Rethinking Environmental Security

RETHINKING POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL

STUDIES
This series is a forum for innovative scholarly writing from across all sub-
stantive fields of political science and international studies. The series aims
to enrich the study of these fields by promoting a cutting-edge approach to
thought and analysis. Academic scrutiny and challenge is an essential compo-
nent in the development of political science and international studies as fields
of study, and the act of re-thinking and re-examining principles and precepts
that may have been long-held is imperative.
Rethinking Political Science and International Studies showcases authored
books that address the field from a new angle, expose the weaknesses of
existing concepts and arguments, or ‘re-frame’ the topic in some way. This
might be through the introduction of radical ideas, through the integration of
perspectives from other fields or even disciplines, through challenging existing
paradigms, or simply through a level of analysis that elevates or sharpens our
understanding of a subject.
Titles in the series include:
Rethinking International Relations
Bertrand Badie
Rethinking International Political Economy
Benjamin J. Cohen
Rethinking Environmental Security
Simon Dalby
Rethinking
Environmental Security
Simon Dalby
Professor, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid
Laurier University, Canada

RETHINKING POLITICAL SCIENCE AND

INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Simon Dalby 2022

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Contents

Prefacevi
List of abbreviationsx

Introduction to Rethinking Environmental Security1

1 Realism, firepower and insecurity 13

2 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 34

3 Geostory: deep time and history 54

4 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 72

5 Global security/environmental conflict 90

6 Catastrophic and existential risks 111

7 Whole earth security: an engineered world 131

8 Environmental peacebuilding 151

Conclusion171

References181
Index203

v
Preface
Half a century after delegates from some members of the United Nations
first gathered to discuss the Human Environment in 1972 in Stockholm the
matters they addressed now need much more urgent attention. In late 2020 the
Secretary-General of the United Nations posed matters in terms of emergency;
the United Nations Human Development report highlighted the appropriate
contextualization for urgent action in terms of living in the new geological
period of earth’s history, the Anthropocene. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) and numerous scientists have started talking in
medical terms of a global code red, a matter of an imminent potentially fatal
situation.
The matters that were initially raised in 1972 in terms of human survival
have been added to by other considerations of global change since and were
gathered under the rubric of environmental security in the aftermath of the
cold war. What is clearly needed now from policy makers, social scientists and
financial managers are initiatives to rapidly accelerate the transition to a world
where global ecology is taken seriously as the necessary premise for public
policy and investment decisions; and consequently the use of fossil fuels is
phased out quickly. Time is, as the Secretary-General has made very clear
repeatedly, running out. The longer we wait, the worse it will get.
Rethinking environmental security requires first and foremost this shift in
terms of temporality. Where climate change and extinction have long been
understood as matters for the future, this is no longer the case. To borrow
a phrase from Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute, the future that delegates to the 1972 United Nations
meeting on the Human Environment hoped to avoid is what we are now living
in. Political and policy thinking about security has to start from that premise;
climate change and extinction are accelerating, no longer a matter for future
consideration.
Thinking in these terms is a tall order in a world where the rich and powerful
still mostly understand environment as something external to their affairs,
a source of resources, a playground for their recreation, and out of sight, a sink
for their wastes. Climate change!? Well that is, they still apparently frequently
think, a matter for future generations to worry about later. Or perhaps, in
a common but more worrisome formulation, something that their wealth can
enable them to ignore, given that the nasty consequences will presumably fall
vi
 Preface vii

elsewhere. Where climate activists pose the problem as one of system change
or climate change, the rich and powerful still, it seems, prefer the latter as
a better option than the former.
It is thus necessary to explore the modes of thought that have led to this
situation as well as those that might offer novel formulations that lead towards
a different future. Until fairly recently, as Amitav Ghosh (2016) argued, there
was a “great derangement” in Western culture where the dramatic story of
climate change, and the current reconfiguration of the earth system caused
by the expansion of the fossil fueled global economy, was absent from most
novels and cultural productions in the West. This has begun to change as the
zeitgeist slowly registers the point that we no longer live in the relatively stable
conditions of the Holocene that humanity has known throughout its history.
Novelists are increasingly starting to engage themes of climate change, extinc-
tion and the possibilities of both dystopian and better futures for humanity in
a rapidly changing world (Andersen 2020).
A key point for the arguments that follow in the chapters of this book is
that the overall culture within which climate is being considered is starting to
shift and novels and larger cultural issues matter in how what is dangerous is
framed. This matters in terms of what is considered within academic analyses
of security. Not only are scientific and political matters involved, but the
popular imagination of what is to come is important in shaping political dis-
course, and cultural matters related to climate are especially fraught (Hulme
2009). This is especially the case where energy innovations and the connec-
tions between climate change, disasters and the possibilities of better lives in
the future powered by novel electrical systems after fossil fuels are part of the
discussion.
In Sheila Jasanoff’s (2015, 2021) terms the socio-technical imaginaries that
underpin political discourse need to explicitly engage with this new context
with much more humility, recognizing the importance of the earth system as
something modernity can no longer pretend to ignore. It is also the case that
popular culture is increasingly being engaged by political scientists and other
disciplines in terms of teaching and the interpretation of cultural politics.
Popular political tropes draw on the larger cultural vocabulary in circulation,
and hence matters of rethinking political things, in this case environmental
security, need to draw on the larger cultural repertoire, and not just academic
analyses of the traditional themes of international relations. Hence the periodic
mention of novels and movies in the pages that follow here.
Part of the problem of dealing with matters of environmental security and
the future dangers presented by species extinction and climate change is pre-
cisely that academic disciplines of the social sciences, and not just international
relations, have been slow to grapple with the novel geophysical and biological
circumstances of our times (Clark and Szerszynski 2021). But the current
viii Rethinking environmental security

generation of students, both when on climate strike in the streets or when in

their classrooms, are owed a much better range of intellectual and pedagogic
options, ones that require rethinking both security and environment simulta-
neously while engaging with the international dimensions of both in light of
the new insights of earth system science (Rockström and Gaffney 2021). This
volume offers a few modest suggestions as to how this might be done.
This book is to a substantial extent a product of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Initially conceived in the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, when staying
home and worrying about the disease, more so than many volumes, this book
is a product of long confinement in the professorial study. Brooding over
global catastrophes and the failure of “security” to provide for the basics of
life for many vulnerable people, not least the elderly confined in “care” facil-
ities, or impoverished people without medical assistance, added impetus to
rethinking security on the large scale. Headlines about megafires in Australia
and California, storms in numerous places, and both “heat domes” and,
a few months later, an “atmospheric river” bringing severe floods to British
Columbia focused attention on the consequences of climate change and the
failures to anticipate their arrival, as well as the policy disconnects in a prov-
ince where resource extraction still dominates policy making despite rising
human vulnerabilities.
The ongoing opposition to the political economy of raw extractivism in the
province is linked to attempts to decolonize academic understandings of the
province’s history, as well as rethink the legacy of colonization and the fate
of violently dispossessed indigenous peoples. So many of these processes set
in motion by the expansion of European colonization, powered frequently by
fossil fuels, have parallels elsewhere, that the larger story needs to be incor-
porated into academic discussions of environmental security. Likewise the
importance of ecological disruptions elsewhere, and not just climate change,
has been sharpened by a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, the mutating
virus, its modes of transmission through complex artificial ecologies and the
sometimes bizarre politics surrounding vaccines. All these themes have shaped
this volume.
But while confinement to the professorial study reduced in-person contacts,
important inputs to my thinking have come from many Balsillie School of
International Affairs colleagues and students on Zoom, email and various other
electronic media. In particular thanks to Alan Whiteside for conversations
about viruses and the role of expertise and Neil Craik on geoengineering.
Zhenzhong Si helped on China and eco-security. Randy Wigle and Alex
Suen’s engagement with me on economic damage estimates related to climate
change led me to realize that most of that discussion was a distraction from the
core concerns of environmental security. Tamara Lorinz’s work on military
emissions and Roger Boyd’s on energy and geopolitics has all helped too.
 Preface ix

University of Kansas professor John Head has been a visiting fellow at the
School and his work on rethinking agriculture, law and ecostates has been
especially inspiring even if he is cited less frequently in the pages that follow
than perhaps he ought to be.
Also in Kansas, Shannon O’Lear helped with our ongoing discussion of
environmental geopolitics. Long ago Derek Orosz collected material for me
on the debate about the legacy of the 1970s Limits to Growth discussion, and
a subsequent inspiring meeting in Oslo, before the pandemic, with one of the
original authors, Jorgen Randers, focused my attention on this legacy once
again. Cara Stewart’s media sleuthing has, as usual, kept me in the loop on
current climate events. Julia Trombetta and Ray Silvius helped with China.
Dialogue with Luke Ashworth on his parallel efforts on the Anthropocene and
how to teach about the end of the world, Rome and the history of international
relations has helped too. David Long saved me from an embarrassing faux
pas related to E.H. Carr. My ongoing conversation on all these topics with
Thomas Homer-Dixon and Tom Deligiannis has provided very useful reality
checks. Virtual participation in the Planet Politics Institute (planetpolitics.org)
also connects me to innovative scholarship and commentary by colleagues
around the world on the themes in this volume. My thanks to you one and all.
Given the very diverse sources drawn on in the following pages, more so than
usual, the normal disclaimer applies exonerating everyone listed here from any
responsibility for my foibles and errors. Finally thanks to Harry Fabian and all
the crew at Edward Elgar for getting this text into print.
Abbreviations
AMOC Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current
COP Conference of the Parties
GDP Gross Domestic Product
GNP Gross National Product
IMF International Monetary Fund
IPBES Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
SDG Sustainable Development Goal
SUV Sports Utility Vehicle
UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development
UNCHE United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment
UNEP United Nations Environment Programme
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change

x
Introduction to Rethinking Environmental
Security

The politics of planetary peril

OUR COMMON FUTURE

While numerous inquiries into the human prospect have long pondered the
prospects for humanity, in the latter part of the twentieth century, as knowl-
edge of the planetary system rapidly expanded, both the external dangers to
our species and the novel self-imposed threats to civilization coalesced into
a discussion of what became known as environmental security. Its impetus has
usually been global scale threats to civilization and global human activity, but
much of the practical attention has been on smaller issues of environment as
a cause of local conflict, the dangers of pollution in numerous forms, and the
implications of resource shortages, water and food in specific contexts. Most
recently the rapidly advancing science of the earth system has highlighted
looming catastrophic and existential risks at the global scale, which inter-
national relations as a scholarly enterprise, like the institutions and political
arrangements it studies, has been very slow to effectively address.
The key document that codified environmental security as a focus for
policy and scholarly concern, the World Commission on Environment and
Development’s 1987 report on Our Common Future, explicitly stated that
environmental insecurity needed to be addressed by change in numerous
aspects of economic life and security provision. The implications were that
societies needed to pursue sustainable development rather than modern pat-
terns of economic growth. Sustainable development would, so the argument in
Our Common Future went, deal with environmental insecurities. This crucial
innovation was neglected in subsequent decades where the rapid expansion
of fossil fueled globalization was given policy priority even if the rhetoric of
sustainable development was widely invoked. But the current climate crisis,
the rapid loss of many species in the current planetary extinction event and
renewed concerns about disease highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic

1
2 Rethinking environmental security

have revived concerns about global environmental insecurity and given them
a renewed urgency.
This now requires rethinking how the scholarly field of international rela-
tions, and more specifically the security studies component of it, might effec-
tively grapple with the rapidly changing material context that is shaping global
politics. It also requires addressing how the changes, both in how security is
formulated and in how sustainable development policies are crafted, that Our
Common Future insisted were necessary might be implemented now. To do so
requires reworking both the assumptions underlying the economic trajectories
that have underpinned “development” in recent decades, and the arrangements
of international politics that, despite the supposed priority given to global secu-
rity, have radically endangered both people and the planetary system in which
we all now live. We are in new times, captured in the discussion of a new geo-
logical era caused by human action, now commonly called the Anthropocene.
Given the danger of superpower nuclear arsenals and related weapons
systems, international relations as a scholarly enterprise in the Anglosphere
was formerly primarily concerned with survival in the nuclear age, but now
survival is threatened by another series of political and technical arrange-
ments. Traditional notions of state rivalries, and the struggles for power as
supposedly the source of insecurity, are now part of the problem in terms of
climate change and the extinction crisis. Precisely the fossil fueled industrial
systems that power the economy and military capabilities that supposedly
provide security are undermining the ecological conditions for their existence.
This is the crisis of environmental security that requires rethinking many
things, and the framework for security thinking in international relations in
particular. The new sources of danger to humanity in general, and to specific
populations in particular places, are now very different from the traditional
international relations focus on armed conflicts. The dangers of nuclear war
have not disappeared, but these new concerns need urgent attention. All this is
not to forget that a major nuclear war would also be an environmental disaster
of global scope, and as this book suggests, these interconnections are important
in revisiting the environmental security discussion.
International relations as a discipline has not been effective at dealing with
the climate crisis, partly because many of the political divisions that matter in
this case are between the contemporary fossil fueled model of economy and
future human generations. Those generations will need a functional biosphere
to live in if a human civilization of multiple billions is to survive, never mind
thrive, but they don’t have an effective voice in the corridors of power. The
geopolitical divisions marked by climate change also run in complicated ways
between states that produce and consume fossil fuels and those, frequently
former colonies with underdeveloped economies dependent on agriculture,
that are subject to the largest disruptions caused by climate change, and which
 Introduction 3

have no obvious policy or military options to deal with these threats to their
security.
Neither are the modes of thinking related to regime formation, interdepend-
ence and cooperation, a dominant stream in international relations thinking
after the cold war, all that helpful. Much of the focus in climate negotiations,
and in international relations literature dealing with regime formation, has
been on greenhouse gas emissions as a pollution problem, a matter of curtail-
ing the amounts of methane and carbon dioxide coming from industrial and
agricultural activities. So far these institutions, namely the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol
and the Paris Agreement, have failed to grapple effectively with climate
change, being in effect empty or decoy institutions (Dimitrov 2020). They
simply don’t deal with the causes of the crisis, namely the massive use of
fossil fuels and the expansionist mode of contemporary economy. The Paris
Agreement didn’t mention fossil fuels, and until recently, key investment
decisions that shape the future of the global economy were made without much
consideration of climate matters. This has begun to change, as the discussions
of coal, fossil fuel subsidies and investments at the Glasgow Conference of
the Parties (COP) in 2021 indicates. Discussions within global environmental
politics studies focused mainly on regime construction and related matters,
and have been slow to grapple with the existential risks involved in the global
economy.
One important exception is the matter of ozone depleting substances,
namely chlorofluorocarbons and related chemicals, where ending their produc-
tion has been a priority, and considerable academic attention has focused on
this regime, albeit not explicitly as a climate change issue. The model of side
payments to compensate Southern states for the forgone benefits of using these
chemicals has been important as a precedent for climate change negotiations
where common but differentiated responsibilities have been a key principle.
The attempts to construct international regimes to deal with climate change,
under the auspices of the UNFCCC, have not noticeably slowed, much less
reversed, the trajectory of fossil fuel use and the resultant temperature changes
in the earth system. Nonetheless, despite repeated international conferences,
the annual (until COVID-19 disruptions intervened in 2020) COP to the
UNFCCC and dramatic statements by the United Nations Secretary-General
(2020) about the imminent dangers of climate change, greenhouse gas emis-
sions continue ever upward.
But mostly, international relations thinking has simply taken the environ-
ment for granted as the context for the rivalries of states that are its subject
matter, and as such ignores the huge transformations of both natural and
human systems currently underway (Burke, Fishel, Mitchell et al. 2016). This
is not a new trend; as Lucian Ashworth (2014) has noted, the predecessors
4 Rethinking environmental security

