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That is the essence of militarized adaptation to climate chaos: dirty war forever. In the following chapters, the social wreckage of counterinsurgency past will be evident in the form of crime, smuggling, civilian militias, death squads, regions glutted with light arms, and routine use of detention and torture. Because counterinsurgency is war that, by design, attacks the social fabric, it has sowed chaos and set the stage for the catastrophic convergence. Leaving corruption, ignorance, crime, and anomie in their wake, small, dirty wars have created societies totally incapable of dealing with climate change. And now, armed adaptation is set to double down on a bad bet by applying more counterinsurgency to the global matrix of crisis.

II

AFRICA

CHAPTER 4

Geopolitics of a Cattle Raid

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

—T. S. ELIOT, The Waste Land

IF THE IMPERIAL CORE of the world system is preparing to adapt to climate change by resort to military methods, then what does incipient climate-driven collapse in the Global South look like? How are the poor adapting? How is the catastrophic convergence lived on the ground? What are its textures and histories? For answers, I traveled to East Africa, and there, one hot morning, I found myself looking down at that dead man, Ekaru Loruman, who was, in many ways, killed by climate change.

As mentioned in chapter 1, this group of Turkana had been pushed south by severe drought and were grazing their herds very close to their enemies, the Pokot. With water and grazing scarce, the herds were ill. To replenish stocks, young men raided their neighbors.1 And this increased violence is very clearly linked to climate change. Surface temperatures are rising, and the clockwork rains of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), are out of sync. At the same time, the waters flowing from the glaciers on Mount Kenya are also in trouble: a century ago, the peak held eighteen glaciers; today, only eleven remain, and four of those are greatly reduced.2 The same is true next door in Tanzania where the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that “during the 20th century, the areal extent of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s ice fields decreased by about 80 percent.”3

As one Kenyan veterinarian who works with the Maasai, pastoralists explained to the Guardian’s John Vidal, “In the past we used to have regular 10-year climatic cycles which were always followed by a major drought. In the 1970s we started having droughts every seven years; in the 1980s they came about every five years and in the 1990s we were getting droughts and dry spells almost every two or three years. Since 2000 we have had three major droughts and several dry spells. Now they are coming almost every year, right across the country.”4

The extreme weather is pushing northern Kenya toward desertification, and that means pastoralists must compete for grazing and water. The situation is so bad in some areas that people are now killing each other for water—shooting it out for control of wells and pasture. This is perhaps the most direct example of how climate change plays out as violence.

The Raid

The Turkana are here—in a place called Kotaruk southwest of the village, or “sublocation,” of Naipa—to be close to a borehole, a well drilled years ago by an NGO. Not far away rise the Karasuk Hills—sharp, barren mountains that thrust up abruptly from the flat desert. When the tribesmen have diesel to run the pump, this narrow well sucks up a trickle of ancient groundwater. In these dry times, which seem to go on and on, well water alone keeps the cattle alive. Without cattle, the Turkana would disappear. They would die or migrate to cities, and their culture would exist only in the memories of deracinated urban slum dwellers.