快猫短视频

THE Garden of Eden, it is said, grew at the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now southern Iraq. Around the fourth millennium BC the area became known as Sumer, arguably the world鈥檚 oldest civilisation and one that, a couple of thousand years later, became absorbed in ancient Babylonia. In 1992, this naturally and historically rich region hit the news when the Ma鈥檇an or Marsh Arabs 鈥� descendants of the ancient Sumerians 鈥� were ousted from their homeland by Saddam Hussein after he lost the Gulf War. They had lived in harmony with their wetland environment for some five thousand years, fishing, hunting and cultivating rice and millet. Now they are all but gone 鈥� a long way from Eden.

In his politically and economically motivated attack on the Marsh Arabs, Saddam used armed forces to raze their villages with missiles, poison the water of the marshes and burn the reed beds. Most devastatingly, they dammed rivers and drained the area. Today, according to the AMAR (Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees) Appeal, 90 per cent of the central Qurnah marsh, which once covered 700 000 hectares, is dry. The Marsh Arabs had no choice but to flee. Between 80 000 and 120 000 crossed the border into Iran. Another 200 000 are thought to have dispersed through Iraq 鈥� refugees in their own country.

The Marsh Arabs are only one set of players in a rapidly escalating international nightmare. Norman Myers, an environmental scientist from the University of Oxford, estimates that the number of these so-called environmental refugees has swelled to an all-time high of 25 million. The term, coined in the report Environmental Refugees, published by the United Nations Environment Programme a decade ago, refers to people forced to leave their land because, for whatever reason, it can no longer support them.

Myers has calculated that the number is likely to rise to 50 million by 2010, and could reach 200 million by the middle of the next century if global warming causes the rise in sea levels, erratic growing seasons and dislocation of weather patterns that have been predicted. Politicians are becoming worried.

快猫短视频s are worried, too, and increasing numbers are asking what can be done. One prominent researcher is Stuart Leiderman, an environmental scientist at the University of New Hampshire. In 1992, he began to research the problem of environmental refugees worldwide, and develop strategies to help them. Now he is developing a model to try to predict which peoples may be under threat. 鈥淥ur aims are ultimately to create a legitimate status for environmental refugees, to secure adequate refuge for them, and then to launch large-scale restoration of damaged homelands,鈥� says Leiderman.

He believes that the way we think about refugees needs redefining. Currently refugee status, and rights of asylum, are only given to those with a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons related to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Environmental decline or destruction is not recognised as a cause of displacement. 鈥淪trict definitions obstruct rather than facilitate addressing the plight of uprooted humanity,鈥� he says.

Leiderman鈥檚 view is that four factors combine to uproot people: political or religious oppression, economic collapse, military or civil terror and ecological disaster 鈥� usually in combination. War and environmental disruption are profoundly interconnected, as the example of the Gulf War has shown (see 鈥淒evastation in the desert鈥�, 快猫短视频, 1 April 1995, p 40). The problem today is that environmental disasters are two a penny, and unless they are addressed, they could soon overwhelm the international community.

鈥淓nvironmental refugees are bio-indicators of environmental quality,鈥� says Leiderman. 鈥淭oday there are refugees from floods, toxic spills and dump sites, desertification, hydroelectric projects, strip mining, radon and other radiation exposure, severe logging, soil erosion, agricultural land abuse, disease epidemics, defoliation, land mines, and other unwitting or intentional human activities.鈥�

Leiderman鈥檚 interest in the issue began in the 1970s through his work with Environmental Response, an organisation which provided technical assistance, education and policy advice for development projects in rural areas of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, New York and New England. He started helping people who had to move when leaks of toxic chemicals from waste disposal and incineration plants made their land, and homes, uninhabitable. Almost all of them were poor and so lacked a political voice. This led Leiderman to realise that even in the US, a group of displaced people was going unrecognised.