to contemporary international thinking mostly overlooked the importance

of nineteenth century industrialization and its material consequences. The
material context of states, and the contexts their industrial systems are reshap-
ing, need a much more explicit treatment in international relations thinking.
Politics and administrative arrangements may indeed shape policy making
and institutional innovation, but the larger social contexts, remade by the
production processes of the global economy, are key to the current crisis.
This requires rethinking what both security and environment might mean in
contemporary circumstances.
Hence international relations scholars are mostly not asking the kinds of
questions that are needed to reshape the global economy to make it sustainable.
Realists assume inevitable power struggles among elites; institutionalists that
cooperation may deal with the worst aspects of rivalries. So called construc-
tivists point to the importance of identity in the fault lines that divide peoples
and might be used to mobilize support for conflict. But the Anthropocene
requires that other analytical priorities get attention, and given the rapidly
changing earth system, it implies that security cannot be provided by ever more
dominance games between state elites. While the threat of nuclear war has
long endangered humanity, now the firepower of the contemporary economic
system has become an additional urgent global security problem.
If the long term survival of human civilization is of concern, power now
has to be reinterpreted in ecological terms and focused on the flourishing of
adaptable ecological systems rather than physical domination and the imposi-
tion of particular modes of conduct on both humans and what is increasingly
inaccurately termed the natural world. This is necessary because both climate
change and a rapid reduction of biodiversity in the current global extinction
event are upon us. Focusing on both as matters for the distant future has to
be replaced by a focus on the urgent and immediate (Rockström and Gaffney
2021). In particular this book emphasizes the urgency of dealing with both:
greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere and “locking in” future
heating and hence meteorological disruptions; biodiversity losses are reducing
the species available for the future, removing numerous evolutionary possibil-
ities for the planetary system. Decisions made in the immediate future about
how to grapple with this context, or failure to do so, will have dramatic long
term repercussions.
Related to this is the necessity of realizing that the past is no longer a reliable
indication of likely future weather conditions. This assumption of stationarity
has to be abandoned; non-stationarity, where the range of likely meteorological
conditions in a place can no longer be reliably imputed from historical records,
is the new normal (Milly, Betancourt, Falkenmark et al. 2008). Assumptions
of climate stability as the backdrop for human affairs cannot be the basis for
useful politics. This is about much more than traditional discussions of envi-
 Introduction 5

ronmental regulation, international treaties to limit trade or damage to wildlife,

pollution standards and other matters under the rubric of global environmental
politics. All these remain important, but how they play out in a more dynamic
and changeable earth system increasingly shapes the context for future politics,
and the rivalries of states as well as corporations. Climate instability, without
appropriate social and policy innovations to grapple with these new circum-
stances, threatens future conflicts, disruptions and much future avoidable
human suffering. Greta Thunberg (2019) and her youthful colleagues in the
Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion (2019) movements understand this
even if many of their elders apparently don’t.
Thinking about climate change as a pollution problem, and negotiating
agreements to constrain emissions, hasn’t worked effectively, not least
because of the classic notions of free riders and collective action problems.
But the larger political struggles are about the future modes of urban life, and
extensive consumption that is based on the widespread use of fossil fuels. The
inertia in this system is used to legitimize such things as fossil fuel subsidies
from governments. Governments would be much better off taxing fossil fuels
in the short run and phasing them out in the medium term (Coady, Parry, Sears
and Shang 2017). As of 2020 numerous financial institutions had at last begun
to wake up to the vulnerabilities of many supply chains to climate disruptions,
and simultaneously to the potential of a shift away from fossil fuels towards an
economy based on renewables and alternative modes of production, only most
obviously such things as hydrogen as a source of heat for industrial processes.
The question of environmental security now is how fast these transitions
will happen, because if they don’t move ahead quickly then the disruptions to
weather systems, water supplies, agriculture and infrastructure will become
ever more severe in coming decades. In the process these will increasingly
challenge the capabilities of the urban systems, that now house the majority
of humanity, to function effectively. The political disruptions set in motion by
these difficulties are likely to cause all sorts of security problems in numerous
places. Failure to grapple with the causes of these disruptions ensures that,
as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, the disruptions will get
ever larger further into the future. Regardless of how much credence is put in
looming tipping points in the earth system (Steffen, Rockström, Richardson et
al. 2018), it is clear the earth system or “ecosphere”, the complex combination
of the atmosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, is
being radically altered by the novel artificial entities that industrial humanity
has made, an ensemble of materials and processes now frequently called the
technosphere (Donges, Lucht, Müller-Hansen and Steffen 2017). Its future
configuration is now key to humanity’s prospects, and whether collectively
humanity can secure the conditions for our future thriving is precisely the
question posed in contemporary discussions of environmental security.
6 Rethinking environmental security

ONLY ONE EARTH

It is important to note that in some ways this isn’t a new debate. In the
1970s extensive discussions about environmental problems spilled over
into the international arena. The United Nations Conference on the Human
Environment (UNCHE) was held in Stockholm in 1972, the same year as the
first computer simulations of the earth system were published in The Limits to
Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens 1972). The background
report for UNCHE, which included a discussion of the technosphere, was
called Only One Earth (Ward and Dubos 1972), and at least the British version
had a NASA picture of the earth on its cover. At the end of the major period
of decolonization, discussions of a new international economic order were in
the air, and the possibilities of development to rapidly tackle poverty in the
former colonies structured much of the international agenda. At least it did in
those parts of international politics not preoccupied by the Vietnam war and
the dangers of superpower confrontation.
What wasn’t clear back then were the precise details of the operation of
the earth system, where thresholds might be or whence the greatest dangers
to human civilization might lie. Half a century later this contextual informa-
tion is much clearer, and the decades in-between, when sensible economic
arrangements that take ecology seriously might have been put in place, have
been squandered. Early concerns about climate change were eclipsed in part
by the geopolitical consequences of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) oil embargo following the October 1973 war between Israel
and an alliance of Syria and Egypt. The focus on fuel supplies and vulnerabili-
ties replaced much of the concern in Western states about pollution, but it also
generated an extensive discussion of how to replace oil as a fuel in modern
economies (Lovins 1977).
Tied into this was a confusing academic and political discussion of resources
and their shortage, seen in the Limits to Growth framework as a constraint on
economic growth. Growth, the key focus in so much economic thinking, was,
many economists argued, not constrained by shortages of key materials, and
erroneous claims on that score by ecologists were used to ridicule the larger
concerns about limits on a finite planet. Economic growth, usually understood
in terms of Gross National Product (GNP), or sometimes the slightly different
formulation of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), was the benchmark measure
for progress. Growth was supposedly the solution to the ills of poverty world-
wide. Usually environmental concerns, with pollution in particular, were seen
as an unnecessary constraint on growth, and in the politics of these matters,
appeals to workers in particular industries are made on the grounds that eco-
nomics is more important than conservation. It is easy to reduce conservation,
 Introduction 7

or environment in these terms, to a matter of affluent peoples’ recreation pref-

erences for parks, and then contrast this to the economic necessity of earning
a living.
Here the politics of knowledge enters into the discussion, and arguments
about who was competent to pronounce on which policy were as much about
disciplinary turf as they were about ecological realities. Reduced to an argu-
ment about resources, the larger ecological concerns about species elimination,
soil depletion, pollution of natural systems and damaged health, not to mention
large scale climate destabilization, were often sidelined. As will be seen in the
following chapters in this book, which expert discourse frames policy discus-
sion matters greatly, although politics usually trumps the claims of expertise.
This is especially the case when notions of national security enter the picture,
as in discussions of climate and security in particular and environment and
security more generally. Where nationalist politicians wish to brandish mil-
itary technologies and use fossil fuels as a token of state capability, climate
change concerns get short shrift. Likewise in recent years the reproduction
of earlier modes of Western security thinking in the claims of a new cold war
with China is easy to do, but it distracts attention from the much more serious
looming threats of climate disruption (Lieven 2020).
Part of the argument in what follows is about the need to shift the contex-
tualization that frames security thinking to grapple with the novel circum-
stances that are now clear as a result of the rapid advances in earth system
sciences in the last few decades, a matter explored in detail elsewhere (Dalby
2020a, 2020b). But to understand how difficult it is to change the politics of
knowledge, and to think through the implications for policy that follow on
from a drastic recontextualization of security, it is necessary to revisit some
of the earlier debates, about the Limits to Growth and the formulations at the
UNCHE, to understand their limited efficacy. The intense debates then about
growth, pollution, resource shortages and development are now a matter of
historical interest mostly, but because the arguments then are precursors to
how attempts are being made to deal with the twenty first century ecological
crisis, they need renewed attention.
But much of this debate in the 1970s, about environment, resources and
new international economic orders (Lean 1978), was forgotten in the early
1980s. The revived cold war contest between the superpowers, when nuclear
warfare replaced environmental matters as the primary cause of political
anxiety, pushed matters of energy supplies and nuclear power controversies in
particular off the policy agenda in the United States and in Europe. Neoliberal
arguments about deregulation, public sector spending reductions and a limited
state involvement in economic matters beyond key military concerns further
worked to displace discussions of existential risks and long term sustainability
(Harvey 2005). The New International Economic Order aspirations of the
8 Rethinking environmental security

1970s were also swept aside by the reassertion of corporate power and the
militarization of superpower politics.
Many of the contradictions in the Limits to Growth debates were elaborately
fudged in the 1980s in the establishment of sustainable development as the
overarching rhetoric for tackling environmental matters and the appropriation
of this by numerous corporate actors apparently more anxious to maintain
their power and privilege in the world order than to tackle the consequences
of their material status (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). This formulation,
articulated in the World Commission on Environment and Development’s
report Our Common Future (1987), was the basis for the 1992 United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) “Earth Summit” in
Rio de Janeiro which produced the conventions on both climate change and
global biodiversity. While these agreements focused on the key issues in rapid
changes in the earth system, they didn’t generate substantive policy changes in
the years that followed.
Crucially for the argument in the following pages, Our Common Future
premised the necessary conditions for sustainable development as a matter
of dealing with issues of “environmental insecurity”, to use the phrasing that
structured much of its text. Without those necessary conditions sustainable
development wasn’t likely to be successful, but if it were successful it would
in turn provide environmental security for the future. Conflict, and the dangers
of nuclear war in particular, was highlighted as a major obstacle to the achieve-
ment of environmental security; the money wasted on weapons would, the
report’s authors argued, be much better spent on development, health care and
ecological restoration.
Sustainable development also provides the overarching rhetorical frame-
work for the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), widely adopted
as the policy desiderata for the United Nations system, but which present
numerous contradictory projects and don’t resolve many of the difficulties of
contemporary global governance (Dalby, Horton, Mahon and Thomaz 2019).
This series of aspirational goals and multiple subsidiary policy targets do,
despite being contradictory in key places, nonetheless set out a framework for
a desirable future for all of humanity. To provide the conditions necessary for
their achievement however requires rethinking both climate change strategies
and the global problem of species extinction that are reducing the options for
the future quite drastically. Environmental security requires addressing all
these if the aspirations expressed by the SDGs are to be reached, if not by the
target date of 2030, then soon after.
The current trajectories of fossil fueled economic activity imperil many
things that are necessary for future environmental security. The massive accu-
mulation of wealth on the part of a small part of humanity is now the key to the
destruction and the endangerment of peoples in many marginal environments.
 Introduction 9

Consumption drives both climate change and the rapidly accelerating extinc-
tion crisis. This is so both because, directly, the extraction activities required
to appropriate resources lead to the destruction of habitats and, indirectly,
processes are set in motion by ecological disruption, only most obviously
climate change, which can lead to very grave long term dangers arising from
ocean acidification caused by excess carbon dioxide being absorbed from the
atmosphere. Bluntly put, contemporary patricians are accumulating wealth at
the expense of much of the human population (Piketty 2014), and are playing
consumption status games at the cost of the impoverishment of plebeians more
or less everywhere. Highlighted by the responses of the rich to the perils of
COVID-19, mostly escaping its direct impacts and using the crisis for further
enrichment, this pattern of wealth accumulation suggests forcefully that this
mode of economy is unsustainable. It also suggests that the security of the very
rich comes at the cost of impoverishment and vulnerability for many others;
hence the now extensive discussion of matters of climate justice.
Putting all this together suggests an analysis that links four themes. First,
environmental security is an aspirational discourse, aspiring to a future that
is a sustainable ecological context for humanity. This is in doubt because of
military and political efforts that endanger it by a focus on economic expansion
and the forceful preservation of this trajectory in the name of national security.
The trajectories of the last few centuries have already disrupted and destroyed
numerous peoples and their habitats; environmental security hasn’t been sup-
plied for them (Grove 2019). Now the question is for whom can it be supplied
in coming decades, and whether a liveable planet in perpetuity, the implicit
goal in most of this discussion, can be shaped by policy actions and economic
change in coming decades.
To reach this goal of a liveable planet, second, careful analysis of the earth
system, humanity’s place in it, and how it has changed in the past and is now
being rapidly transformed is necessary. So too is an investigation of how the
contemporary changes are related to past human actions and the colonization
of ecological niches by an expanding humanity, a species that has uniquely
adopted the use of fire to change key parameters in the earth system. Focusing
on this generates, third, considerable anxiety about contemporary and future
threats to the human enterprise, and these need careful contextualization to
understand the causes of human insecurity. Having appropriate responses to
these anxieties clearly requires, fourth, advocacy of sensible economic, secu-
rity and ecological policies to generate a sustainable ecosphere as humanity’s
habitat in future. Political strategies for achieving this end are also an unavoid-
able part of any serious discussion of the future of environmental security.
10 Rethinking environmental security

THE BOOK

To work through these four interconnected themes the book is organized into
eight chapters with each two chapters roughly focused on, in turn, traditional
notions of security which contrast with aspirations for a sustainable earth,
analysis of the earth system, anxieties about ecological dangers and, finally,
advocacy for a secure human future.
The rationale for this volume, and the context of rethinking issues of our
common future half a century after the first UNCHE, is set out in this intro-
duction. The urgency for addressing these matters is now unquestioned, but
how to reframe matters is far from easy to articulate effectively for scholars of
international studies and others in the social sciences.
Chapter 1 starts with questions of security which are at the heart of con-
temporary international relations thinking. While much of the recent literature
focuses on regimes, interdependence, hegemony, constructivism and related
matters, at the heart of the international relations enterprise historically have
been questions of great powers, their rivalries, the causes and consequences of
inter-state warfare and, in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons,
how inter-state rivalries and the larger questions of world order can be
addressed to prevent the global catastrophe of major nuclear war. Aggression
has to be deterred, and nuclear risks managed by the architecture of interna-
tional order to tackle the self-imposed existential risk to humanity, that of
massive technological devastation to the whole planet by the unleashing of
nuclear firepower. But now another series of self-imposed existential risks are
looming, caused as a consequence of the success of other forms of firepower,
the successful manipulation of combustion to power modern societies. Climate
change is now a matter of security too, and international relations thinking
needs an overhaul to deal with this new category of threat.
Chapter 2 tackles the precursors to the current discussion, first in terms of
the rise of environmental concerns in the 1960s and 1970s in the West, crys-
tallized in the 1972 UNCHE with its influential conference statements as well
as the debate around the contemporaneous Limits to Growth. In parallel there
was a discussion in the international relations literature on how to grapple with
these emergent issues, one that has potential for informing current debates, but
which was then at best a marginal contribution to the international relations
discipline. Subsequent sections in the chapter outline the follow on discussion
in the 1980s leading to the publication of Our Common Future, the debate
around the UNCED and the emergence of environmental security as a focal
point in the discussions of post-cold war security issues. The sustainable devel-
opment rhetoric structured the United Nations development goals a quarter of
 Introduction 11

a century later, just as earth systems science was charting in detail the scale of
ecological transformations.
These insights into earth history and the place of humanity in the earth
systems require a more fundamental rethinking of categories such as environ-
ment, the topic of Chapter 3. The earth is a much more dynamic place than is
frequently recognized, and this requires both a reassessment of the premises in
environmental thought and a recognition that humanity is now, as a result of
its appropriation of processes of combustion, a key geophysical player in the
future configuration of planetary systems. Firepower is the key here; the ability
to do ignition in numerous modes lies at the heart of technological innovation
that has remade both humanity and the planet, facilitating numerous human
endeavours while simultaneously generating new dangers in the remade geog-
raphies humans now inhabit.
Which also requires us to look much more closely in Chapter 4 at the history
of human colonization and the legacy of imperialism and capitalism in shaping
the global rivalries of international relations and the structures of security that
now confront disruptive global changes. Given this legacy of imperial rivalries,
the formulations of security that aim to perpetuate these unsustainable ways of
life are easily seen as part of the problem. The expansion of colonization and
the extension of commercial arrangements into rural areas disrupts both tradi-
tional social patterns and ecologies. In the process the violence on the colonial
frontier comes into focus as a key dimension of environmental insecurity. The
implicit imperial premises in this need more explicit attention in the literature
on environmental security, because the transformation of nature into property
is key to modernity.
As Chapter 5 indicates, these patterns of theory and administrative practice
are the lenses through which much of the discussion of resources, conflict,
security and sustainability are viewed, and may be singularly unhelpful in
tackling the major threats of our times. The case of Syria and the possible role
of climate change in causing its civil war has garnered much attention, but the
situation there suggests that climate was much less important than maldevelop-
ment. Crucially both the biodiversity and climate crises require a reconsidera-
tion of modernity and its assumptions of humanity as apart from nature rather
than part of a nature that industrial systems are rapidly changing. Likewise the
implicit geopolitical categories in the rapidly proliferating discourse of climate
security often focus on symptoms rather than causes, and as such narrowly
constrain policy options while focusing on military matters. Contrasting
endangered, entangled and extractivist views of the world highlights the
implicit representations of the world that shape security policy discourse.
Chapter 6 looks at matters of threats to climate, biodiversity loss, pandemics
and other existential threats facing humanity, including the persistent dangers
of nuclear warfare and related modes of extremely destructive human activi-
12 Rethinking environmental security

ties which conventional notions of national security in particular have mostly

aggravated in recent decades rather than ameliorated. The contrast with the
policy formulations that have emerged in terms of the financial risks implied
by climate change to the global economy is noteworthy in terms of what is
endangered. At the largest scale, which matters most in terms of environmental
security, the key question is whether contemporary trajectories will lead to
societal collapse, or whether a rapid reorganization of the global economy to
rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels will avoid this outcome.
Persisting with attempts to use technological modes of intervention as
a response to these threats frequently leads, Chapter 7 shows, to discussions
of geoengineering and attempts to use force to reshape at least parts of the
planetary system. In contrast whole earth security understands the intercon-
nections between ecologies and human habitats as the essential framework for
living appropriately within the vulnerable context of a fragile planet. Whereas
Chapter 5 deals with the contrasting perspectives of endangered, entangled and
extractivist worlds, this chapter looks to the debates about a future engineered
world, one of geoengineering, and the potential security implications of these
novel geopolitical possibilities. An alternative focus on ecology and the flour-
ishing of ecosystems, as in regenerative agriculture and permaculture modes
of food production, suggests possibilities for living within nature, inhabiting
the world rather than exploiting it, a matter of taking eco-security, in Chinese
terms, seriously.
Finally Chapter 8 thinks through the contemporary debates about how to
rework security and policies of peacemaking and peacebuilding as an alter-
native series of activities that may foster a flourishing ecosphere, the key
necessity for any notion of long term environmental security, but a notion
substantially removed from traditional international relations thinking focused
on either the rivalries of great powers or the institutional arrangements of
trading and regulatory regimes in a liberal order. National security under-
stood in these terms is anathema to flourishing societies in the long run, but
rethinking security now requires confronting these implicit assumptions quite
directly. Taking ecology at various scales seriously requires nothing less than
rethinking assumptions of force controlling territory as the basis of security.
The conclusion offers some reflections on the links between international
relations and these novel formulations and the need to escape narrow discipli-
nary modes of thought and policy formulations if environmental security is to
be rethought in the comprehensive terms that present circumstances urgently
require.
1. Realism, firepower and insecurity

