and my crops are failing, what can I do?" said Antoine. "Do I die today? Or do I extend my life for the next few days by cutting trees and selling charcoal so I can buy medicine? So I can buy some fertilizer so I can grow some lettuce?" When the forests are gone, the slopes can't hold on to their soil. Entire villages are lost to mudslides. Roads and bridges are damaged. The slums continue to swell. Haiti sinks deeper into poverty. Pressed to survive, another farmer chops down another tree. "It's not a vicious circle," said Philippe Mathieu, the Haiti director for the Canadian charity Oxfam-Québec. "It is a spiral. Each time you make a turn, you have less space."


The road rose sharply, and we were at our destination, Lac de Péligre, an artificial lake stretching ten miles towards the Dominican border, held back in a narrow valley by a towering concrete dam. Completed in the 1950s, the hydropower plant had been built without consulting or really even informing the farmers whose fertile fields and orchards would soon be at the bottom of a lake, and it had devastated the local community. "One of the old people of Cange remembered seeing the water rising and suddenly realizing that his house and goats would be underwater in a matter of hours," wrote Tracy Kidder in Mountains Beyond Mountains. "‘So [the man said] I picked up a child and a goat and started up the hillside.'"
"Families had hurried away, carrying whatever they could save of their former lives, turning back now and then to watch the water drown their gardens and rise up the trunks of their mango trees," Kidder continued. "For most, there was nothing to do but settle in the steep surrounding hills, where farming meant erosion and widespread malnutrition, tending nearer every year toward famine."
The builders of the dam had left their construction equipment behind. Skeletal structures of cement and steel towered on either side. In a dusty market square, an abandoned construction crane reached for something above the trees. Villagers used its bulk to tie off their horses or spread their laundry across its raw metal treads. I walked out onto the concrete stretch that separated the lake from the river below. Ferrymen paddled carved pirogues, their passengers sunk dangerously below the waterline. Over the dam's edge, the steep drop looked down upon the blue, rectangular warehouse containing the power-generating turbines. Pylons marched in single file over a low hill toward the capital. Violent white foam twisted and bucked on its way to join the riverbed.
"The project was intended to improve irrigation and to generate power," Kidder wrote. "It wasn't as though the peasants of the central plateau didn't need and want modern technology … . But, as they themselves often remarked, they didn't even get electricity or water for their land. Most didn't get money either. In fact, the dam was meant to benefit agribusinesses downstream, mostly American-owned back then, and also to supply electricity to Port-au-Prince, especially to the homes of the numerically tiny, wealthy Haitian elite and to foreign-owned assembly plants."
Had it at least accomplished that, the project might have generated economic growth. Instead, the water I was watching was being wasted. At full capacity, the plant produces sixty megawatts of power, enough to supply a small city. But deep in its bowels below, the needle hovered between fifteen and seventeen megawatts. Of the plant's three truck-sized turbines, two were broken, disassembled and waiting for pricey spares or improvised replacements. The entire operation relied on a single turbine—still in use despite a broken seal that spit water into the work space and a defective shaft that wobbled worryingly as it spun. With the reservoir near capacity, the dam was evacuating water, churning away the force that could be used to produce electricity.


The dam had been planned to last 140 years. But the engineers who projected its life span had assumed the valley's wooded hills would become more forested. They hadn't foreseen that the dislocated farmers would settle on the steep slopes, cutting the trees to survive, or migrate to the capital to become another mouth to feed with charcoal-cooked meals.
I had been joined on the dam by two of its security guards. Every slope I could see was flattened by clear-cutting. Patches of pale green grass hung above steep, scraggly fields that slipped precariously towards the water. The forest clung only where the slopes were steepest. "People need to eat," said one of the guards. He made a quick two-handed gesture to his stomach. For those in desperate need of cash, even fruit trees were worth more as charcoal than as orchards. "They cut the mango, and then they sell the charcoal," said the other. "As the money finishes, the people return into misery. Then they go and cut another mango. And it's like that that the deforestation happens."
Rising silt in the reservoir had shifted the currents near the dam and warped a protective shield meant to keep branches and logs from jamming the system. Sediment levels hadn't been measured since 1988. But at some point in the next few decades, unless hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent for dredging, the reservoir will simply fill up. "It's another vicious circle," Joanas Gué, Haiti's agriculture secretary, told me when I visited him in his offices on my return to Port-au-Prince. "Not only do we have a reduction of our potential energy production, we have to spend money to undo the damage of the deforestation."
"Do you know how many trees are cut in Haiti each year?" he asked. "Thirty million trees. That's a lot." The government had planned an ambitious program of planting 140 million saplings over the next five years. But given the speed of cutting, even that furious pace would be nothing more than treading water in the middle of the ocean. "Even if we do a big reforestation program with fruit trees, mango trees, avocado trees, they'll be cut one day or another," he said.
"You have to do everything at once," Gué said. "If you plant trees, but don't provide another source of energy and forbid people from cutting trees to make charcoal, demand will rise for an alternative that we don't have yet. The price of charcoal will increase: we'll have contraband. If, on the other hand, we provide an alternative source of energy to the people of Port-au-Prince and we don't give another source of revenue to the peasants, at that moment, the price of charcoal will drop. They'll have to cut a lot more trees to satisfy their needs in terms of monetary revenue." Haiti's cash-strapped government is unable even to keep order in the streets of the capital. Yet to solve its country's problems—that is to raise standards to the levels of the Dominican Republic, itself a poor country—it will have to solve three puzzles at the same time, any one of which seems beyond its capabilities. "We need to provide a revenue source," said Gué. "We need a planting program. And we need to create an alternative source of energy."