Myers has reached the same conclusion. Last year, he wrote Environmental Exodus by far the most comprehensive assessment yet made of the problem worldwide. He argues that environmental refugees are difficult to identify because they are often displaced peoples 鈥� that is, refugees within their own countries. Many of those who live in the slums that surround almost every city in the developing world have been driven off their homelands. 鈥淭he kind of refugees we鈥檙e looking at are very often the forgotten, the ignored, the very poor, the people who aren鈥檛 easily identified as being refugees,鈥� says Crispin Tickell, Warden of Green College, Oxford, where Myers works, and a vociferous advocate for such people.

Policy makers may not fully appreciate the scale of the crisis but they are already running scared. In June 1993, President Bill Clinton reflected how much attitudes to immigration have changed in that bastion of immigration, the US. 鈥淚t is a commonplace of American life that immigrants have made our country great,鈥� he said, 鈥渂ut we also know that under the pressures we face today we can鈥檛 afford to lose control of our own borders, or to take on new financial burdens at a time when we are not adequately providing for the jobs, the healthcare and the education of our own people.鈥�

Despite these tough words, there are now more people moving to the US than in its heyday of immigration, 1890 to 1910. Then, fewer than 900 000 people entered the country in any one year. Today, illegal immigration from Mexico alone reaches 1 million a year. There is no doubt that the money and apparent opportunity in the US are an irresistible lure for many.

But according to figures from the Natural Heritage Institute in San Francisco, more than 60 per cent of the land in Mexico is severely degraded and soil erosion leaves 259 000 hectares of grazing and crop land 鈥� an area the size of a megacity 鈥� unproductive each year. Unsustainable farming practices and, increasingly, desertification caused by climate change drive 900 000 people off the land each year. So, are the Mexicans who cross the US border illegally at night economic migrants or environmental refugees?

And what about the Haitian immigrants who have made arduous trips by sea to relative safety? On Haiti, environmental degradation, often caused by tree felling, and population growth have depressed per capita grain production to half what it was 40 years ago. Haitians now get just 80 per cent of their minimum nutritional needs, according to the International Development Association, the specialised UN agency based in Washington DC.

Add to that the chronic political unrest that plagues the country, and it is not surprising that 1.3 million Haitians have fled their island over the past two decades. Most have gone to other Caribbean islands, but at least 300 000 have made the boat trip of more than 1500 kilometres to southern Florida. Like the Mexicans, these Haitians are classed as illegal economic immigrants, and deported if the authorities find them.

A similar fate awaits thousands of dispossessed Africans who flee to mainland Europe every year. 鈥淭he countries of the European Union are slowly getting tougher and tougher about immigrants,鈥� says Myers. Spain, France, Italy and Greece are introducing some of the most stringent measures. 鈥淏ut that doesn鈥檛 stop people hopping across the Mediterranean in the middle of the night,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 build a wall three thousand miles long.鈥�

Michelle Leighton Schwartz of the Natural Heritage Institute believes that the only way to assess the real needs of such people is to unravel the complexities of their situations, and find solutions flexible and fresh enough to really get to grips with the problems. 鈥淭o date, research has been bounded by traditional academic disciplines and political and geographic boundaries,鈥� she says. And scientists have failed to generate models sophisticated enough to account for the interactions between the socioeconomic and environmental dimensions of these problems. 鈥淭his has limited the creation of integrated programmes which can address these problems on a local, national and regional level,鈥� she says.

Myers also thinks that something must be done, and fast. But he is more concerned that scientists use the information they already have and act now to influence policy makers. 鈥淭oo often, lack of evidence about a problem is taken as lack of evidence that there is a problem,鈥� he says. Myers points out that environmental catastrophes tend suddenly to erupt into view, exhibiting a pattern known as discontinuity.

鈥淓nvironmental discontinuities occur when resource stocks or ecosystems absorb stresses over long periods without much outward sign of damage, until they suddenly reach a disruption level,鈥� says Myers. The sudden, nonlinear changes are hard for science to deal with and predictive models can be very difficult to set up.