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

In the 1930s in Britain E.H. Carr (1939) pondered the causes of the First World
War and many other wars that European states had been plagued with over the
previous few centuries. His book, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, which contained
his ruminations on the failures of international politics and the catastrophe of
war, is often conveniently looked to by international relations scholars, anxious
to provide undergraduates with a simple potted history of the discipline,
as one of the founding texts of the field. Coupled with Hans Morgenthau’s
(1948) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace published
a decade later on the other side of the Atlantic, these texts are the core of the so
called realist interpretations of international politics. Supposedly these analy-
ses debunk the naïve hopes of idealists that international cooperation, peaceful
norms and global institutions can provide material security for citizens and
states. Power in the form of military and economic capabilities is the ultimate
arbiter, and security must be sought in these terms.
These canonical disciplinary statements about the fate of humanity sug-
gested that we are always in danger of conflict. Power promised peace but
frequently led to conflict; this is the tragedy of the human condition that can
at best be managed to minimize the damage, but never entirely eliminated as
the ontological condition of human being. How then, these thinkers pondered,
might security be achieved in a world of rival powers and mutual suspicion,
plagued by politicians seeking for primacy first and foremost, and in the
process creating security dilemmas (Herz 1950)? What role might interna-
tional agreements and organizations play, and how might peace be maintained
as some states grow in strength and ambition while others fall into decline?
All of which became much more complicated in 1945 when American nuclear
weapons destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and threatened to wreak havoc in
future wars (Mandelbaum 1981) or, perhaps, to make future wars unthinkable
precisely because the sheer scale of that likely havoc required cooperation in
the interests of common survival.
The intellectual history of international relations is of course much more
complicated than these simple renditions of realism and idealism that conven-
iently organize matters for undergraduate textbooks (Ashworth 2014). But one

13
14 Rethinking environmental security

key theme that is fundamental to this concerns the questions of war, peace and
the survival of states. Nuclear weapons posed these questions in stark terms.
In the period of the cold war, in Western states security was linked to these
dangers, the sheer destructive power of nuclear weapons demanding attention
from scholars, policy makers and the growing ranks of think tank employees
applying new models of social science to numerous problems of the modern
human condition. In the case of warfare, the irony that the firepower that sup-
posedly provided security had suddenly also become the source of existential
danger presented all sorts of dilemmas encapsulated by the phrasing of the
standoff between the superpower arsenals in the cold war as a matter of mutu-
ally assured destruction. The British journal established as the flagship for the
Institute of International and Strategic Studies in London was for good reason
simply and aptly named Survival.
The dangers of an overabundance of firepower, the ability to incinerate and
radiate large parts of the civilized world, loomed over international politics
throughout the period of the cold war, a four decade long period of dangerous
standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States. Obliteration became
possible in a matter of hours once intercontinental ballistic missiles with
nuclear warheads populated the arsenals of those superpowers. The possibili-
ties of misunderstanding, accident or just bad luck leading to the use of these
weapons preoccupied thinkers on security for much of those four decades,
and shaped the discourse of the discipline that emerged as international rela-
tions, with its core elements focused on “strategic” or “security” studies. This
discourse also functioned as a mode of coordination for policy discussions in
the Western alliance, a mode of knowledge that shaped how it was possible to
think about security, and reinforced American hegemony in the process (Klein
1995).
That the Soviet Union was an expansionist power was mostly taken for
granted in the “West”, and strategies of deterrence to militarily contain its
ambitions were the logical corollary (Leffler 1984). That Soviet planners,
reflecting on the history of the first half of the twentieth century, might assume
that capitalism was inherently war prone, and that in the event of further
hostilities Western powers might yet again invade its territory, and hence they
should plan accordingly, was only rarely taken seriously in Western strategic
thinking (MccGwire 1987). The superpower standoff ended at the end of the
1980s and the Soviet Union dissolved in a relatively peaceful transition in
1991, an eventuality more or less unforeseen by the international relations field
prior to the event. But the lessons that were taken from this event were mostly
articulated in narratives of Western success. Apparently George Kennan’s
long telegram strategy dating from the 1940s (X 1947), advocating a patient
exercise in containment, had paid off; strength and nuclear deterrence were
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 15

vindicated and, as he predicted, the Soviet Union had disintegrated because of

its own internal contradictions.
Subsequent developments have added numerous additional themes to inter-
national relations. The period of superpower détente in the 1970s suggested
that complex interdependence and the international regimes that structured
these arrangements constituted a key theme in understanding geopolitics
and the role of hegemony in maintaining order among states. International
economics too became increasingly important both in terms of development
and international trade theories, and as the cold war gave way to what was
soon named the era of globalization, political economy featured more prom-
inently. Much of this literature took the environmental context within which
the great game of states was played for granted, although the rise of concerns
with global environmental issues, perhaps most obviously the discovery of the
depletion of stratospheric ozone in the 1980s, led to the development of global
environmental politics as a theme in international relations too (Hoffman
2005). But while it has become a thriving subdiscipline, highlighted by papers
in the journal Global Environmental Politics and the MIT Press book series on
the theme, the topic is much less obviously present in the mainstream journals
of the discipline. That said, it is important to note too that climate change is
about much more than what is conventionally understood as environmental
politics (Goldstein 2016). Likewise the global extinction crisis.
Mostly, during the cold war, these concerns with security, weapons, strategy
and geopolitics were studied by men. The gendered dimensions of both the
practice of international politics and how it was studied drove scholars in the
later stages of the cold war to investigate how power works in these modes too
(Cohn 1987). The practices of security were tackled from much more critical
perspectives focused on the ironies that the provision of security so frequently
left people and regimes in states of insecurity. Voices from the Global South,
and marginalized peoples in the North, insisted that the whole edifice of inter-
national relations needed to be decolonized to recognize that the great powers
were edifices of empire and the world order has been shaped profoundly by
the colonization practices of European and subsequently American power.
International relations was, as Stanley Hoffman (1977) asserted, mostly
an American discipline. Extending Klein’s (1995) point, it is not too large
a stretch to suggest that international relations as an intellectual enterprise
effectively is the conceptual infrastructure of the liberal order established by
American power in the cold war period.
The failure to anticipate the rapid peaceful end to the cold war nuclear
standoff remains a black mark on the intellectual trajectory of a discipline that
purports to provide policy advice to all and sundry concerning the appropriate
measures to be taken by states to provide security. Regardless, humanity
survived a very dangerous few decades where the possibilities of nuclear
16 Rethinking environmental security

annihilation had loomed over all policy decisions and the dangers of firepower
in its most concentrated form threatened the end of civilization. However the
lessons that were frequently not learned concerned the dangers of accidental
nuclear war and the narrow escapes in the most dangerous episodes during
the cold war, only most obviously the Cuba crisis in 1962 (Sherwin 2020),
the alerts in 1973 in the October war in the Middle East, and the Able Archer
exercise a decade later in 1983. Assumptions of dominance and the ability to
control events imputed a rationality to the cold war that these episodes suggest
were more about luck.
Rather than recognize these dangers, after the Soviet Union collapsed
American policy makers, in particular, framed the results as a victory for the
West. The reassertion of military capabilities in the first Gulf war, viewed as
an overcoming of the Vietnam Syndrome, where American interventions in
the Global South had been constrained because of the failures to prosecute
the Vietnam intervention to a successful conclusion, led to the use of force
in various places in the 1990s and, after the events of 9/11, a remilitarization
of American security thinking (Bacevich 2013). Where NATO had mostly
been on the defensive, at least in Europe during the cold war, and arguably
successful precisely because it had been (Lieven 2021), initial promises to
Soviet and then Russian leaders as the cold war ended that NATO would not
expand eastward were quickly forgotten. The subsequent accession of Eastern
European states to the alliance eventually fed into renewed confrontation
with Russia as its policy makers feared American encroachment in what they
understood to be their sphere of interest (Toal 2017). While the Warsaw Pact
dissolved, NATO did not. Nuclear deterrence remains as the bedrock doctrine
of Western security; dominance and threats of extreme violence undergird the
political arrangements of international politics.
Lost in this were some of the insights in the 1980s in the Soviet Union “New
Thinking” on security that nuclear weapons were simply too dangerous to use
as the basis of a security strategy (MccGwire 1991). The corollary that inter-
national cooperation and novel security arrangements were needed was swept
aside and realist assumptions of the inevitability of force in human affairs and
the specification of the world as a dangerous place in need of, at least the threat
of, American violence to maintain order were reasserted in the global war on
terror and the subsequent formulations of a rapidly growing Chinese economy
as a threat in need of containment. The geopolitical logic of rivalries continues
to feed into arms races, and the never ending technological innovations by the
military industrial complex that retiring President Eisenhower warned against
in his farewell speech in 1961. Security this obviously isn’t if the safety and
well-being of ordinary citizens in numerous places is what matters, but secu-
rity in terms of maintaining American control of much of the world it just
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 17

might be. Nuclear firepower undergirds this international arrangement. So too

does the widespread use of fossil fuels.

FIREPOWER

But now some decades after the end of the cold war, firepower once again,
in a different form this time, threatens the future survival of contemporary
civilization. This time the dangers of firepower come both directly in some
places in terms of the rising incidence of wildfire, and indirectly from the
byproduct of the routine use of fire, mostly in the form of the combustion of
fossil fuels (Dalby 2018). Climate change is accelerating and destabilizing
many of the ecological and geographical contexts within which contemporary
civilization operates, and in the process endangering people in numerous
places, albeit mostly indirectly. Should contemporary trajectories not change
soon, they are potentially leading to major runaway accelerations as natural
positive feedbacks kick in, and in the worst case scenarios these may lead to
an end of civilization itself, a matter of Collapse in Jared Diamond’s (2005)
terms. In popular literature the question as to whether runaway climate change
might indeed lead to the extinction of our own species has sounded alarm bells,
notably in David Wallace-Wells’ New York Magazine article in 2017 that gar-
nered much attention when he posited the possibility of a future earth rendered
uninhabitable by human actions.
Over the last few decades a large literature has grown on many of these
themes, under the umbrella term “environmental security” from the 1980s
onwards. Recently this has morphed into a focus on climate security more spe-
cifically, and concerns that climate change is a cause of conflict has generated
a series of research projects on the fringes of the international relations disci-
pline. In 2020 this sense of environmental insecurity was suddenly added to by
a focus on other related dangers of biodiversity loss and habitat disruption once
the vulnerability of humans to novel zoonotic diseases was made unavoidably
clear by the COVID-19 pandemic. The palpable failures of security planning
on the part of many states to render their populations safe from the dangers of
disease highlight the vulnerabilities of people to dangers in an interconnected
world (Dalby 2020a, 2022). The policy debate about how to rebuild disrupted
economies after the pandemic has subsided has once again linked environ-
mental matters with development thinking, and highlighted both the 2015
adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the subsequent
Paris Agreement on Climate Change (Falkner 2016). Now climate security
looms as an overarching threat to the future of civilization even though the
core themes of the international relations discipline have been slow to engage
these dangers.
18 Rethinking environmental security

The argument in what follows in the rest of this book takes these points
about the failure of firepower to provide the security that its technological
innovations so frequently promised and uses them to rethink the context for
both security studies and the practical application of its modes of thought to
policy making in the international system. The focus now on environment,
climate, habitat disruption, ocean acidification and related matters requires
a rethink of the contextual assumptions that underlie international relations.
The historical analogies with previous episodes are far from exact replications
of present circumstances, but the argument in what follows suggests that there
are enough commonalties to offer a novel way of thinking about both environ-
ment and security.
Especially in the case of climate change, increasingly rapid changes are
already happening, and while many militaries, including the American one, are
well aware of the likely consequences, the warnings about rapid destabilizing
change that they have been issuing since the middle of the 2000s are only
beginning, as of 2021, to penetrate either the corporate boardrooms of major
finance and investment institutions or the political forums where major deci-
sions are made about industrial and energy policy. In the years since the Paris
Agreement on Climate Change in 2015 this has begun to change, but the over-
arching “extractivist” assumptions of an external world to be used to provide
resources for ever larger modes of economic activity, and as a repository for its
wastes, have yet to effectively grapple with the insights of earth system science
which make it clear that the earth is a much more dynamic and fragile system
than the hegemonic modern assumptions of it as a taken for granted substrate
for human actions have long assumed (Rockström and Gaffney 2021).
The implicit assumption of a quiescent earth that underlies modernity’s
quest for security is no longer tenable, but planetary social thought is relatively
novel, and as yet not integrated into the much more profound rethinking that
is urgently needed in the new circumstances of the Anthropocene (Clark and
Szerszynski 2021). In historical perspective this is ironic given that one of the
key events in European history that set in motion some fundamental recon-
siderations of the human condition, and freed much critical thinking from the
formerly theological frameworks, was the huge Lisbon earthquake of 1755.
This disaster forced a fundamental reconsideration of the role of natural events
in the human condition, and as Carol Dumaine (2021) notes in her arguments
for a similar dramatic reconsideration of the modes of security thinking in light
of the COVID-19 pandemic, now once again catastrophe should stimulate
a reconsideration of the practical conditions for both human safety and state
survival. Whatever the earth may be, it is not quiescent.
At the heart of these issues are some fundamental themes about the human
condition, and crucially how scholars and policy makers think about the human
context, many of these themes being related to the ambiguities implicit in the
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 19

human appropriation of firepower in quests for security. Like the sorcerer’s

apprentice, some sections of humanity have gained a partial ability to control
the powerful forces of combustion, but lack of foresight and limited skill have
unloosed these forces in ways that may yet lead to our immolation. Avoiding
that fate is now the necessary task in rethinking environmental security. No
longer can assumptions of environment as a stable backdrop to human affairs
be used as the basis of international relations thinking (Dalby 2020b); the
novel material circumstances of what is now called the Anthropocene require
new modes of thought about security and international politics.
The surface of the earth has long been convulsed by earthquakes, volcanoes
and the occasional meteor strike. The climate has flipped rapidly from one
configuration to another in the past, especially in the highly changeable period
immediately prior to the remarkably stable one, the Holocene in geological
science parlance, of the last twelve thousand years. What is new in all this, cap-
tured in the term Anthropocene, the age of humans, is that the scale of human
activity is now, in its consequences for how the earth system operates, akin
to the celestial mechanics that have until recently determined the climate’s
configuration (Lewis and Maslin 2018). Now humanity, and its proclivity for
burning things, has taken on the role of deciding the future configuration of the
climate. In fire historian Steven Pyne’s (2021) terms, we have shed the ice ages
and are now in the fire age, what he suggests we call the Pyrocene.
These new circumstances require rethinking many things, including the
relationship between fire and security. But to formulate these new modes of
thought requires an understanding of both the implicit assumptions in the tra-
ditional modes and the contradictions that have made security both an essential
concept in modern modes of political conduct and one that simultaneously
encompasses the dilemmas that comprise contemporary geopolitics and sup-
posedly offers the ultimate political desideratum, safety from many dangers.

