Our world

There's a very interesting New York Times article by Alexei Barrionuevo, Whose Rain Forest Is This, Anyway? :

For as long as most can remember, Brazil has gazed nervously at maps of the vast, mostly uninhabited territory of the Amazon rain forest.

In the 1960s and ’70s, generals here saw the colonization of the Brazilian Amazon, which is half the size of Europe, as a national security priority. Ocupar para não entregar — “occupy it to avoid surrendering it” — was the slogan of the day. Highways were built, and Brazilians were offered incentives to conquer the land in the Amazon and transform it in the name of development.

There was more behind the nervousness than idle conspiracy theory. Even then, such a unique and vast repository of riches stirred imaginations worldwide. Herman Kahn, the military strategist and futurist, pushed the idea of establishing a freshwater lake in the Amazon to transform the area into a center of agricultural production.

Now, with the world focusing on the promises of biodiversity and the perils of global warming, a chorus of international leaders have ever more openly declared the Amazon part of a patrimony far larger than that of the nations that share its territory. “Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us,” Al Gore, then a senator, said in 1989.

Ah, a world of 'us', excluding 'them', the Brazilians.

I can extrapolate a future where Western countries seize land in the Third World, citing the worldwide environmental importance as an overriding factor over national sovereignty.

The Western countries would, of course, be immune from any such seizures themselves, since most of their environmental legacies have already been consumed to feed their power.