As fully tenured professor of government at The College of William and Mary in Virginia from 1984 to 2017, David Dessler, PhD, had a research focus on foreign policy and international relations. Extensively published, Dr. David Dessler authored a review of Thomas F. Homer-Dixon’s The Environment, Scarcity, and Violence in the summer, 1999, issue of the Environmental Change and Security Project Report.
Describing the book as ambitious and part of an emerging, wide-ranging debate, Dr. Dessler draws attention to a central finding that renewable resource scarcity can contribute significantly to fostering insurgencies, ethnic clashes, and other types of civil unrest. The formulation is that, as freshwater, forest, and agricultural land becomes ever more scarce, incidents of violence will tend to increase.
