It also showed that the rapid advance of Islamist militant groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab, and Boko Haram in disparate parts of the Muslim world is related to regional food insecurity.
Food crisis, water scarcity, and climate change are not worsening together by accident. Unfortunately, they are symptoms of global system failure.
RenewalCivilization's dependence on fossil fuels is tied to geopolitical relationships with extremist, authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world and is simultaneously complicit in the acceleration of global climate change.
Climate change, in turn, is severely impacting access to water, food, and energy resources, especially in poorer countries of the Middle East and Central Asia. This contributes to the destabilization of the region, catalyzing powder kegs of pent-up frustration and anger at decades of repression.
As regional states fail, unable to deal with populist grievances, economic dislocation, food scarcity, and energy shortages, billions of dollars poured into the Islamist militant network find in the unfolding chaos a new and fruitful playground for recruitment and mobilization.
Since 2002, terror attacks have skyrocketed by 6,500 percent.
It is in this intensifying trauma that the utopian mania of ISIS's vision of the End of Days is able to thrive.
Yet the response promised by Hollande looks set to repeat the same actions that helped inflict the regional trauma by which ISIS was midwifed to power.
It is safe to say that not a single one of the post-9/11 interventions, with noble promises to "destroy" terror and promote "freedom," has succeeded.
Everywhere one looks, the aftermath of Western intervention has seen failed or failing states: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Mali, Yemen, Libya, Syria, an arc of destabilization with power vacuums consistently filled by Islamist militants.
Despite $5 trillion spent since 9/11 on waging the "war on terror," terror attacks have skyrocketed by 6,500 percent, and terrorism casualties have increased by 4,500 percent since 2002 , U.S. State Department data show.
Our war and their terror have accelerated in symbiosis. They are part of the same system, feeding off each other, fueling one another.
Professor Joseph Tainter, the highly-regarded anthropologist who authored the classic book The Collapse of Complex Societies, has argued that one of the core reasons for the collapse of any civilization is the increasing complexity it creates in trying to solve increasingly complex problems of its own making. New tools, new ideas, new mechanisms, new bureaucracies to solve a crisis require new resources to create a whole new layer of complexity that generates its own new set of crises, challenges, and problems.
To solve those requires yet more problem-solving mechanisms, drawing on more resources, which end up adding yet another layer of complexity, only generating more problems down the line. Eventually, there comes a point where the system becomes so bloated and overcomplicated by its own resource-guzzling problem-solving bureaucracy that it can no longer generate sufficient resources to solve the next layer of problems generated by its own complexity. The historical result, as Tainter shows, is often civilizational collapse.
The vast majority of citizens across the Western and Muslim worlds do not buy into this bleak future.
It need not be. As system theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon has shown in his book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization, natural and evolutionary processes reveal that breakdown can be a precursor to revitalization. But that requires fundamental systemic transformation: overcoming internal system dynamics that no longer work, breaking out of the old mold, while embracing and creating from within a new system, with new rules, new dynamics, and new vision.
The empirical data, in our case, are unequivocal. The inability of the "war on terror" to address the problem it is purportedly addressing is symptomatic of a deeper, systemic impasse. Terrorism is not a symptom of barbarians "out there." It is an integral and inevitable feature of the prevailing geopolitical and economic order: the hidden barbarism within the global system.
The "war on terror" dynamic is going through the very process of growth-heading-to-collapse identified by Tainter, compounded by the vicious cycle of systemic crises in food, water, and energy.
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