I believe that Homer-Dixon’s approach to environmental scarcity and its role in leading to violent conflict avoids discussions about the deeper structures at play. His theory has a typical positivism approach that realists would pull apart as not taking all the variables into account and manipulating the results to support the environmental influence on the outbreak of conflict. There have been a number of critics of the text by different academics over the years. Most notably by Nils Petter Gleditsch in the article, “Armed Conflict and the Environment: A Critique of the Literature,” published in 1998, that lead to Homer-Dixon and his researchers writing a response directly to these critics. Gleditsch criticizes Homer-Dixon’s concept of environmental scarcity-which integrates supply, demand, and distributional sources of the scarcity of renewable resources-suggesting it, “muddies the waters,” (Gleditsch 1998; 387) and is, “unclear as to whether the casual factor is absolute resource scarcity or environmental degradation.” To a point Gleditsch has fuel for this argument as absolute resource scarcity means here are simply insufficient quantities of a resource to meet human needs or wants, which in turn does relate to Homer-Dixon’s argument about population growth. However, if we also introduces the argument of Environmental degradation than the Gleditsch critic does become justified. It is hard to see the separation of both definitions in Homer-Dixon’s research and both could partially relate to overall definition environment scarcity, however this is not tackled at all in the text. This can be seen as a flaw in in its analysis. Throughout the text, Thomas Homer-Dixon uses population growth as an important variable leading to environmental scarcity. Anybody with the ability to read statistics or graphs can see that there is a direct correlation. However, it is Home-Dixon’s conclusion that environment scarcity leads to violent conflict that I believe can be evaluated. Ethnic tension, economic disparities, and weak government are often the main causes to violent conflict however Homer-Dixons study tells us otherwise, or at least tries to link the factors back to environmental scarcity. He explains that often the role of environmental scarcity is downplayed by academics and it can aggravate already growing issues in regions. The example of the Senegalese and Mauritian conflict was used to support his case; stating: “The interaction of two sources of human-induced environmental scarcity,” (Hom