With weak governments vulnerable to weak shocks, preventing future conflicts like Darfur's will mean keeping countries from sliding into these sorts of traps. Where rains fail, drought- and salt-tolerant crops will improve day-today living. Better roads will ease access during emergencies. Reservoirs and irrigation can carry communities through droughts or absorb flooding. "Basically what you want to have is more water control," said Claudia Ringler, a water management specialist at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.
In Darfur itself, where the crisis has spiraled too far down for a short-term fix, recognizing climate change as a player in the conflict means seeking a solution beyond a political treaty between the rebels and the government. The United Nations Environment Programme predicts the desert will continue to expand into Sudan's farmland, cutting agricultural production. Rainfall is expected to continue to decrease. "The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," wrote Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, in a 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post. "It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought."
"Any peace in Darfur must be built on solutions that go to the root causes of the conflict," he continued. "We can hope for the return of more than two million refugees. We can safeguard villages and help rebuild homes. But what to do about the essential dilemma—the fact that there's no longer enough good land to go around?"
Haiti's experience with deforestation shows how environmental pressure can undermine a society's ability to cope with its effects. In Darfur, fighting over failing lands makes it nearly impossible to rethink land ownership or management. With most of the population in refugee camps, rebel groups are fighting each other and attacking peacekeepers. The country has slipped into anarchy. Unless Khartoum suddenly decides to cooperate, creating the conditions for negotiations will require forceful intervention and a long-term stay. "The chance of finding new ways of reforming land management during a time of conflict is pretty much zero," said Homer-Dixon. "The first thing you've got to do is stop the carnage and allow moderates to come to the fore." It's a heavy commitment, one made more burdensome by Darfur's harsh environment. In 2007, United Nations officials were struggling with the logistics of deploying an estimated twenty-six thousand peacekeepers in an area where humanitarian groups could barely provide refugees with a few quarts of water a day. Each soldier required twenty-two gallons a day. The mission was planning twenty daily flights just for water.
They better find the funds to keep those planes flying for years. To craft a new status quo, one with the moral authority of the God-given order mourned by Musa Hilal's father, local leaders will have to put aside historic agreements and carve out new ones. Lifestyles and agricultural practices will likely need to change to accommodate many tribes on more fragile land. Widespread investment and education will be necessary. "Solutions imposed from the outside rarely graft," said Homer-Dixon. "Local solutions to locally generated conflict will last longer. But these processes can take decades."
The impact of climate change on a country is analogous to the effect of hunger on a person. If a starving man succumbed to tuberculosis or was shot while stealing a piece of bread, you wouldn't say he had died because he didn't eat. But hunger played a role in his death. Global warming by itself doesn't launch wars, rebellions, or campaigns of ethnic cleansing. "What climate change does is decrease the resilience of a society," said Homer-Dixon. "It makes it more brittle and more vulnerable to shock and various kinds of pathologies, including major violence."
Of all the repercussions of climate change on the killing in Darfur, one of the most significant may be moral. If the region's collapse was in part caused by the emissions from our factories, our power plants, and our cars, we bear some responsibility for the dying. "This changes us from the position of Good Samaritans—disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral obligation—to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the conditions that led to this crisis," said Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. "We cannot stand by and look at it as a situation of discretionary involvement. We are already involved."
Copyright © 2009 by Stephan Faris