Description
Modernization and Industrialization have presented the human race with many problems, inflicting deprivation, poverty, war and premature death on millions of people. Until recently, however, solutions were achievable.
Drawn from the much-acclaimed Coming Age of Scarcity and adapted here for general classroom use, this work will be an ideal introduction to courses in population, environment and resources, genocide studies, and social conflict. As we enter the twenty-first century, several components converge, namely population, land for cultivation, energy resources, and environmental carrying capacity. Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann establish a realistic projection of the disastrous future that awaits humankind as surplus populations collide with dwindling resources.
Scholars from a variety of disciplines investigate the problems and suggest ways to maximize individual and collective survival, discussing cause-and-effect scenarios concerning industrialization, biophysical limits, exponential population growth, and genocide.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Bottlenecks and the Ways Out, John K. Roth
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: On the Edge of Scarcity, Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann
Part One: Statement of the Problem
Introduction
Globalization and Security: The Prospects of the Underclass, John B. Cobb, Jr.
Global Industrial Civilization: The Necessary Collapse, Chris H. Lewis
Part Two: Scarcity and Conflict
Introduction
Biophysical Limits to the Human Expropriation of Nature, John M. Gowdy
Our Unsustainable Society . . . and the Alternative, Ted Trainer
Population and Immigration: Sliding into Tribalism, Virginia, Deane Abernethy
Population, Technology, and Development: The Vicious-Circle Principle and the Theory of Human Development, Craig Dilworth
Scarcity and Its Social Impacts: Likely Political Responses, Kurt Finsterbusch
Foundations and Context of Contemporary Conflict, Joseph A. Tainter
Sustainable Development and Human Security: Can We Learn from Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and Haiti? Waltraud Queiser Morales
Part Three: Case Studies of Scarcity and Mass Death
Introduction
Scarcity and Genocide, Roger W. Smith
Globalization and Genocide: Inequality and Mass Death in Rwanda, David Norman Smith
The Feminization of Global Scarcity and Violence, Waltraud Queiser Morales
Scarcity, Genocides, and the Postmodern Individual, Leon Rappoport
Works Cited
About the Author
Michael N. Dobkowski is professor of religious studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is author of The Tarnished Dream: The Basis of American Anti-Semitism, The Politics of lndifference: Documentary History of Holocaust Victims in America, and Jewish American Voluntary Organizations.
Isidor Wallimann is senior lecturer in sociology at the School of Social Work, Basel, Switzerland, and a lecturer at the University of Fribourg. He is author of Estrangrement: Marx's Conception of Human Nature and the Division
of Labor.
February 2002