SECURITY AND ITS DILEMMAS

In a world divided into multiple states, which are the entities that supposedly
provide security but find themselves in rivalries with each other, preparing
to protect one’s own state from rivals, whose capabilities and intentions are
obscure, is always in danger of causing suspicion among rivals, and responses
in turn to build further capabilities. The dilemma lies in that in preparing to
protect oneself one triggers responses elsewhere (Herz 1950). This in turn
appears threatening and hence requires further preparations which in turn
confirm in the minds of potential antagonists that you are dangerous and
need to be countered. Rivalry among polities can frequently give rise to this
dynamic, and a history of prior conflict can feed resentment on the part of
losers and a desire to redress the losses imposed by a previous peace settle-
20 Rethinking environmental security

ment. So too the obvious political utility of having an antagonist to both blame
for difficulties and mobilize against in a crisis can aggravate these dynamics.
In the twentieth century in particular, security dilemmas were tied into
the rapid pace of technical innovation (Buzan 1991). In the decade prior to
the First World War the naval arms race between Germany and Britain was
accelerated by the arrival of the new Dreadnought class battleships, and the
emergence of long range submarines as a novel mode of naval action. The
emergence of tanks changed how land warfare was to be fought and the swift
introduction of air forces and tactical innovations in their use led to a rapid
extension of the speed, range and capabilities of airplanes. In the aftermath of
the Second World War the extension of air power, nuclear weapons, missiles
capable of intercontinental ranges and nuclear powered submarines that could
remain submerged for weeks accelerated the capabilities of military forces and
in each case forced the development of countermeasures in a constant ratch-
eting up of firepower in new configurations. Fear of “the other side” getting
an overwhelming advantage because of a technological innovation drove this
arms race in a perpetual escalation that could never accomplish a state of secu-
rity in terms of a permanent decisive advantage.
The temptations to pre-empt in a situation where a rival is growing in
power and the opportunity for a military attempt to stop their ascendance
may be limited in time also apply in these situations of rivalry. Realist schol-
arship usually refers to Thucydides in these situations, and to his account
of the fear evoked in Sparta by the growing power of Athens as a cause of
the Peloponnesian war. This argument has been reworked in recent years by
American scholars wondering about the implications of China’s recent growth,
and the challenge that presents to America’s hegemony (Allison 2017). In
a world of rapid technological change and scientific innovation, not only is
the number of weapons and potential combatants an issue, but the changing
capabilities of the weapons—their range, destructive power, accuracy and
control systems—also plays on fears that “the other side” may gain a decisive
technological advantage.
Assumptions of the role of states in these arrangements also draw on a theme
highlighted by Thomas Hobbes where the ruler of a state has an implicit, and
sometimes fairly explicit, obligation to provide safety for subjects as the price
of their loyalty. The provision of order internally is connected to the need to
prepare to defend the realm too, although modern states have usually nuanced
this arrangement so that policing is a matter of domestic security within
boundaries and military preparations and actions are concerned with external
threats and the dangers of the use of armed force in the case of an insurrection.
These divisions are never absolute, and subversion, espionage and interference
in the internal affairs of one state by another, or by international non-state
actors, have blurred these distinctions frequently. But nonetheless the basic
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 21

assumptions of liberal order are of independent states where citizens look to

their own affairs, a matter of territorial sovereignty in which freedom resides
within states (Jackson 2000).
In addition to this basic set of geographical arrangements at the heart of the
formal thinking about security there are multiple international relationships,
alliances, treaties and informal rules of the road for militaries and diplomats.
The United Nations in theory at least provides an overarching structure to all
this and a forum to prevent conflict, or attenuate it should it occur. Implicit
in the United Nations system is the clear understanding that aggressive war
is illegal, and that while national defence is permitted, the use of other forms
of military action is not unless it is authorized by the United Nations, and the
Security Council in particular. As a measure to facilitate conflict resolution,
and provide a face saving invocation of authority greater than that of a state
ruler, it has considerable utility, even if, as so often is the case, these rules are
circumvented. That said it is noteworthy that the decision making body in the
United Nations is called the Security Council and not the Peace Council and
the permanent members of the body that have a veto over its decisions are the
five major nuclear weapons states.
But there is much more to these notions of security than these ideal case
formulations encompass. The history of nation states is relatively recent, and
many states, those specified in many textbooks as great powers, are much
more obviously empires than something resembling a clear national popu-
lation living on a discrete territory. Powerful states project power far from
their boundaries, and navies in particular often range far afield, while military
interventions abroad and the stationing of troops in both hostile territory and
allied countries happens in numerous complex arrangements. In Barry Buzan
and Ole Wæver’s (2003) terms there are numerous geographical “security
complexes” in the current world system, with overlays of force projection by
larger powers over smaller ones providing forms of political order, or at least
enforcing tacit arrangements in particular places. Clearly the cold war liberal
order in parts of the world, and its extension to much of the rest of the world
in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, has long been undergirded
by series of military arrangements that provide a form of order, if not security,
in many parts of the world (Latham 1997).
While this might be understood as an overarching imperial order, these inter-
secting security complexes are in many places fraught and at best only tem-
porarily stable. This order, which makes simple assumptions of autonomous
territorial states as the basis of the system untenable, has been underpinned by
American military might since the end of the Second World War. This is the
only organized military force capable of operating around the globe. Matters
are confused when this is understood, as it usually is in the United States, as
a matter of American “national security”. The origins of this formulation come
22 Rethinking environmental security

from the 1940s, and while American forces were involved in fighting the Axis
powers, American planners were thinking about the future world order and
how to shape it so that no obvious future contender for world power could
endanger American security once again as the Japanese had done in 1941
(Leffler 1984). To prevent the emergence of a peer competitor it seemed an
American military presence and a series of alliances in Asia and Europe would
be needed along with a system of bases to rapidly move American air power,
in particular to distant places.
With this went the need for much more detailed information about the states
and societies in these regions as well as the economic resources to be found
around the world which might be put to use by American corporations anxious
to expand their reach after the war. Likewise those planners thinking about the
political order for the post war years were anxious to ensure that the disastrous
economic downturns of the great depression, part of the cause of the rise of
Nazi power in Europe, didn’t recur. The Bretton Woods system of interna-
tional financial arrangements likewise was constructed as the basis of a trading
order, and one with international arrangements in terms of the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund dominated by American interests to oversee
financial stability among members of that nascent liberal order. In Panitch and
Gindin’s (2012) terms these arrangements made the world safe for capitalism
and in the process enhanced the power of American business in that world.
Underpinning this system, although frequently simply taken for granted,
was the growing importance of petroleum as the energy source to keep
everything moving (Yergin 2011). The rapid mobilization of the American
and to a lesser extent the Canadian economies in the Second World War to
provide huge amounts of war material, and vast numbers of vehicles and air-
planes, changed the transportation systems and gave rise to modern logistics,
tying trading and technology together in new long distance relationships. The
subsequent post war rise of American style consumer societies, and the rapid
spread of the necessary technology and the ubiquitous and iconic symbol of
that lifestyle, the individually owned automobile, was mostly fueled by gaso-
line. Subsequently earth system science has dubbed this period the beginning
of the great acceleration (McNeill and Engelke 2016), a doubly apt designation
given the speed of economic expansion based on this new mode of individual
locomotion. To keep it all moving petroleum supplies had to be secured, and
as later chapters will explain in more detail, this was to have profound geo-
political effects. American national security was tied into the global political
economy of petroleum in numerous important matters, and subsequently into
military adventures in the Middle East.
One other crucial innovation matters in this period. As the Second World
War ended and confrontations with the Soviet Union morphed into what was
soon called the cold war, American military planners realized that they needed
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 23

to know much more about what was now a global arena of potential conflict.
Submarine warfare in both the Atlantic and the Pacific had extended the range
of naval operations. Likewise the rapid expansion of the American Air Force
and its new global system of bases raised questions of global weather patterns,
and the finer points of atmospheric conditions for long range aircraft. The
advent of nuclear weapons also raised matters of global geophysics, and as
nuclear testing in the atmosphere revealed the interconnected nature of the
atmosphere, with radioactive fallout being tracked round the globe (Masco
2015), as well as the importance of the ozone layer and the potential of the
ionosphere for radio communications, scientific enquiry into the atmosphere
and hydrosphere rapidly expanded as the military tried to learn as much as it
could about its new arenas of operation. In scientific terms all this led to an
emergent sense of globality, of the world as a series of interconnected realms
(van Munster and Sylvest 2016).
The possibilities of using those environments as part of their combat oper-
ations, and of weaponizing natural systems, as well as learning to fight in
extreme environments, was all part of the expansion of these new agendas,
and an integral part of American cold war culture with its fascination with
technology and futuristic visions (Farish 2010). Large scale weather modi-
fication possibilities and thinking through the use of nuclear explosives for
massive engineering operations were part of this research agenda. The advent
of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the use of orbital satellites for mili-
tary reconnaissance extended further both the capabilities for understanding
the earth system and the abilities to monitor changes. Computation and the
development of digital data collection and processing capabilities fed into all
this too, linking sensors and modelling together intimately (Edwards 2010).
Weather satellites are now taken for granted and the use of their data in climate
modelling is a key part of contemporary science, but all this has its origins
in cold war research and these connections are morphing once again in the
contemporary discussions of the possibilities of geoengineering technologies
as a mode of dealing with rapidly accelerating climate change (Surprise 2020).
The apotheosis of this expansion of American military reach happened in
the aftermath of the events of 9/11 when a global war on terror was launched
by the Bush administration. In parallel the combatant commands map was once
again updated, this time to include Antarctica so that the whole earth system
was now incorporated into the remit of American military operations. Crucial
to all this is the ability to surveil distant places as a potential preliminary to
military action. The whole world is potentially a battle space, one that in the
planning documents of the US military distinguishes geographical regions
partly in terms of their distance from the homeland, with the assumption in the
war on terror that peripheral locations and failed states were the primary source
of potential danger (Dalby 2009a). That has more recently given way to higher
24 Rethinking environmental security

priority being paid to China and Russia as potential military antagonists, but
these mappings of danger, and the implicit assumption that the environment is
an external entity to be monitored, technologically dominated and controlled
in the extension of military power to provide “security” to the American home-
land, constitute a powerful and persistent set of epistemological practices.
These modes of knowing the world have also shaped how climate change came
to be a matter of concern too (Allan 2017), and they now shape much of the
discussion about environmental security.

NUCLEAR REALISM

In parallel with the expansion of American power and the extension of its
reach into all parts of the world and into orbital space too, numerous critics
were alarmed by the scale of the weapons systems and the cavalier attitude to
nuclear risks. As the arsenals rapidly increased in the 1950s, alarm about the
dangers of nuclear technologies and weapons in particular accelerated. The
British too built nuclear weapons and in the process generated a reaction most
notably in the form of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament with its annual
protest walks to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston
and its campaign to “ban the bomb” with its iconic peace symbol.
Nuclear anxiety arose both from the immediate dangers of warfare and
from the numerous above ground tests of nuclear devices that the superpowers
conducted in the 1950s. The enormous destructive power of the thermonuclear
weapons, the largest of which dwarfed the destructive capabilities of the
bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raised alarms. If even a small part
of the rapidly growing arsenals were to be used in a war, then the destruction
would obviously be so large and the indirect disruption of economies and
societies so widespread that the successful continuation of these economies
and societies was highly doubtful. The destruction of Pacific atolls used as
testing grounds and the suffering of the local residents forcefully removed and
subjected to radioactive fallout downwind of the explosions foreshadowed
a much larger series of potential future catastrophes (Masco 2015). They also
emphasized the fate of indigenous peoples whose islands have been occupied
by foreign military power in the Pacific just as national independence move-
ments were dismantling the former European empires in Asia and Africa.
Fears of nuclear fallout and the illnesses from radiation and cancers were
encapsulated in popular culture in various mediums, from Godzilla to Nevil
Shute’s ruminations about the last surviving humans after a nuclear war in his
novel On the Beach.
With the emergence of intercontinental missiles and submarine based
missile systems, as well as long range bombers, a situation of mutually assured
destruction ensued. While nuclear strategists argued over the finer points of
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 25

how these systems might be used, and conflicts in some sense won, more level
headed commentators realized that this wasn’t war as traditionally understood
but something akin to a doomsday situation. Mutually assured destruction
wasn’t security in any meaningful sense, however many theorists of deterrence
argued that the threat actually maintained something called peace. Intellectual
notables in the 1950s including Lewis Mumford, Albert Einstein and Bertrand
Russell argued against the deployment of nuclear devices, suggesting that
their enormous firepower was simply too great to be gambled with given the
destruction that would result should they actually be used (van Munster and
Sylvest 2014). The possibilities of error and assumptions of rational control
of the weapons should hostilities commence were, they argued, such that it
simply wasn’t realistic to gamble with these systems. Hence another form of
realism, one which demanded that security for all humans be supplied in the
form of disarmament so that no combination of accident and miscalculation,
much less deliberate aggression, could endanger the survival of humanity.
The sense of an endangered world, due to the enormous potential destruc-
tive power of this novel technology, shaped much of the discussion about
global affairs, at least in NATO countries including the United States. As
noted above, Soviet thinking, influenced by Leninist formulations, was very
concerned about the inherent tendencies to expansion, crisis and conflict that
plagued capitalist states and their empires in the first half of the twentieth
century. The Soviets were mostly concerned with their own survival, and
maintaining some form of socialism should another major war eventuate, and
built weapons systems designed so that they would not lose a war should it
happen (MccGwire 1991). This involved plans to capture Western Europe
to prevent an American beachhead on the continent, but those plans looked
immensely threatening when viewed from Washington.
Thus misperception and the security dilemma raised the stakes in the cold
war standoff until the reappraisal of Soviet thinking in the 1980s. Then Soviet
“New Thinking” revised the Leninist interpretation of long term historical tra-
jectories and concluded that a political rapprochement with the United States
was possible in a world where the contradictions of global capitalism didn’t
necessarily any longer presage inevitable wars. Subsequently the dissolution
of the Soviet Union obscured the fact that this was what had happened. Instead
many American interpretations invoked a triumphalist narrative of victory.
This in turn then vindicated the continuation of the American search for
technological dominance in strategic affairs and perpetuated the implicit geo-
political assumptions of external dangers to a supposedly peaceful American
order (Bacevich 2010).
Part of the Soviet New Thinking in the 1980s included a focus on environ-
ment and the need to take it seriously as part of the larger ambit of security.
These ideas were introduced in the United Nations in 1987 and reiterated in
26 Rethinking environmental security

international discussions (Timoshenko 1992). In part this too was related to the
Soviet reconsiderations of global geopolitics. The explosion of the Chernobyl
reactor in 1986 emphasized the vulnerabilities of contemporary nuclear tech-
nologies. A military strategy involving attempts to occupy Western Europe,
something that could not be contemplated without major combat operations in
a region that is home to hundreds of reactors, looked increasingly dangerous.
It was hard to imagine a war scenario in Europe that left most of the reactors
intact and, given prevailing wind patterns, the radioactive consequences of
meltdowns and explosions would be carried over the western Soviet Union.
This added another link between traditional military concerns and a growing
awareness of environmental dangers.
Given the appalling environmental record of the Soviet Union in previous
decades and its frequently cavalier attitude to pollution, radiation and environ-
mental degradation (see Komarov 1980 for a widely circulated exposé, and
Feshbach and Friendly 1992), it was easy for Western thinkers to dismiss these
newfound concerns with environmental security as being at best disingenuous
or at worst deliberately deceptive. What was not easy to see, given the ideo-
logical filters through which all Soviet actions were viewed in the cold war
(Cohen 1985), was the possibility that precisely because of this awful record,
a new generation of policy makers might think it necessary to come to terms
with this legacy and attempt to rethink security and development in ways that
precluded further destruction. The link to the rethinking of Soviet strategy was
also occluded given that the Leninist premises in traditional Soviet thinking
were not widely understood among Western analysts. Because of this the
Soviet assumption that occupying Western Europe was a necessary military
step to prevent the defeat of the Soviet Union in a war caused by Western
dynamics wasn’t likely to be considered either. But read this way the introduc-
tion of concerns about environmental security by the Gorbachev administra-
tion in the 1980s makes logical sense as part of their “New Thinking”.
On the other side of the cold war divide in the 1980s there were revived
concerns with themes that had preoccupied Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein
and Lewis Mumford, of technology run amok and the consequent dangers to
all of humanity of trying to live with and manage nuclear arsenals. Given the
fractious nature of twentieth century politics the realistic policy was to get
rid of nuclear weapons. But in the late 1970s, as the cold war became more
confrontational and arsenals were enhanced by new missile systems, including
the SS-20 intermediate range weapons of the Soviet Union and the Pershing
2 and new cruise missiles of the United States, in the European theatre peace
activists once again focused on the immense potential destruction of these
weapons and the dangers of hair trigger alerts, errors and misunderstandings
(Johnstone 1984).
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 27

Notable among the prominent voices was Edward Thompson, who penned
numerous essays pointing out the dangers of nuclear weapons and the com-
pletely inadequate efforts to prepare for the worst in terms of civil defence.
His rejoinder to British government programs to “protect and survive” was
titled “protest and survive” (Thompson 1980). In a more theoretical mode he
analyzed the nuclear arms race and its escalation in Europe in the late 1970s
in terms of a logic of exterminism, a term that highlighted the dangers of strat-
egies of nuclear deterrence that ultimately presented themselves as mutually
assured destruction (Thompson 1982). Isomorphic replication, in Thompson’s
(1982) terms, led to the ever larger production of military means of extermina-
tion, based on ever larger and more sophisticated modes of firepower. The geo-
political division of Europe effectively made all Europeans insecure given the
dangers of warfare using these huge arsenals, and the political program of the
European Nuclear Disarmament movement, debated at length in the pages of
its eponymous journal in the 1980s, explicitly focused on dealignment (Dalby
1991), removing both the superpower forces from the continent and eliminat-
ing some of the potential causes of accidental nuclear war in the process.