One thing is certain 鈥� throughout the developing world, pressures on the environment are already acute. Within a few decades, says Myers, the Philippines, Mexico and the Ivory Coast are likely to have lost most of their remaining forests, while Ethiopia, Nepal and El Salvador will see most of their topsoil blow or wash away. The flow of refugees next century is likely to be unprecedented in scale, unless action is taken now, he says.

Leiderman, faced with what he calls this 鈥渙verwhelming issue鈥�, believes in action, too 鈥� but of an unconventional type, guided by new models, manifestos and leaders. In his new paradigm, environmental refugees are seen not just as helpless victims, but as a sign of a world out of balance. The existence of environmental refugees indicates ecological decline which can be addressed. Leiderman is focusing his effort on restoring damaged ecosystems and anticipating which places and situations are likely to deteriorate to crisis point.

To predict crises, he is developing a mathematical formula which could be applied to any community or society. One side of the equation is a product of the rate of ecological deterioration, multiplied by the time over which destruction takes place and by the vulnerability of the people and the environment. On the other side, the rate of restoration is multiplied by the time spent restoring an environment and by the potential for a given environment and its people to bounce back. 鈥淲henever the size of deteriorating factors exceeds the restoration side, all hell breaks loose,鈥� says Leiderman.

Making the predictive model work is far from simple. Each factor has several components which are often difficult to measure. Assessing rates of ecological deterioration, for example, involves measuring changes in air, water and soil pollution, then calculating the effect of these and other variables on the whole ecosystem. Leiderman is testing his formula by analysing events like the Irish potato famine of the 19th century.

鈥淭here were many episodes of potato crop failure before the catastrophic one in the 1840s,鈥� says Leiderman, 鈥渂ut these didn鈥檛 lead to flight because other foods were available.鈥� By the time of the famine, much of the agricultural land was producing export crops, while local people lived mainly on potatoes. A chain of environmental, economic and political events cascaded to produce a refugee crisis. 鈥淭he same type of problems are likely to have the same result today,鈥� says Leiderman, pointing to the calamities in Mexico.

Leiderman has no time for those who argue that describing people as environmental refugees weakens refugee status and undermines asylum laws. He believes that future mass migrations will almost always include a significant environmental factor, as the Earth鈥檚 resources come under pressure from the growing population. His aim is to quantify the environmental component of individual refugee episodes, so talking to displaced people is vital.

鈥淭hose who have written or spoken on the subject are academics, analysts, investigators, journalists, scenario-thinkers and policy groups, but almost never environmental refugees,鈥� says Leiderman. Understanding their experience helps Leiderman untangle the factors that force them to migrate. He is finding, for example, that ethnic violence can reflect environmental stress. As populations grow, land deteriorates and this leads to conflict. It鈥檚 a situation that Leiderman has dubbed the 鈥渞emainder Earth scenario鈥�.

He believes that the only solution is a shift away from development of 鈥渨hat remains鈥� and towards the ecological restoration of the homelands 鈥渓eft behind鈥�. 鈥淩ecognising and consulting environmental refugees as ecological indicators may be the key to accomplishing such a shift and reversing the remainder Earth scenario.鈥�

Recently, a group of Marsh Arabs spoke to representatives of the AMAR Appeal about their future. 鈥淲e believe that if the dams are removed, the water will return,鈥� said one. 鈥淭hen we can go back to farming, fishing and breeding animals. Our life will return to normal.鈥� Leiderman also thinks that with the correct expertise this can happen. He is working on a Web site where he will issue a challenge to environment specialists to develop ideas for possible future restoration of this area and others in five, ten or fifteen years鈥� time (http://pubpages.unh.edu/~Leidermn).

There have been some encouraging little signs that the hopes of dispossessed Marsh Arabs are not unfounded. This spring a rivulet broke through the dykes damming the Euphrates and water returned to an area that had been dry for years. Already reeds are growing back and small fish have returned.