Yobe State sits at the center of one of the most violent and least understood conflicts in West Africa. Decades of insurgent activity by Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have claimed thousands of lives, yet explanations anchored in ideology alone fail to account for the structural conditions that sustain mass recruitment and territorial control across the state's arid zones. This study examines the ecology of insurgency in Yobe State, tracing how poverty, climate stress, and violent extremism interact to produce cycles of instability that conventional security responses have consistently failed to break. Grounded in political ecology and conflict theory, the research draws on mixed methods: spatial analysis of rainfall anomalies and land degradation data, household-level poverty indices, and qualitative evidence from affected communities. The central argument is that violent extremism in Yobe State is, in significant part, an outcome of accumulated environmental and economic shocks that have hollowed out livelihoods, weakened state presence, and left large segments of the population structurally exposed to extremist mobilization. Shrinking water availability, desertification along the Lake Chad corridor, and the collapse of rain-fed agriculture have not caused insurgency directly. They have, instead, removed the material and social buffers that might otherwise contain it. Findings show spatially concentrated overlaps between climate stress hotspots and zones of high insurgent activity, with implications for policy that go well beyond military containment.