BEYOND REALISM, EXTENDING SECURITY

The formulations of firepower as the ultimate arbiter in human affairs have

thus never been unchallenged. Attempts to manage the superpower relation-
ship and prevent accidental warfare due to miscalculation or misadventure
followed from the Cuban missile crisis (Blight and Lang 2018). The “hotline”
modes of communication between Moscow and Washington were designed to
allow rapid communication to prevent conflicts escalating. Détente followed
in the 1970s as both superpowers had accumulated massive nuclear arsenals
and the standoff of earlier years had settled into a stalemate. Arms control
agreements followed this, and if they didn’t quite stabilize the arsenals and the
delivery systems for the weapons, they shaped their numbers and capabilities.
National technical means of surveillance were institutionalized as a mode of
inspection to ensure that both sides were abiding by the agreements. But in the
early 1980s tensions rose and proxy conflict was extended into Afghanistan.
The logic of exterminism once again raised the danger of conflict by misad-
venture as the Soviet fears that the 1983 NATO exercise Able Archer was
a dress rehearsal for a nuclear assault on the Soviet Union showed all too
clearly in retrospect.
Simultaneously various efforts were made both to extend notions of détente
and to rethink security concepts and their policy applications. A United
Nations document in 1986 identified eight concepts of security that were in
use in various contexts, suggesting that numerous innovations were being
considered (Report of the Secretary-General 1986). The eighth concept is one
28 Rethinking environmental security

of common security formulated by the Palme Commission in the early 1980s

focusing on the common vulnerabilities of all states in the case of a nuclear
war, and making the case for disarmament as the logical policy to deal with
shared vulnerabilities (Independent Commission on Disarmament Issues and
Security 1982). The commission, although not providing any detailed analysis,
enlarged the compass of threats to security to include mention of resource
shortages and environmental degradation in addition to the dangers of both
conventional and nuclear arms races.
Simultaneously, in the United States the notion of national security was
under increasing scrutiny by scholars concerned about its narrow focus on
military matters and the neglect of political and diplomatic modes of thinking
and conduct. Richard Ullman (1983, 133) offered the following suggestion:

A more useful (although certainly not conventional) definition might be: a threat to
national security is an action or sequence of events that (1) threatens drastically and
over a relatively brief span of time to degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of
a state, or (2) threatens significantly to narrow the range of policy choices available
to the government of a state or to private, nongovernmental entities (persons, groups
corporations) within the state.

This is clearly a much more nuanced definition, and one starkly at odds with
the expansive view of what constituted the conventional American cold war
view, with its focus on global matters and its concerns with military power.
Crucially, nonetheless, this focus on national security is about responding to
threats, and implicitly a situation in which external actions impinge on a sup-
posedly autonomous state. What is not here is an engagement with potential
antagonists, who are to be secured against. Security is, as Mick Dillon (1996)
put it, about modern thought as metaphysics. In contrast understanding things
in terms of tragedy, rather than metaphysics, focusing on the failures to con-
sider the consequence of actions on others, and to understand how others see
us, assuming conflict rather than compassion and engagement, suggests very
different political possibilities. Likewise, for those who insist that nature, and
human nature too, is intrinsically competitive, and that force is the ultimate
arbiter, tragedy is unavoidable, and all one can do is prepare for the worst.
For those who believe it is possible to use reason to avoid this fate, security is
rather different, but it requires politics and discussions about how to coexist,
not the use of force to impose one’s will on others who may have other desires.
Crude forms of realism simply assume that what is must be protected, thus
has it always been in human affairs and that nothing else is possible, and if
violence is the ultimate arbiter in human affairs, that is a matter of unavoidable
tragedy. The rules of the game are given; only how well you play it matters.
In a world of large nuclear arsenals this is, the nuclear realists would argue,
suicidal, given that errors and accidents are inevitable. What then is security?
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 29

Force clearly arbitrates many things, but in a world of nuclear firepower it

ultimately endangers both humans and the ecosystems they inhabit.
These dilemmas were especially clearly spelled out in the 1980s as the reac-
tion to the second cold war highlighted the impossibilities of massive destruc-
tion providing any meaningful condition of security. The rearticulation of who
was in need of security and how it might be provided generated a substantial
discussion of human security focused on the various dangers faced by people
in the world of states and nuclear weapons. But in doing so the discussion of
human security adumbrated so many sources of danger and vulnerability as to
make it very difficult to formulate any clear policy for its application. The cod-
ification of human security in the widely cited United Nations Development
Report of 1994 included environmental threats to human well-being, and
emphasized that such threats were mostly the unintended consequences of eco-
nomic and social activities, not the deliberate actions of overtly hostile entities.
In such circumstances both the sources of insecurity and their counter, by
some agent or policy, stretched the formulation of security so far as to render it
effectively inchoate, and to so muddy the waters in terms of who was responsi-
ble for its provision that while it provided a focus for much political and policy
discourse it offered anything but clarity. Emma Rothschild summarized the
1990s discussion as involving four extensions.

In the first, the concept of security is extended from the security of nations to the
security of groups and individuals: it is extended downwards from nations to indi-
viduals. In the second, it is extended from the security of nations to the security of
the international system, or of a supranational physical environment: it is extended
upwards, from the nation to the biosphere. The extension, in both cases, is in the
sorts of entities whose security is to be ensured. (1995, 55)

This involves expanding the scope of security in many new ways, well beyond
either the traditional liberalism relating security to social order, and the order
of property in particular, or the larger international concerns with state secu-
rity and the collective security of alliances that classical realism emphasized.
Third, Rothschild suggested that

… the concept of security is extended horizontally, or to the sorts of security that are
in question. Different entities (such as individuals, nations, and “systems”) cannot
be expected to be secure or insecure in the same way; the concept of security is
extended, therefore, from military to political, economic, social, environmental, or
“human” security. (1995, 55)
30 Rethinking environmental security

Given these multiple extensions, clearly states alone are no longer the sole
repositories of institutions to provide security. Hence fourth,

… the political responsibility for ensuring security (or for invigilating all these
“concepts of security”) is itself extended: it is diffused in all directions from national
states, including upwards to international institutions, downwards to regional
or local government, and sideways to nongovernmental organizations, to public
opinion and the press, and to the abstract forces of nature or of the market. (1995,
55)

This is clearly a term with a broad scope, one that suggests that states alone are
not the sole arbiters of security, nor their sole providers. If security is a widely
accepted political desideratum then the question of priorities inevitably arises,
once again making security an essentially contested term at the heart of much
political discourse.
A crucial further twist to this series of arguments came in attempting to
define who had the obligation to provide for security. In the subsequent
discussions the principle of the responsibility to protect emerged and was
widely acceded to in the United Nations system (International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001). A corollary to the traditional
Hobbesian notion of a social contract between ruler and subjects where loyalty
is traded for security, in a system of supposedly autonomous sovereignties,
came in the form of a responsibility to protect wherein membership in the
international system was deemed to be contingent upon the state providing
for the safety of its members. Failure in this provision was then linked to
a requirement for the international community to intervene should the rulers of
a member state prove unwilling or unable to prevent genocide, crimes against
humanity and related atrocities against their country’s residents.
The subsequent invocation of this principle to justify intervention in sup-
porting Libyan insurgents in their attempt to overthrow the Gaddafi regime
there, and the intervention’s spectacular failure to provide protection for
much of the Libyan population, has thrown this notion into disrepute, but
the attempt to reorder the responsibilities of both states and the international
system is nonetheless an additional extension of the traditional formulations
of security that matters, not least because it points to the obligations of states
to act in terms of collective benefits beyond the United Nations notions of
collective defence. As to whether this principle can or should be extended to
the global environment, and how that is now reimagined in light of the current
biodiversity and climate crises, is one of the key ongoing issues in rethinking
environmental security.
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 31

SECURITIZATION, ONTOLOGY AND SURVIVAL

A related question then is who can effectively posit things as a matter of secu-
rity. While entities may be in need of protection, who can do the protecting,
and against what supposed, or real, threat, is a matter of politics. While numer-
ous fears and threats to identity may be in circulation, in so far as security is
a matter primarily for states, then which threats are accepted as a matter of pri-
ority for states to protect against is a profoundly political question. Thus in the
aftermath of the cold war and in light of the numerous extensions to the security
concept that appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde
(1998) offered “A New Framework for Analysis of Security”. They suggested
that only some political arguments about threats became state policy, and that
the processes whereby matters become security concerns, the process of secu-
ritization, required the clear articulation of a threat to some specified identity,
that is, a referent object that is threatened, an audience willing to accept this
specification of affairs, and shifts in state policy to address the threat. Mostly
these threats are understood as having external sources, although, as was the
case throughout much of the cold war, external threats are frequently linked to
fears of internal subversion.
This focus on securitization links loosely to additional innovations in more
recent security studies focusing on this question of what entity needs to be
secured. In this line of thinking, what it is that needs to be secured is a matter
of ontological security (Mitzen 2006), invoking entities, and more specifically
political identities, that need to be defended from external threat. Nationalist
rhetoric obviously works effectively here, invoking a community that is both
unique and endangered from outside. So called populist politicians have of
late used this rhetorical strategy to bolster support and done so by constructing
threats to an imagined but often nostalgic invocation of a national community.
What is much harder to do is to think about the implicit threat that one’s own
identity and practices of securing it might present and how this would endan-
ger others. Ethnocentrism has long bedeviled strategic thinking (Booth 1979).
As noted above, this failure of insight into the key assumptions being made on
the other side of the cold war divide was one of the things that made this period
of history so dangerous. Understanding the modes of thought that potential
antagonists are using is a key to international cooperation, and to negotiating
agreements. Reassurance that hostile intent is not part of the security calcula-
tion is a key to dealing with the security dilemma. This requires acting in ways
that don’t raise concerns among others who have no good reason to believe the
claims of benign intent used in shoring up self-identity.
Changing the overarching narratives of ontological security is a fraught
political matter (Subotic 2016), frequently requiring nimble political maneu-
32 Rethinking environmental security

vering and successful rearticulation of parts of a national identity. This has

been done in cases of major political realignments, as in the end of the cold
war, but also in terms of finding resolutions to longstanding conflicts and
resolving political tensions. These rearticulations are also a necessary part
of creating the conditions required for quality peace, and ensuring that in the
aftermath of a conflict the conditions that caused it in the first place do not
recur and reactivate it (Wallensteen 2015). But as the Brexit case has also
demonstrated, nostalgic populist formulations with implicit assumptions of
autonomy as a political desideratum persist too (Agnew 2020), something that
fits with “fortress” formulations of security that are frequently much less than
helpful with environmental issues (White 2014). Once again distant phenom-
ena are portrayed as a threat to Western order while downplaying the conse-
quences of that order for those places. As much of the rest of this book points
out, the causes of environmental insecurity now lie in the massive use of fossil
fuels, not in supposedly stingy natures on the periphery of the global economy.
In John Herz’s (1950, 157) phrasing, his original formulation of the security
dilemma wasn’t about biology: “The condition that concerns us here is not
a biological or anthropological but a social one.” But now the argument in this
book suggests that humanity faces a new security dilemma, one also brought
about as an indirect result of the ever larger use of firepower in the broader
sense. More specifically the argument in what follows in the rest of this
volume suggests that, whereas traditional notions of a security dilemma were
concerned with the actions of potential antagonists, and that the source of the
dilemma lay in social arrangements, firepower, understood in its broader sense
involving combustion and its use as a key mode of power in human affairs,
is now endangering numerous communities because of its geophysical con-
sequences. This isn’t a matter of social actions, nor strictly biology in Herz’s
terms. It is a matter of geophysics, of actions having indirect consequences,
and the formulation of security in terms of attempts to shape supposedly
external contexts in ways that are endangering precisely what is supposedly
being secured. Hence an extended notion of the security dilemma structures
the argument that follows in the rest of this volume.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?

All these complicated themes raise the key question as to whether this larger
discussion of the fate of humanity is really a topic suitable for a discipline,
or subdiscipline, called international relations at all? If one takes the term
literally, always accepting the implicit fudge in substituting nation for state,
then the topic is about the relationships between states, not about the larger
questions of planetary habitability for our species. And yet the rapid rise of
the international relations discipline during the cold war, and security studies
 Realism, firepower and insecurity 33

as its central focus, was driven by a concern for the survival of major states in
a system endangered by the prospect of nuclear warfare. Nuclear war posited
the possibility of the destruction of civilization itself; climate change, ocean
acidification and the extinction crisis also now threaten the same fate unless
firepower in its more general sense is reined in soon.
After the initial cold war and during the period of 1970s détente, when
nuclear warfare seemed much less of a threat, the discipline turned its atten-
tion to regimes, governance and the functioning of an increasingly integrated
global economy. So while the key foci of the discipline over the last few
generations has been on issues of conflict, governance and economy, it is fair
to say that these intellectual engagements are not far off the central questions
of survival for at least civilization, if not humanity in some form. But what
has been relatively neglected in both the security studies literature of the cold
war and the globalization literature subsequently is the material context of this
civilization; mostly it has been taken for granted. As with economics which has
taken a relatively stable climate and cheap energy as a given context, so too has
much of international relations (Albert 2020).
What is new now in the third decade of the third millennium is the growing
realization that this assumption of a stable backdrop for humanity is no longer
tenable as a premise. Gradually through the cold war period, as the dangers of
nuclear fallout percolated into many cultures, and then other forms of pollution
as well as ongoing famines in some parts of the world, apparently related to
the rapid growth of population, questions about the global environment as
such emerged. They provided the tentative beginnings of an understanding of
the planetary context as much more vulnerable than had been assumed, and
challenged the modern dichotomies of humanity and nature too. Now the new
thinking of Planetary Social Thought (Clark and Szerszynski 2021) requires
engaging with earth system science and Breaking Boundaries (Rockström and
Gaffney 2021) in the sense of transcending divisions between disciplines too.
Given international relations’ concerns with security and survival, clearly it
needs to rethink many things in grappling with the current crisis, one that is to
a substantial extent a result of previous efforts to provide security, based on
firepower in both its senses.
2. Sustainable development/
environmental insecurity

ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY

Stories of disaster, epic struggles and human survival provide foundational

myths for many peoples. Famine frequently stalked our ancestors most of
whom long ago became dependent on agriculture for food supplies, a series
of processes vulnerable to droughts and floods in the short term and climate
variability on the longer timescale related to volcanic activity in particular
(Jenkins 2021). Disease likewise; pandemics are nothing new in human
history, and as the COVID-19 episode has reminded us all again recently,
inept political responses have frequently rendered numerous people insecure.
Assumptions of vulnerability and insecurity are related to narratives of scar-
city, inevitable conflict and the need for leadership to protect some community
or nation. Ontological security, the matter of maintaining a coherent narrative
of a collectivity (Mitzen 2006), weaves these themes together in numerous
political discourses, only most obviously in those of war and struggles against
external antagonists in a dangerous world. Modernity’s promise that the use of
firepower and technology could insulate societies from the vagaries of a fickle
nature is, it turns out, coming back to haunt humanity’s future in the form of
global environmental disruption.
War has long been linked to matters of environmental change too, only
most obviously in European discussions of the fall of the Western Roman
empire caused, Thomas Malthus (1798/1970) asserted, by climate fluctuations
in Asia leading to the western migration of numerous tribes that eventually
overran Roman defences. Similar concerns about food, fodder and climate
limitations have shaped Chinese history in particular too, the rise and fall of
various dynasties being linked to famine and attempts to ameliorate the worst
vagaries of natural fluctuations. This was highlighted in the 1950s by famine
once again striking the Chinese population, largely as a result of the economic
misadventures as part of the great leap forward and the political convulsions
related to misconceived attempts to force very rapid economic transformation
in China’s rural areas in particular.

