"We can't just send in the Army and the Marines and the Air Force and the Navy to resolve these problems, and they can't all be security problems...
"Whether it is climate change, whether it is disruption of the environment in other ways ... we're going to see more failed and incapable states."
Zinni referred to: Depletion of fish stocks off Somalia, The drop in water and oil resources in Yemen, Droughts in Afghanistan And scarce and polluted water in Pakistan.
Lieutenant Colonel Shannon Beebe, an Africa analyst, compared the traditional threats to security with those posed by environmental and natural resource problems.
Beebe is quoted as saying: "You think we're going to continue to face state-based threats?
"Might I remind you of the two greatest attacks on the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, and neither of those was from a state-based threat: 911 and Hurricane Katrina... (Did Bush government break the levees?)
"When you talk to Africans ... ministers and chiefs of defense, they will talk to you in terms of security as food, as environmental degradation, natural disasters, environmental shocks."
"Climate change is now blamed for just about everything...
"Famines and drought have a long history in Ethiopia and development experts have traditionally blamed poor governance and the state’s exclusive, and inefficient, hold on farmland for that.
"But, with the possibility of another famine looming, Meles Zenawi, the country’s prime minister for the past 18 years, has preferred to blame climate change for his country’s woes." - The Economics and Politics of Climate Change
"Most rainforests are cleared ... for its timber value and then are followed by farming and ranching operations, even by world giants like Mitsubishi Corporation, Georgia Pacific, Texaco and Unocal."
"Experts agree that by leaving the rainforests intact and harvesting it's many nuts, fruits, oil-producing plants, and medicinal plants, the rainforest has more economic value than if they were cut down to make grazing land for cattle or for timber.
"The latest statistics show that rainforest land converted to cattle operations yields the land owner $60 per acre and if timber is harvested, the land is worth $400 per acre.
"However, if these renewable and sustainable resources are harvested, the land will yield the land owner $2,400 per acre." Rainforest Facts
4.Who to copy?
There is a dispute about global warming.
But, most people agree about the need to look after the environment.
Too many trees are being cut down, too much air is polluted and too many creatures are dying out.
A new report from the charity Oxfam says the world should copy Scotland in environmental policy.
One of Obama’s top advisers says the world must follow Scotland's lead in environmental policy.
Professor Diana Liverman, the Oxford scientist and presidential adviser, backs the Oxfam report that singles out Scotland as an example for the rest of the world to follow.
Malcolm Fleming, Oxfam's Scottish campaigns manager, said: "Scotland is already leading the world ... with targets guided by science rather than political expediency."
The Oxfam report states 375m people will likely be affected by climate-related disasters by 2015, and that 200m people may need to migrate each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation and loss of land.
Scotland is expected to provide around 25% of Europe's ALTERNATIVE energy.
Scotland's SNP government is OPPOSED to nuclear energy.
A study of 93 nations has found that only one nation - Cuba - is developing sustainably.
"The wholesale plunder of the planet’s natural resources has brought into sharp focus the necessity for some kind of global (and globally enforceable) regulation of what’s left of the planet’s precious cargo of life.
"But can capitalism undertake such a task?...
"There is a certain irony in the fact that Cuba, through force of circumstance, has had to embark on the construction of a sustainable economy." - Marx, the First Real Globalist
What is the problem with regard to Population and Growth?
"An international team led by Mathis Wackernagel of the Global Footprint Network looked at how the living conditions and ecological footprints of 93 nations have changed in the last 30 years.
"They used the ecological footprint (EF) index, a tool devised in 1993 by Wackernagel and William Rees, his PhD supervisor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. EF quantifies the area of land required to provide the infrastructure used by a person or a nation, the food and goods they consume, and to reabsorb the waste they produce, using available technology." We should not copy the poorest countries in Africa because, although they do not consume more than their fair share of resources, they do not have a decent standard of living for all their people.
Under no circumstances should we copy the USA or the United Arab Emirates, because they consume much more than their fair share of resources.
General Zinni, 'the Godfather'.
