http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20071022/cm_u...speacefulplanet

AL GORE'S PEACEFUL PLANET

By Georgie Anne Geyer
Mon Oct 22, 5:48 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- You could hear it everywhere in the aftermath of Al Gore's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize for his superb work on the environment. The Academy Award, sure! An Emmy, bet your life! But what do wind, rain, glaciers, storms, floods and tsunamis have to do with hammering out peace processes in situations where people really want to kill one another?

We're aware (sort of) that industrialist Alfred Nobel instructed in his will that the all-important peace prize be given to individuals and organizations working for "fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace conferences."

Over the years, we're surely aware, it has been given to some distinctly odd characters. Teddy Roosevelt won it in 1906 for his mediation efforts in the Russo-Japanese War, but the "hero of San Juan Hill" could only honestly be described as a warlike peacemaker. In 1973, the prize went to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam for a "peace accord" that lasted less than two years. Yasser Arafat, that famous "peacenik," also received it. So, all right, its choices weren't always perfect.

But the funny thing is that the critics of the Gore award have it all wrong. In fact, the deeper one digs into the historic reasons for chaos and collapse of societies across the globe, the more one finds that the real reasons behind many of the endless wars were precisely environmental degradation and collapse. Ironically, the turmoil in Iraq has its roots in the environmental problems of ancient times.

If you look, for instance, at the classic work "Ancient Iraq" by French historian/archaeologist Dr. Georges Roux, you can see clearly the loss of the great civilizations of Iraq -- Babylon, Ur, Nineveh, Nippur, Assur and so many others -- through the destruction of the original environments that made such advanced societies possible.

As the climate continuously changed and as riverbeds shifted with the movements of rivers, Roux writes: "A glorious past was forgotten. In man's short memory of these opulent cities, of these powerful gods, of these mighty monarchs, only a few, often distorted names survived. The dissolving rain, the sand-bearing winds, the earth-splitting sun conspired to obliterate all material remains, and the desolate mounds which since concealed the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh offer perhaps the best lesson in modesty that we shall ever receive from history."

Lessons in modesty? Well, that's a new one! And where is one to find that modesty in all the long history of man the occupier, man the violator, man the casual destroyer?

For centuries, observers wondered why and how the great Mayan civilization of Central America just disappeared, leaving only its glorious pyramids hidden in the jungles of the Yucatan and Central America. Today we know why: The Mayans declined because of the intensification of their wars, caused by overpopulation and the scarcity of land.

In one of the truly great recent books, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," Pulitzer Prize-winner Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, goes systematically around the world to show the reader how one society after another collapsed -- for those very same reasons.

Writing of the classic Mayan experience, he uncovers the problem of "increased fighting, as more and more people fought over fewer resources. ... Maya warfare, already endemic, peaked just before the collapse. ... That warfare would have decreased further the amount of land available for agriculture." But, he concludes that, "Bringing matters to a head was the strand of climate change."

In all of Diamond's examples -- and they are legion -- it was the settlers who did not respect the land and the realities of their environment who failed. In Greenland, for instance, the early Norse Vikings from Europe disappeared altogether because they refused to respect the environment; but the native Inuit people succeeded in living in that harsh environment for 700 years because they adapted to it.

Nevertheless, many of the critics of Al Gore's peace prize pooh-poohed it as a "political statement." The former vice president, of course, refuted such criticisms, saying, "The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

Those of us covering the exploding world of the last decades have found this to be all too true. In the 1990s, when I was covering U.N. "peacekeeping" operations across the globe, it soon became clear to me that the reason for the horror in Rwanda in Central Africa, where the Hutus massacred nearly a million Tutsis, was overpopulation, abuse and overuse of a limited amount of arable land and environmental impoverishment.

In this case and so many others, supposedly ingrained "ethnic" wars like those of Rwanda and Bosnia came about not from old hatreds so much as rivalry over the environment that alone can sustain those human populations.

Indeed, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon only recently stated that the massacres in Darfur in southern Sudan were due in large part to shortages of water and to the shortage of natural resources in that crowded desert wilderness.

So, yes, Al Gore, you more than deserve the peace prize; you have introduced many in the world to a new way of looking at how we arrive at peace among men and among nations.

What's more, you may have led us to a real breakthrough. In those ancient times there was still space in the world, so that isolated societies could collapse without taking others with them. That is no longer true. We should awaken to the fact that there are few "elsewheres" out there anymore to absorb or transform our profligacy.