34
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 35

Many of the themes that show up in contemporary discussions of environ-

mental security have their forerunners in nineteenth century discussions of
resources, pollution and conflict, a point worth remembering in considering
the multiple claims that environmental security is a new concern in global poli-
tics (Hough 2019). The origins of the discourses of contemporary international
relations are tied into industrialization in Europe in the nineteenth century,
even if that part of their history is frequently overlooked (Ashworth 2014). But
it was only in the twentieth century that it became clear that human actions
on a global scale, as opposed to the disruptions of particular empires and
ecosystems in the process of colonization, were part of the causal mechanisms
that induced human insecurity. In the second half of the twentieth century,
themes from earlier discussions of political economy, of Thomas Malthus’s
pessimistic prognostications about the human fate in particular, coalesced
with the larger discussions of international politics and nascent ideas of global
governance to generate a discourse that linked these things together in what
subsequently became known as environmental security.
These themes came together in 1972 against the backdrop of the first
photographs of earth from the Apollo program’s missions to the moon sug-
gesting a fragile planet in an inhospitable solar system. The United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) was held in Stockholm in
June that year. The background report to the conference was simply titled Only
One Earth, reprising the theme so powerfully articulated in the NASA photo-
graphs of the “blue marble” set against a black backdrop (Cosgrove 1994). In
the United States a study with the first computer simulations of the earth as
a single system was published called The Limits to Growth. While there are
numerous precursors to all this, the conjunction of space exploration, computer
modelling, widespread angst about the future and a United Nations conference
on the theme suggests that what became the discourse of environmental secu-
rity can fairly be said to have started in 1972. The origins of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) lie in the 1972 Stockholm conference too.
The term environmental security itself became part of the policy delib-
erations of international politics fifteen years later with the publication of
the World Commission on Environment and Development’s report on Our
Common Future. Commonly called the Brundtland report, after the Norwegian
former prime minister who chaired the commission, Our Common Future
popularized the term sustainable development. But it forcefully argued that
for sustainable development to be successful, conditions of “environmental
insecurity” had to be removed. The argument was neatly circular: sustainable
development could, so the report argued, provide conditions of environmental
security for future generations. These two concepts were essential comple-
ments to each other even if sustainable development was the term that got
most of the attention. It still is getting that priority, as the 2015 United Nations
36 Rethinking environmental security

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight (Dalby, Horton, Mahon and

Thomaz 2019).
Some key works in international relations did grapple with the environment
and resource agenda in the 1970s, but much of the discussion about interna-
tional security remained focused on nuclear warfare and matters of interna-
tional development. These were highlighted in the aftermath of the October
1973 war when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated military assault on
Israeli forces in the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. When the United
States and some European states began resupplying Israeli forces, members
of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC) began suspending
petroleum exports to those states and the price of oil quadrupled. Fuel supply
issues quickly dominated American and European geopolitical discussions,
and the larger discussion of resource constraints to development in general
became entangled with the specifics of oil supply. The knock on effects of the
rapid OPEC increase in petroleum prices both subsequently caused the debt
crisis in many developing countries and partly derailed international efforts
to formulate a new international economic order to deal with global economic
inequalities. But the environmental questions kept returning onto the policy
agendas of major states.

HUMANITY AND NATURE

Clarence Glacken’s (1967) magisterial survey of Western discussions of

humanity and nature poses matters in terms of three questions. First, is the
earth, so obviously a conducive place for humanity, a purposive creation,
a pristine nature into which humanity has subsequently been placed? The
second question is one about how the varied geographic regions of the world
have shaped specific human cultures, with climate and cohabiting species
offering possibilities for societal formation. Third is the matter of how human-
ity, by its cultural actions, agriculture and modes of life, has changed nature.
While the first question is now mostly the preserve of theological discussions,
the supposition of a pristine nature prior to human intervention is very persis-
tent and structures the dominant dichotomy of modernity, one that specifies
humanity as separate, superior and in some senses above nature. While the
second of Glacken’s questions is frequently dismissed, often far too quickly,
as a matter of dubious environmental determinism with numerous racialized
presuppositions dating from the worst excesses of European and subsequently
American colonization, there nonetheless remain many constraints on what
humans can do where.
The third question Glacken (1967) raised, that of how humanity is changing
nature, is now the preoccupation of numerous research efforts. These issues
were, as Ashworth (2021) suggests, major preoccupations of political geogra-
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 37

phers in the 1930s and 1940s, but as he notes, the emergent realist consensus
in international relations in the early years of the atomic age ignored this
mode of thought and focused instead on human psychology and power. The
material context as it was being changed by human activity wasn’t a pressing
priority for thinkers trying to work through the implications of the enormous
expansion of firepower that had suddenly become available to the larger states
in the international system. While this focus on the pressing issues of the time,
given the advent of nuclear weapons and the then recent history of aggres-
sive warfare as a mode of state policy, made sense in those times, the longer
legacy is one where much of international relations has been mostly blind,
until recently, to the pressing issues of the human transformation of the earth
(Burke, Fishel, Mitchell et al. 2016).
But this discussion has been underway in numerous other forums both
within the academy and outside of it, longstanding discussion in economics
about resources and shortages of supplies of numerous things, perhaps only
most obviously in the long history of humanity that of food. The chaos of the
1930s and 1940s, with famine, war, conquest and the mobilization of immense
industrial productive forces to supply the war machines, emphasized the
vulnerabilities of societies to economic disruptions. The starvation of millions
in the Bengal famine in India during the Second World War likewise focused
attention on political economy and the importance of political decisions in
terms of the fate of the poor. In the aftermath of the war, as decolonization led
to the dismantling of European empires and the presence of communist parties
challenged the efficacy of capitalism to provide economic necessities, discus-
sions of development emerged as the dominant framing of what needed to be
done. While the Soviet model promised development led by planning, and the
spread of industrialization, the capitalist model promised much the same, with
private ownership driving innovation. Both however required policy, techno-
logical innovation and rapid growth in energy use to shape the future for the
provision of prosperity.
While the period that has in retrospect become known to earth system scien-
tists as the “great acceleration”, the post world war long economic boom that
spread consumer culture and its economics to many parts of the world, was
premised on American notions of technological progress and economic growth
(Farish 2010), worries about resource shortages provided a persistent, if minor
counter narrative to the enthusiasm for “development”. The Road to Survival
(Vogt 1948) for machine civilization was indeed the Challenge of Man’s
Future (Brown 1954), to use the phrasing from two popular books that posed
matters in terms of a predicament of technology, resources, pollution and
social adaptability. The proceedings of a major symposium (Thomas 1956) on
“Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” in 1955 summarized the state
of contemporary knowledge of human driven transformations.
38 Rethinking environmental security

Much of the expansion of modernity depended on cheap energy, in the form

of coal for industry, petroleum for many things and, in many cases, water for
generating hydroelectricity. The downsides of these were pollution in terms
of combustion products and numerous chemicals let loose as byproducts of
industrial activity. Pesticides promised to rapidly expand the productivity of
agriculture and lead in gasoline the power of internal combustion engines, but
both soon turned out to have dangerous unintended ecological consequences.
In the case of hydropower the inundation of land and the displacement of river
valley residents this supposedly clean power entailed had numerous ramifi-
cations. Hanging over all this discussion of the environmental disruptions of
modernity was the fear of nuclear fallout, both in terms of the actual spread of
radioactive residues from tests in the atmosphere and in terms of the potential
for future damage from nuclear wars yet to come.
But development did, it seemed at the time, have tremendous promise,
something that the very rapidly growing populations of the second half of
the twentieth century were going to need. If, that is, the resources could be
found to feed the expanding industrial system that was supposed to provide all
manner of consumer products deemed essential to the good life. In Europe at
least, alarms about resource supplies came into focus in the aftermath of the
Suez crisis of 1956 when war disrupted petroleum supplies. Rachel Carson
(1962) warned of a Silent Spring when pesticides designed to kill insects
would also kill off bird populations, eliminating their songs and silencing
nature. Paul Erhlich (1968) raised the alarm about a forthcoming Population
Bomb, rhetorically linking anxieties about nuclear catastrophe to a formulation
of disaster due to subsistence crises. R.F. Dasmann (1971) posed matters in
terms of a question regarding a Planet in Peril? while summarizing the initial
work of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) “Man and the Biosphere” program established following the 1968
scientific conference on these themes.
In the 1960s, famines in India in particular, and pollution as a result of
rapidly expanding industries and mass consumption, fed into a widespread
concern about the environment in at least some so called developed countries.
Air and water quality in the United States became a major issue as fears of
pollution overwhelming progress rearticulated narratives of environmental
degradation and societal decline (Rienow and Rienow 1969). In addition the
spectre of mass annihilation caused by the use of even a small portion of the
superpower nuclear arsenals raised the issue of human survival, or at least civ-
ilizational survival. The related matter of environmental concerns stretching
round the globe was focused on the dangers of nuclear fallout from the atmos-
pheric dispersal of radioactive elements generated in the 1950s and early 1960s
weapons tests (Masco 2015). A sense of global vulnerability emerged from
these events as tracking fallout made it clear that the atmosphere was a single
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 39

complex entity where pollution in one place could show up on the other side of
the world in a matter of weeks.
This rise of concern over fallout, resources, pollution and shortage of food,
especially in India in the 1960s when emergency international grain shipments
were needed to stave off famine, coalesced in a rising concern at least in
Western states about global environmental matters. Concerns over pollution
and population combined in an environmental social movement in the United
States and subsequently in Europe in the 1960s. Anxiety over how to frame
these matters in international politics in the 1960s gave rise to discussions
about who was responsible and how policy might be formulated (Boroway
2019). While in retrospect this all might seem to be obviously a matter of
environment, and the need for some international agreements to deal with
the matter, this wasn’t clear in the 1960s when discussions of development,
technology, war and the potential for nuclear destruction intersected with
concerns about pollution and resource shortages, as well as matters of the role
of science, as both the source of many of the problems and potentially a major
player in the potential for solutions, for all these issues.
Matters crystallized in 1972 when the Swedish government hosted the
UNCHE in Stockholm, out of which emerged a new agency, the UNEP.
The Soviet Union boycotted the Stockholm conference over an argument
about granting East Germany delegate status at the conference, and this and
other superpower disputes marked the event. But in retrospect, despite the
international controversies, this conference is seen as marking the emergence
of contemporary global environmental concern and the beginnings of com-
prehensive international efforts to grapple with ecological matters that were
then being considered as properly global concerns (Conca 2015). Not least is
the now taken for granted argument that states have the right to use resources
for their development, but should not do so in ways that impinge on the rights
of other states because of the generation of cross boundary pollution. This
rearticulation of standard liberal notions of property and responsibility was
scaled up, as it were, to states and hence to the international arena in the 1972
Stockholm Declaration.
The one head of state who did make it to Stockholm was Indira Gandhi,
Prime Minister of India, and her speech to the conference is in some ways
a watershed in international politics, and one that is still repeatedly cited
(Gandhi 1972). It is so because she explicitly argued that poverty was the
worst form of pollution and warned against the dangers of developed states
using arguments about environment to constrain the development that poor
states needed to address issues of poverty. This key argument, reinterpreted
subsequently as a matter of “environmental colonialism” (Agarwal and Narian
1991) where the poor in the South get to pay for the consumption of the rich,
persists to this day in discussions of climate change and, in the formulation
40 Rethinking environmental security

widely used under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC), common but differentiated responsibilities
(Brunnée and Streck 2013).
What is much less cited in the retrospectives on Stockholm is the point that
the conference declaration is very blunt about the need for nuclear disarma-
ment. The dangers of nuclear war were seen as a major concern, and eradicat-
ing this was explicitly pointed to in the final item in the conference declaration.
A sense of global vulnerability as well as numerous concerns about injustice,
apartheid and poverty shape the declaration, marking its historical origins but
also linking environmental deliberations into a much larger discussion of the
politics of human insecurity. Western worries about resource shortages were
highlighted once again a little later by the disruptions to the international petro-
leum trade as OPEC raised prices in the aftermath of the October war between
Syria, Egypt and Israel in 1973. How the rich world and the poor world
could coexist, and what might be done to deal with the tensions in the global
system and the persistence of gross inequities in trade and development, the
legacies of centuries of colonialism, shaped demands for a “New International
Economic Order” in subsequent years (Lean 1978).
Simultaneously with the rise of environmental concern in the 1960s, the
crises of resources and pollution generated critiques of the conventional eco-
nomic assumption that growth was key to future prosperity, and the implicit
assumption that it could go on forever. Most high profile in this discussion
was the debate about a report for the Club of Rome published in 1972 that
identified what it called The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers
and Behrens 1972). Based on a simple computer model of the global problem-
atique, with industrialization, population, malnutrition, resources and a deteri-
orating environment the five key interacting variables, the various runs of the
model forecasted disaster if then current trajectories were maintained. Contrary
to many popular misconceptions of the report, disaster wasn’t projected as
inevitable, and the time frame pointed to the decisive time period, then many
decades in the future, of the early decades of the twenty first century.
Nonetheless it generated vehement objections on numerous grounds, espe-
cially from economists anxious to defend the key credo of their canon, the
unquestioned benefits of economic growth and the related assertion that
technological innovation could handle whatever problems came along (Cole,
Freeman, Jahoda and Pavitt 1973). Now half a century later we are living in
the period that the Limits to Growth report identified as key decades when
the trajectories it identified would converge in crisis. The rapidly escalating
climate change crisis and the loss of biodiversity suggest that, tragically, those
initial crude forecasts of planetary trajectories were fairly close to the mark,
and are so precisely because the warnings from that period in this report and
others weren’t heeded (Turner 2014). As the fiftieth anniversary of the report is
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 41

reached, humanity is living in the period where The Limits to Growth predicted
things would go wrong if action wasn’t taken!
The discussion of the Limits to Growth was part of a larger political and
cultural transformation, one marked by the emergence of the annual earth
day in April each year following on from the initial one in 1970 in the United
States. It was also a time where politics was especially fraught in the United
States, with the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement
being especially high profile. In Europe the student actions in 1968 and the
Prague Spring shook up conventional political assumptions. Simultaneously
the so called space race between the superpowers generated a fascination
with technology, and a cultural innovation too when the first pictures of the
whole earth from space were taken by the Apollo astronauts going to the moon
(Cosgrove 1994).
Notable books from the time specified various combinations of political
economy and technology as key to the crisis (Commoner 1971). In Britain
The Ecologist (1972) published its Blueprint for Survival and established its
magazine as part of the larger cultural discussion. In the United States Richard
Falk published a lengthy volume examining This Endangered Planet which
started with a blunt discussion of the ecological imperative that required
“… the development of an ecological politics, whose essence is a political
embodiment of man-in-nature, as the ideological underpinning for an adequate
conception of world order” (1971, 21). Subsequently Jon Barnett (2001) was
to claim this particular volume as the appropriate starting point for what has
since become environmental security, although the term itself doesn’t appear
in Falk’s text. The unofficial background report for the Stockholm conference
used images of the earth from space to emphasize earthly vulnerability in
specifying matters in terms of Only One Earth (Ward and Dubos 1972). Given
the concerns about nuclear warfare in the Stockholm Declaration, Barnett’s
timing seems very appropriate. The agenda of what has subsequently been
known as environmental security can be dated clearly from the early 1970s
and the explicit attempts to conjoin concerns about military dangers and envi-
ronmental disruptions.
The crisis of the 1970s arising from the increase in concern about envi-
ronmental destruction, and then once again in the West after the disruptions
in oil supply triggered by OPEC action following the October war of 1973
in the Middle East, generated numerous efforts to think through alternative
economic models that might be both less vulnerable to petroleum supplies
and less demanding on environments. Alternative development movements,
the widespread popularity of discussions of Fritz Schumacher’s (1974)
economic critiques of conventional growth models in Small is Beautiful and
technological innovation all promised at least partial resolutions to the global
crisis. A decade before Our Common Future, Amory Lovins (1977) suggested
42 Rethinking environmental security

that a “soft energy path” offered possibilities for dealing with climate matters
and national security in the United States in particular in very different ways.
He suggested that much better technology, ending wasteful use of energy by
dramatically increasing efficiencies in buildings, production systems and vehi-
cles, offered a much easier path to a sensible future than continued extraction
of fossil fuels from, among other places, a volatile Middle East.
The Carter administration tackled many of these issues and compiled
a major report providing an overview of the state of the environment (United
States Department of State and Council on Environmental Quality 1980). It
established a Solar Energy Research Institute as a major research initiative,
and symbolically put solar panels on the White House roof. But these ini-
tiatives were swept aside by the subsequent Reagan administrations’ focus
on fossil fuels and economic growth during the rise of neoliberalism and the
acceleration of globalization. The cultural politics of the Reagan slogan of
“it’s morning in America”, with the emphasis on consumption as the key to
the American way, justified policy that sidelined many initiatives that had
promised a more sustainable United States. The Reagan administration closed
the Solar Energy Research Institute and moved to deregulate many industries
that had been subject to the clean air and water legislation of the Nixon era.
In Lovins’ terms (1977) they chose the hard path and combustion as the key
energy source, and with that made a major contribution to the current climate
crisis. Solar panels disappeared from the White House roof when the Reagans
moved in, only to return later when the Obamas were in residence then disap-
pear once again during the Trump presidency. They are clearly very symbolic
of the larger American cultural dimensions of energy (Daggett 2018).

ECOPOLITICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

These discussions found their way into at least some of the international
relations journals of the time, but remained a minor concern in the major
journals in the 1970s. Richard Falk’s (1971) formulation suggested four major
causes for the dangerous predicament that the planet finds itself in: the war
system; population pressure; the insufficiency of resources; and environmental
overload. Exponential growth and complacent assumptions that political and
economic systems can adjust seemed on a collision course to Falk, and having
laid out these four causes of imminent danger he wondered as to whether a civ-
ilizational crash was looming. The failure to think about the larger context,
and the collapse of previous empires, whose rulers didn’t foresee their demise
too, offers, he suggested, a cautionary tale requiring some serious rethinking of
world order and the incorporation of these themes into discussions of politics.
The disconnection between the size, function and authority of political units is
one of Falk’s concerns, and this doesn’t lead to sensible efforts to grapple with
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 43

the looming dangers. The discrepancy between state sovereignty and the uni-
versal precepts of the United Nations Charter on the use of force are among the
additional concerns that Falk worried about. Clearly the existing arrangement
of states and international organizations wasn’t up to the job.
Across the Atlantic Hedley Bull (1977) was worrying about some similar
themes of world order, and in his synthesis of the “English School” literature,
The Anarchical Society, a few years later, he addressed Falk’s concerns, taking
him to task for simultaneously complaining about the inadequacy of states
and contemporary institutions and the need for urgent action. Bull suggested
that if urgency was required there was little choice but to act using existing
institutions even if they didn’t appear very efficacious, the implication being
that waiting for new political forms to address these issues would delay action
too long. While Bull was willing to concede that a greater sense of solidarity
might engender global innovations, his argument suggests that states, as the
provider of what semblance of order there is in the world, were going to be an
essential institution for tackling environmental problems. But that said, Bull
only addressed a few pages in his book to environmental matters.
In the United States Dennis Pirages (1978) devoted a whole book to Global
Ecopolitics, what he termed The New Context for International Relations. This
text, suggested as being both an overview of the issues and an introduction to
the new themes looming in international relations, posited matters in terms of
an impending revolution in global politics. Looking back in human history,
Pirages suggested that there were two great revolutions in history, first the
agricultural one, and second the industrial one which defined modernity.
Tentatively he suggested that numerous scarcities emerging at the time he was
writing challenged the pattern of resource extensive industrial development
that marked modernity. The possibilities of extending this mode of economic
life to the developing world seemed impossible. Hence Pirages suggested an
incipient revolution in the human condition, one that would require new modes
of governance in this new world of emerging ecopolitics. The dominance
paradigm, of human societies pitted against each other and the natural world,
would have to give way to something novel, as the carrying capacities of the
natural world were being exceeded by rising human numbers and economic
activity.
While comparisons between these three books should not be taken too far,
it is clear that over the decades since, Bull’s themes have dominated interna-
tional relations to a much greater extent than those of either Falk or Pirages. In
June 2021 Google Scholar listed less than one hundred citations for Pirages,
nearly five hundred for Falk, and as a canonical text in international relations,
Bull’s volume, reprinted in multiple editions in subsequent decades, had nearly
twelve thousand. These numbers are only roughly indicative of their relative
importance within the discipline, but they do emphasize the point made much
44 Rethinking environmental security

later in critiques of international relations which argue that the material context
of planetary systems has been remarkably absent from deliberations in the
field (Burke, Fishel, Mitchell et al. 2016). Much more recently Hans Guenter
Brauch (2021) and Ursula Oswald Spring (2020) have led substantial efforts
to engage with the changing material context and how sustainable transitions
relate to matters of peace in the Anthropocene (Oswald Spring and Brauch
2021). It’s notable that Brauch sometimes extends Pirages’s formulations of
the revolutions in human history too in his discussion of the need for new
thinking of ecology and peace (Brauch 2021), but Oswald Spring and Brauch’s
multiple volume edited book series has had little noticeable impact in the core
Anglo-American international relations literature (Brauch, Oswald Spring,
Grin and Scheffran 2016). In part this is probably a matter of their geograph-
ical locations and intellectual roots outside the Anglo-American mainstream,
and the focus on peace rather than power in how they formulate security.
Within international relations in the 1970s the focus on realist issues of
war and peace was challenged by literature suggesting that the relationships
between states were more complicated than the simple formulations of realism
allowed. While military force might be the ultimate arbiter in politics, the
strictures of mutually assured destruction, rapidly growing international trade
and the emergence of numerous international organizations had given rise to
a situation of complex interdependence in which many more actors had to
be considered, and governance of many matters was increasingly happening
in complex regimes where rules, actors, norms and procedures intersect to
shape conduct (Keohane and Nye 1977). Both regime theory and the emer-
gent concerns with global political economy occasionally tackled matters of
environment and resources, and spun off a subdiscipline of global environ-
mental politics, along with its eponymous scholarly journal. But much of this
scholarship worked within the loose ambit of regime theory and with concerns
with trade and political economy and how these shaped the finer points of
environmental governance, or frequently failed to effectively do so (Laferrière
and Stoett 1999).
These political economy, trade and regime theory texts mostly didn’t
grapple with the large transformations of the earth system that the extraor-
dinary expansion of the global economy had set in motion in the twentieth
century. In addition much of the discussion of pollution and ecosystem man-
agement focused on technical fixes and regulation, not on the questions of the
driving forces of production in the first place. If pollution was identified as the
problem, then clearly modernizing industrial technology to prevent it was the
solution. Ecomodernism, as this response to environmental difficulties came to
be called (Mol 2001), didn’t call into question the larger context of production
or consumption; business could continue as usual once technology had solved
the immediate problems with toxicity. In Peter Dauvergne’s (2016) terms, this
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 45

“environmentalism of the rich” is not capable of dealing with either the disrup-
tions caused by the total throughput of energy and materials in the earth system
or the history of the destruction of indigenous peoples and their lands caused
by the expansion of European imperialism and now the global economy.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

What was missing in all this discussion in the 1970s was an agreed upon suc-
cinct way of linking environment and development, and dealing with the con-
tradiction that Indira Gandhi had eloquently expressed in Stockholm. While
the two were linked in numerous ways as part of an overall discourse, fifteen
years after Stockholm the Brundtland report on Our Common Future provided
the synthesis that has dominated discussions ever since, the notion of sus-
tainable development. This has turned out to be amenable to a nearly infinite
number of interpretations and has acted as the ideological infrastructure for
ecomodernist initiatives of numerous sorts, including most recently various
efforts to facilitate both the mitigation of climate change and adaptation efforts
to it in many places (Sovacool and Linner 2016).
Much of the discussion of sustainability since stems from Our Common
Future, and the attempts, five years after its publication, at the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro
in 1992 to implement some of its key themes in novel arrangements of global
governance. Two key conventions were agreed upon there: the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD). In addition an ambitious program called Agenda
21, as in an agenda for the twenty first century, was discussed, but the practical
innovations that it implied for new forms of sustainable development were
quickly pushed aside by corporations and governments enthralled by the logic
of neoliberalism with its narrow focus on economic growth and the supposed
benefits for all of globalization (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). While both key
conventions established in Rio in 1992 have evolved into formal institutions
of environmental governance, as the current global environmental crisis makes
clear, neither has yet effectively constrained the destruction of natural systems
or the rapidly accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The arguments for sustainable development are remarkably persistent, not
least precisely because they are loosely compatible with the neoliberal logics
of private sector expansion, at best loose government regulation, and the prior-
ity given to growth measured in financial metrics. The term is part of the over-
arching SDGs adopted by the United Nations in 2015 (Dalby, Horton, Mahon
and Thomaz 2019). As climate change in particular accelerates, notions of
sustainability have become ever more important in global politics. While the
Rio conference, which happened after the cold war ended, downplayed the
46 Rethinking environmental security

term environmental security, the premise of environmental insecurity had been

a key theme in Our Common Future. The report emphasized both the dangers
of warfare disrupting development and the potential conflicts that might erupt
if development were not done in a sustainable fashion. Environmental security
concerns have been heightened more recently by the discussion of climate
change as many military institutions worry about the disruptions it causes and
possible conflicts that will ensue (Klare 2019). This is now especially impor-
tant as the insights of earth system science make it clear just how much human
actions are changing the planet, how fast this is happening and, if present
trajectories are maintained, the likely increasingly severe disruptions to the
biosphere that will result (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018).
Globalization and its acceleration in recent decades means in practical terms
that the global economy has expanded so much that it is now causing envi-
ronmental change on the scale of major climate and geomorphological forces.
The rapidly expanding technosphere is a new element in the earth system,
a product of the extraordinary expansion of the global economy, one that is
changing how that earth system functions (Zalasiewicz, Williams, Waters et al.
2017). While critics of globalization have frequently invoked deleterious local
consequences of global processes as the problem that needs to be addressed,
it is clear that in many matters the assumptions of bordered national states as
the key to human fulfilment and the appropriate mode of governing human
affairs are now also being challenged fundamentally by ecological change.
Autonomy may appeal to nationalist politicians and environmentalists trying
to protect particular places from development sourced in distant cities and their
investment banks, but sustainability now has to be considered at the global
scale if it is to grapple with key economic transformations that are pushing the
earth system into previously unknown configurations. Welcome to the new age
of human dominance in biophysical matters, this new geological epoch now
frequently called the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin 2018).
Traditional notions of conservation, of parks, ecological reserves and
pollution restrictions in particular places, have to be complemented by con-
siderations of global impacts and the connections across distant and disparate
places. While such management devices as treaties to try to ensure bird migra-
tion pathways are maintained are not new, the scale and speed of ecological
change now means that assumptions of relatively stable geographies, and of
the past as a reasonable guide for predictions of future environmental condi-
tions, no longer hold. Globalization has become a major force of biophysical
transformation and sustainability thinking has to incorporate this new situation
into analysis and policy making (Kareiva and Fuller 2016). State rivalries
and struggles for power and prestige in international politics likewise are
playing out in these changing circumstances, and those circumstances are in
part a consequence of those same processes; geography is increasingly what
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 47

states and corporations make it as the Anthropocene unfolds. In these circum-

stances sustainability cannot mean keeping things the same, or preserving
ecologies in situ. A much more dynamic series of processes must necessarily
be involved, and what precisely needs to be sustained and how is now much
more complicated.
The famous definition of sustainable development at the beginning of the
second chapter of Our Common Future reads: “Sustainable development is
development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (World Commission
on Environment and Development 1987, 43). This has become the standard
definition of one of the most widely used terms in contemporary international
politics. The authors of Our Common Future went on to elaborate on the
definition, stating that it involved two key concepts. The first is “the concept
of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which
overriding priority should be given” (World Commission on Environment and
Development 1987, 43). The second concept is “the idea of limitations imposed
by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability
to meet present and future needs” (World Commission on Environment and
Development 1987, 43). The report’s authors went on to emphasize that the
social and the physical are inextricably interconnected: “Even the narrow
notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between
generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each
generation” (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987,
43). How to do this is not exactly easy; claims to inter-generational and
intra-generational equity persist in discussions of sustainable development,
and are a key theme in the current SDGs (United Nations 2015), but the dra-
matic trajectory of economic change since Our Common Future was published
has apparently not operated on the report’s principles, despite the repeated
invocation of the term sustainable development.
Bluntly put, the term was at best a compromise. It was an attempt to incor-
porate Northern concerns with environment with Southern concerns about
development. Fifteen years after Indira Gandhi called poverty the worst kind
of pollution at the UNCHE in Stockholm, the necessity of dealing with rapid
environmental change and with impoverishment in many parts of the world
required that some compromise between development and environmental
protection be articulated in international forums (Conca 2015). At the time,
alarm about the depletion of stratospheric ozone and concerns about industrial
accidents—with the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown and the Bhopal chemical
leak very much on people’s minds—was coupled with worries about deforest-
ation and the limited possibilities of expanding agricultural production. Ozone
depletion in particular made it clear that some environmental vulnerabilities
48 Rethinking environmental security

were in fact widely shared and global cooperation was necessary to deal with
these matters.
Southern leaders, rearticulating Indira Gandhi’s concerns expressed in
Stockholm, were adamant that Northern environmental issues should not
be used as a method for constraining what they saw as essential Southern
economic growth (Kjellen 2008). Given that most of the big environmental
problems of the time were caused by Northern activities, simple matters of
justice required that those who had caused the problems be the ones to pay for
the solution. At the time of the Rio conference environmentalists posed matters
bluntly in terms of “Whose Common Future?” (The Ecologist 1993). Where
ozone depleting substances were a problem, Southern leaders insisted that
Northern economies help provide technological alternatives to compensate for
what they portrayed as forgone development opportunities. Such principles
linking environment to development have subsequently been key to much
of the diplomatic discussions about aid and development. More recently,
these themes have been key to international discussions of climate change
where technology transfer and development aid are part of the negotiations
under the rubric of common but differentiated responsibilities (Brunnée and
Streck 2013). This terminology has become the taken for granted language for
discussing many international political matters, not just obviously and imme-
diately “environmental” matters.

ENVIRONMENTAL (IN)SECURITY

At the heart of Our Common Future was a concern that shortages of resources
would lead to conflict, and that sustainable development was the answer to
prevent it, precisely by anticipating potential resource shortages and building
economies that were sustainable in the sense of using resources so that they
didn’t run out. Our Common Future also expressed concerns about the arms
race and the financial resources expended on military matters in the cold war,
monies that could be much more usefully spent on development, health and
environmental management. The report’s authors also bluntly warned that
warfare was likely to stymie efforts to implement sustainable development.
Development for most societies requires peace. Environmental security is an
essential prerequisite for sustainable development and in the long run sustain-
able development is necessary for environmental security.
In the early 1980s, as alarm grew about the dangers of nuclear warfare,
environmental research on the effects of nuclear explosions was raising
alarm about the likely second order effects of nuclear weapons beyond the
immediate fire and shock wave destruction. While fallout was a major issue
and the long term illnesses from radioactivity at least tentatively understood,
other effects, such as the disruption to electronic systems caused by the elec-
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 49

tromagnetic pulse given off by nuclear detonations and, in the case of high
altitude detonations, damage to the stratospheric ozone layer, continued to be
examined (Peterson 1983). A crucial innovation in this thinking came in 1983
with the publication of a couple of papers clearly delineating the potential for
climate disruptions should multiple nuclear detonations and firestorms loft
large amounts of smoke, soot and dust into the upper atmosphere during the
Northern Hemisphere growing season (Crutzen and Birks 1983).
The possibilities of an extended “nuclear winter” disrupting agriculture by
changing growing conditions for crops added to the list of likely adverse con-
sequences of a nuclear conflict (Turco, Toon, Ackerman et al. 1983; Ehrlich,
Harte, Harwell et al. 1983; see also Sagan and Turco 1990). In the process it
became abundantly clear that humanity could potentially cause an abrupt if
mostly temporary change in the earth’s climate. This added one more reason
to rethink security given that the scale of firepower now available made every-
one, regardless of whether they were combatants or not, vulnerable to warfare.
Environmental insecurity on a global scale presented an obvious existential
threat to much of humanity. As the nuclear winter discussion suggested, this
might come indirectly through rapid onset catastrophic climate change.
Diverting funds from military preparation to create such an event was a key
additional theme in Our Common Future; challenging the arms culture and
offering much more useful alternatives for funding health care, environmental
remediation and development suggested making a safer and more healthy
world as the key to environmental security in the future. While the term
environmental security itself only appears in passing in Our Common Future,
environmental insecurity is clearly articulated as the problem to be addressed.
Environmental security is obviously the condition that has to be established if
absent, or protected if it already exists. The term appears explicitly in subse-
quent discussions, and simultaneously as part of the extended United Nations
engagement with environmental issues in the 1980s.
The term explicitly appears as part of the Soviet Union’s ideas of New
Thinking in this period too. Alexandre Timoshenko’s (1992) subsequent
summation of much of this emphasizes the need for international law to
grapple with what he specifically terms “ecological security” issues, and to
do so in a non-competitive way given that common interests should gener-
ate common concerns with flourishing ecologies. Focusing on the common
heritage of mankind as well as inter-generational equity, Timoshenko links
these to United Nations resolutions in the 1980s where climate was noted as
a common concern as well as alarm expressed by Soviet thinkers, including
Mikhail Gorbachev (1988) in the 1980s, about the dangers of major industrial
and nuclear accidents as an ecological dimension of international security.
Not least Timoshenko suggests that ecological security shifts the focus from
traditional “react and correct” environmental regulations to a “forecast and
50 Rethinking environmental security

prevent” framework, and as such ought to redistribute resources in the security

sector away from military matters and towards anticipating and avoiding likely
future dangers.
While Our Common Future did not offer an explicit definition of environ-
mental security, focusing more on sustainable development as the solution to
environmental insecurities, the 1992 Olaf Palme lecture, which was delivered
by Gro Harlem Brundtland on the theme of “The Environment, Security
and Development” and published in the annual yearbook of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute in 1993, led to a fairly clear articulation.
The lecture’s text is accompanied by a technical appendix by Richard Moss
which offers a definition of environmental security in which it is suggested that
“Environmental security is defined as the condition which exists when gov-
ernments are able to mitigate the social and political impacts of environmental
scarcity of resources, drawing on their own capabilities as well as the capabili-
ties of inter-governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations”
(Moss 1993, 27). This clearly links adequate supplies of needed resources to
the notion of security, an economic definition which implies that effective
extraction from environmental sources is the key consideration. Crucially it
also includes government and other agency capacity to deal with scarcities,
which was specified as the key problem. This definition is fairly close to the
subsequent use of the term eco-security by environmental managers in China
concerned to think through regional environmental impacts and ecological
sustainability (Zhao, Zou, Cheng et al. 2006).
But the 1993 definition attached to Brundtland’s name is very expansive and
includes environmental services too:

