This chapter explores how country and city stand in as proxies for political, racial, and cultural positions. The country operates as the custodian of the “real America,” which becomes imagined as white, masculine, traditionalist, and working class. The city, meanwhile, teems with the elite and the cosmopolitan. Such gestures conjure away any trace of Indigenous peoples, migrant farmers and ranchers, urban–rural labor alliances, black agrarian Populists, and the city’s intersectional working class. Even as we must acknowledge the generative role country-and-city scholarship has played in US literary criticism, this chapter ultimately calls for rethinking this binary by turning to texts that provide a different account of the rural – a narrative that the country as a concept so effectively obfuscates. Writing by authors such as Hamlin Garland and Zitkála-Šá, conventionally categorized as local-color or regionalist, demonstrates that scarcity and survivance rather than city and country shaped the cultural politics of rural spaces in the nineteenth century. They both challenged the bureaucratic state, as an entity that protected the interests of finance capital by subjecting settlers to constant precarity and violently seeking to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their own land, liberty, and literature.

In this chapter, I first document the great agrarian famine of 1879–80, followed by a detailed analysis of peasants’ livelihood circumstances in the countryside of Diyarbekir, Erzurum and Van, and the politics of food and water scarcity as it impacted agricultural production and the agrarian economy. Next, I turn to the appearance of new environmental disasters in the 1880s and 1890s. These crises exacerbated conflict between local powerbrokers and peasants, and radically transformed settlement patterns within Ottoman Kurdistan. The second major section of the chapter depicts how climatic factors and the periodicity of environmental change impacted pastoralists and it includes a discussion of how climatic fluctuations affect the physiology of herd animals. I conclude this section by examining pastoralist survival strategies, and how these contributed to the growth of intercommunal tension in Kurdistan in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.

Lawyers are the leaders who defend society’s light. Like artists, lawyers must “dream the culture forward.” The responsibility to understand and improve lawyers’ brain health and mental strength extends to our communities because of the privilege, power, and prestige we enjoy. The neuro-intelligent lawyer and legal organization can enlighten government, business, media, education, and philanthropic entities. Like Seth Godin’s insight in The Song of Significance that work is not working for many employees, society isn’t working for many people. Social structures that feature fear, scarcity, exclusion, steep hierarchy, and extreme competition are dehumanizing. And humans are suffering. Maverick lawyer leaders must first dream, and then act, to move the culture forward. They must make neuro-intelligence available to all people, so they can experience the full range of their identities and capabilities. We cannot afford to exclude and lose humans and the light they could bring to the world. These lawyer leaders must educate us about the toxicity of extreme competition and cultures built on fear, scarcity, and chronic stress. These Mavericks can lead the social moonshot movement to further heal and humanize society.

For their politics lessons Susanne Staschen-Dielmann and Saskia Helm create a digital learnscape based on the well-known simulation Model United Nations (MUN) – usually based on the organisation of an international conference. The idea of a digital MUN emerged during the first lockdown in Great Britain and was refined using pluriliteracies principles during the second one. Within the authentic setting of a United Nations conference, learners are guided through more and more sophisticated text-production tasks. These include writing a policy cycle analysis, a draft resolution and an opening speech. Learners take part in a highly formalised debate, which requires the use of an extremely elaborate register. The digital learning space is used to ensure formal and informal communication and information exchange within groups of varying sizes as well as providing meaningful feedback.

This chapter introduces and develops an initial critique of ‘eco-determinist’ thought on climate, water and environmental security. The chapter shows, against this tradition, that the tension between local geographical constraints and demographic pressures is not the central cause of contemporary water-related insecurities, and that there are good structural reasons for this, rooted in the logics of global capitalism. The chapter demonstrates that eco-determinist thinking is both substantively misleading and normatively questionable. And it argues, on these grounds, that climate change–induced scarcities are in and of themselves unlikely to become a major source of conflict. These arguments are advanced both theoretically and via empirical analysis of, among other things, the patterns of water stress and scarcity across the book's ‘divided environments’, claims about 'water wars' on the Euphrates, Jordan and Nile Rivers and evidence on the current and likely future impacts of climate change on water resources. Overall, the chapter shows that what Robert Kaplan has called a ‘revenge of geography’ is unlikely, even under conditions of accelerating human-induced climate change.

This is the last chapter of Part I. It illustrates the explanatory power of the findings thus far by applying them to a well-known puzzle: Why is it that poor people so often seem to lack the willpower and discipline to improve their life circumstances? Sometimes this is explained by reference to a “culture of poverty,” but this explanation is highly controversial. This chapter provides a fresh take on this contentious issue by showing that, irrespective of the sociology, there certainly exists a psychology of poverty. Based on a wide range of data, I show that poverty is correlated with a higher incidence of all the factors undermining self-control discussed in the preceding chapters. I also show that children who grow up in poverty more often experience the circumstances that hamper the development of self-control, while adults who live in poverty more often experience the situational conditions that hinder the successful exercise of self-control. The upshot is that punishing the poor for undisciplined behavior – say by cutting their welfare – may well be counterproductive.

Dedicated public policy professionals are focused on improving their programs. Understandably, they neglect other worthy goals. Economists insist on focusing on the big picture: the opportunity costs for other departments and for taxpayers of spending more and more to address a single problem.

Economists find themselves at odds with experts, who singlemindedly pursue worthy ends without regard to costs. Consider megaprojects such as supersonic transport airplanes and high-speed trains. The engineers who design them want to show what they can do with “adequate” funding. Politicians want to be credited with spearheading such megaprojects. Economists, by contrast, want to be sure that consideration is given to less glamorous projects that may bring greater benefits at far less expense.

Opportunity costs are especially neglected when it comes to saving lives. It’s an easy applause line: “We should pay any price to save a life.” But some projects will reduce very small risks at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Economists remind us that we all take very small risks in our daily living, and there are many programs that will reduce risk. We can’t “fully fund” them all without neglecting, for example, our education and environmental goals.

The chapter highlights the structure of the book, explains its approach, and summarizes its main message. Increased water scarcity intensifies the trade-offs inherent in allocating water to competing uses and makes the policy challenge of managing water resources ever more crucial. The book promotes the view that water policies should be designed and implemented within a comprehensive framework that accounts for the many interconnected pieces comprising water economies.

Resource depletion and sustainable resource extraction is the main focus of this chapter. Depletion is an accentuated scarcity, which can be measured in different ways, four of which are presented in turn: (a) The trends in the adequacy of reserves from which the resource can be extracted provide an important physical insight into the seriousness of the depletion threat. (b) The progress of real prices is seen by economists to reflect accentuating or subsiding scarcity. (c) The long-run change in the unit price in real terms of identified but unexploited resources still in the ground is an alternative measure of the extent of the depletion threat. (d) Finally, the development of the long-run marginal cost of supply, equivalent to the total average cost in the marginal project, is yet another economic indicator of scarcity. Since depletion is a slow, drawn-out process, long time series are needed to make measurement meaningful. The chapter documents and discusses the available data on each of the measures in turn. The chapter ends with a discussion of sustainability in relation to the acceptance by society of extraction of nonrenewable resources.