The Oldest Conflict

I came across yet another story this week about the growing human demand for the world's resources.  This one is from this month's National Geographic and is about the Albertine Rift, part of the Great Rift Valley in Africa. The Rift Valley is where we have the first evidence of our earliest human ancestors, and for want of more detailed information we can probably think of it as the cradle of human civilization.  Today, it is a place of enormous natural resource capital and intense competition for that capital by humans.  This resource competition is probably one of the underlying causes of the horrific violence that has plagued the region over the past several decades.  In fact many of our conflicts tend to come down to battles over resources.  See this video of Wangari Maathai talking about the relationship between conflicts and resources.