Environmental resources include not only (a) non-renewable resources such as oil
and minerals and (b) renewable resources such as fisheries products, biomass and
fresh water, but also (c) environmental services such as waste assimilation, nutrient
recycling, generation of soils, regulation of atmospheric conditions and climate, and
the creation and maintenance of genetic diversity. (Moss 1993, 27)

Thus ecological functions in cleaning up messes made by human activities,

including climate change, are worked in here too. But in linking these together
in a summary statement, Moss (1993, 27) emphasizes all this in terms of
scarcity: “Environmental security is thus a function of three sets of factors:
(a) current and projected levels of resource exploitation; (b) the social and
political impacts of scarcity, and (c) the response capabilities that are available
to mitigate the effects of scarcity.”
What is not in this final articulation of the concept is a matter of environ-
mental services to deal with pollution and the consequences of consumption.
Clearly in the case of climate change in particular the problem isn’t scarcity,
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 51

it’s just the opposite. The widespread availability of relatively easy to access
fossil fuels is generating greenhouse gases and hence climate change. There is
far too much fossil fuel, not too little. Scarcity overall is precisely the opposite
of the problem. Which is why climate campaigners frequently use the phrase
“keep it in the ground”. The environmental services needed to deal with the
effects of resource consumption frequently slide out of the picture with this
focus on scarcity. It is of course possible to stretch Moss’s (1993) definition
and argue that what is now scarce are intact landscapes and ecosystems that
can capture the excess carbon in the atmosphere, but this convolution is in
danger of shifting the focus away from the causes of climate change in the
excessive consumption activities of urban-industrial economies and blaming
rural residents and those in the Global South of mismanaging landscapes that
“we” urban consumers “need” to absorb our waste products, reiterating things
in terms of an imperial view of the world (Brand and Wissen 2021). But, as
the latter parts of this book suggest, these ecosystem services, and their active
construction and reconstruction as part of regenerative ecological activities,
are now a key part of what needs attention in rethinking environmental security
in the next phase of the Anthropocene, always assuming that the firepower
creating climate change dangers can be rapidly constrained.
These ambiguities, both including renewable and non-renewable resources
as “environmental” and including pollution cleanup in with resources scarci-
ties, have long plagued much of the discussion of environment and the various
social movements that adopt the terminology of environmentalism (O’Riordan
1976). But none of this helps clarify matters, especially as overarching policy
goals are concerned. Moss (1993), citing Homer-Dixon’s (1991) early work
among others, also noted that environmental difficulties may lead to conflict
or to social mobilization demanding government reform. The opposition to the
Soviet system in Eastern Europe around pollution and health issues is noted
as a source of the nationalism that was in part responsible for the collapse of
Eastern European regimes in the late 1980s. There, clearly environmental
matters profoundly influenced politics. Even if they were not an explicit source
of conflict, clearly mobilization around these issues had in part undermined the
security of the Soviet modelled governments in Eastern Europe.

THE WORLD IN 2022

Now, as noted in the preface to this volume, in Dan Smith’s terms we live
in the world that the Limits to Growth warned about and that the Stockholm
conference attendees had mostly hoped to avoid; we live in a world of
“Anthropocene (In)securities” to use the title of the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report reflecting on the half century since the
1972 meeting (Lövbrand and Mobjörk 2021). As later chapters in this volume
52 Rethinking environmental security

will discuss in some detail, the legacy of the failed or inadequate efforts to
grapple with the agenda laid out in Stockholm, and subsequently in more
detail in Our Common Future, now in part requires rethinking environmental
security by shifting the focus from only preventing future difficulties to doing
so while simultaneously working out how to live with the results of the failure
to do so over the last half century. Key to this is reimagining the context for
humanity, of us as part of a rapidly changing dynamic ecosphere where deci-
sions made by the rich and powerful about the constitution of the technosphere
in coming decades will be key to future trajectories.
Thinking in terms of ecologies, and their flourishing as key to security,
rather than purely in terms of states or their inhabitants, is an essential part
of this rethinking (McDonald 2021). Where much unnecessary damage has
been done to living systems, now the tasks are to think about rewilding,
about facilitating the reconstruction of flourishing systems. Integrating them
into human activities is part of what needs to be done. These new ecological
arrangements also have to be resilient in the sense of being able to adapt to
a much wider range of climate circumstances than was the case in the twenti-
eth century. Rather than a focus on protection of separate stable spaces from
encroachment, now the tasks at hand are about producing flexible arrange-
ments that allow human activities without destroying ecological possibilities
in particular places. Tackling the practices of extractivism across many modes
of economic activity and thinking instead of closed systems, permacultures
and novel modes of urban living are parts of this new agenda, because as the
last few decades have shown, development as practiced isn’t sustainable (Buck
2021). Living in a dynamic changing world means that species have to be able
to migrate as circumstances change, and this too requires relaxing the strict
territorial demarcations that have so often been what environmental policies of
parks and ecosystem protection have been about.
Above all, the focus on dynamic geographies also requires a recognition that
in many ways the most extreme and rapid changes to the ecosphere are hap-
pening where discussions of environmental security half a century ago never
considered, in the Arctic regions of the world, what can reasonably be called
the north of the north where dramatic change has long been in evidence (Dalby
2003). Yes, perhaps the worst suffering caused by the over-consumption of
fossil fuels in particular will be caused in the climate disrupted regions of
what is called the Global South, but the most dramatic heating is in the Arctic
region with all the dangers of accelerating permafrost melting and enhanced
greenhouse gas emissions. The possibilities of runaway climate change, where
methane and carbon dioxide emissions from this melting and increased boreal
forest wildfires generate a powerful positive feedback mechanism that accel-
erates climate change, is one of the nightmare scenarios that worries climate
 Sustainable development/environmental insecurity 53

scientists. Even if the evidence for such an eventuality hasn’t yet appeared
conclusively, current trajectories are exceedingly worrisome.
All of which requires a reconsideration of the scope of human activity, and
a reconsideration of what was until recently more or less taken for granted as
a separate backdrop to human affairs. While sustainable development accepted,
at least rhetorically, the enmeshment of economic activity within a larger eco-
logical realm, too often it has worked to suggest that the reliable provision of
resources for future economic exploitation is what matters in considerations
of environmental security. Climate change and the growing problems of
extinction have demonstrated both that this isn’t adequate and that humanity
is an integral part of the earth system, not just an appendage on a separate and
stable environment. This requires conceptual innovations that challenge the
most persistent dichotomies of modernity. Now climate and extinction require
scholars to amalgamate geology and history, earth and humanity, in what
Bruno Latour (2014) suggested might best be termed “geostory”.
3. Geostory: deep time and history

DIVIDING NATURE

The discussion of sustainable development and environmental security mostly

takes the notions of development and environment for granted. These catego-
ries however have histories; they are, despite their prevalence, not the only
possible categorizations. While much of human history in many civilizations
has some notion of nature, the more specific category of environment is, in the
Western world, a construction of the late nineteenth century and a formulation
that intruded as such on global politics only in the latter half of the twentieth
(Conway 2019). While environment carries numerous connotations, clearly it
is a formulation of something that surrounds something else, an entity that is
environed. As such it codifies the division between humanity and the rest of
the cosmos, or more specifically the planet. Linked to parallel considerations
of the emergence of territory as a category of governance, it also facilitates the
processes of enclosure and commodification that drive the great transforma-
tion at the heart of modernity (Blomley 2019).
As nature is turned into property, it can be divided, owned, financialized
and privatized in processes of transformation that frequently are termed
development (Moore 2015). But, and the catch is important, failure to do
this in sensible ways leads to pollution, degradation and scarcities, and as the
twentieth century unfolded, this led to a growing sense of an environmental
crisis that could be understood to be global. Resource management has to be
part of successful development, conserving supplies and ensuring that devel-
opment can thus be sustainable. Too much pollution, failure to use ecosystems
wisely and the exhaustion of resources all lead to trouble and, in the more
alarmist formulations, conflict. In at least one critical commentary, nature has
simply become a battlefield (Keucheyan 2016). Scarcities supposedly lead to
conflict, although the historical record suggests that most resource conflicts
are a result of their exploitation for distant economic actors rather than strictly
local disputes (Le Billon 2012). The lack of clarity and specification of what is
environment, what is a resource and which scarcity matters to whom has been
a powerful source of ideological confusion, and has given rise to environmen-
tal alarmism, as well as utopian promises, based on assumptions of ever more

54
 Geostory: deep time and history 55

sophisticated technological innovations, of ever more appropriations of the

natural world to supply unlimited economic growth.
Most recently climate change and growing concerns about the rapidly
rising rates of species extinction have added to earlier concerns about resource
shortages, pollution and ecological collapse. The sheer scale of human mod-
ifications to the planetary system has suggested not only that humanity has
taken its fate into its own hands, but that the notion of environment itself may
not be adequate to grapple with what needs to be done to shape the future in
a manner that will ensure the long term survival of human civilization. Critics
suggest that the violent practices of appropriation and exploitation that have
led to the current crisis mean that the notion of civilization is premature, but
the productive powers now in existence might yet lead to a more sensible and
humane mode of existence for all humanity.
The Anthropocene as a concept encompasses this sense of global capitalism
as a planet altering force, one that will have long term consequences for the
planetary system, and for future modes of life. But the rapidly proliferating
discussion of the Anthropocene, how it might be specified, whether it is
useful as a scientific or political term, focuses attention on how the current
crisis is contextualized (Moore 2016). In the debate about when it might be
said to have begun, there lies a larger question about the role of humanity as
a planet shaping force. If humanity is in fact a novel “forcing agent” in the
earth system, then when it first became one, and how, is a key question. But
of course not all humanity has played an equal part in shaping the system, and
critics of the notion of an Anthropocene are quick to insist that it is only recent
global appropriations of environment by the rich and powerful elements in the
capitalist system that are responsible for the dangers that most of the rest of
humanity now face.
All this matters greatly for the consideration of what environmental security
might now mean. In particular climate change is at the heart of this discussion
as growing storms, droughts, wildfire, floods and related disruptions raise
questions of security in many ways. But these disruptions require thinking
about both geological scale transformation and historical change together,
a matter of conflating the scientific and the human, geology and history in
Bruno Latour’s (2014) terms, a matter of geostory. Framing matters in these
terms refuses to take environment as a given backdrop to the human drama,
and insists instead on embedding humanity in its context, one understood
over geological timescales, and understanding humanity as a geological scale
change agent, among which the rich and powerful are initiating a very rapid
transformation of the earth system with potentially disastrous consequences
for planetary life (Barnosky, Hadly, Bascompte et al. 2012).
The argument in this volume is focused on trying to link up the scientific
discussion of these matters but think through the human consequences in terms
56 Rethinking environmental security

of security, and the possible connections between environmental change and

violence. The link between these matters is most obviously about firepower,
a category at the heart of concerns about warfare and dominance in geopolitics,
but also, as the rest of this chapter will explicate, one that is essential to much
else in the rise of humanity to become the dominant species in the planetary
system. Teasing out these linkages more explicitly is key to rethinking envi-
ronmental security. Earth system science makes it clear that there is no taken
for granted backdrop to human activities that is a given context for humanity.
Humanity as a form of life is an ecological actor, changing its habitat, as so
many other animals do as a consequence of their activities. But now this is
having planet wide consequences which are the new context for considering
what has become called environmental security.

THE GEOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Thinking in terms of geology and the human context in the longer term evolu-
tion of the planet and the ecosphere in particular suggests that we are part of
a very dynamic, and at times dangerous, system. Indeed some of the historical
compilations of previous human calamities, famines, pandemics and wars
suggest that the dynamism of the planetary system is such that humanity’s
survival, never mind its extraordinary expansion in recent centuries, is at
best a fluke event (Jenkins 2021). Existential threats loom, and in the past
could easily have rendered humanity extinct (Ord 2020). The assumption that
humanity is here as part of the biosphere and will continue to be in perpetuity
is just that, a very large assumption. The related modern assumption, that the
planetary context is stable, predictable and likely to remain so, is likewise an
assumption, one that the rapidly accelerating disruptions of climate change in
particular and environmental transformation in general render highly dubious.
But the cultural assumptions in modernity, of human mastery of its environ-
mental circumstances, have dominated the social sciences for a long time, and
in part shape the failure of international relations to grapple with the human
material context. Removing this cultural myopia and looking more clearly
at the history of the planet suggests that contextual matters are much more
dynamic than the social sciences usually assume, and once that is done and
the condition of planetarity (Clark and Szerszynski 2021) substituted as the
ontological framework, matters of security take on new interpretations.
Popular culture with its disaster movies and speculative fictions sometimes
offers a corrective to assumptions of stationarity with the premise that the past
is an accurate indication of future conditions. The discussion of the fate of the
dinosaurs highlights ecosystem fragilities. A huge meteor strike apparently
led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, or at least was a contributing factor in
their demise. Some accounts suggest instant immolation for animals close to
 Geostory: deep time and history 57

the impact and slower starvation elsewhere as food supplies were promptly
destroyed, or as plants failed to grow in the cooling period that followed due to
skies darkened by dust and debris. But that said, of course some dinosaurs did
survive; their descendants are what humans now call birds.
There is a long history of meteor impacts, and indeed the current formation
of the earth and the moon was apparently a result of a massive impact in the
early history of the solar system. Mars, Mercury and the moon, without oceans,
biospheres or mobile crustal plates that might obscure the evidence, are pock-
marked with impact craters. Fortunately in recent decades space monitoring
systems have been carefully tracking asteroids and comets that have trajecto-
ries that potentially intersect with earth. Apparently there are few obvious risks
of dangerous collisions in the near future, although numerous very minor ones
frequently generate shooting stars in the night sky. If a dangerous trajectory
is discovered, the possibilities of using spacecraft to nudge the asteroid into
a safer orbit arise, although early warning long in advance would be key to an
appropriate response. With due apologies to Bruce Willis movie fans, blowing
them apart with nuclear weapons is not likely to be an effective response.
Volcanos have in the past generated earth shaping changes both globally
and on the immediate scale as in Mount Toba’s eruption and the more recent
detonations of Tamboro in 1815 and the well documented case of Krakatoa
(Winchester 2003). Mount St Helens exploded in 1980 in the Western United
States, and eleven years later in the Philippines, Mount Pinatubo’s eruption
lofted aerosols into the stratosphere with a pronounced cooling effect on global
temperatures (McCormick, Thomason and Trepte 1995). This subsequently
generated speculation about the possibilities of artificially cooling the world
by using stratospheric aerosol injection, a form of solar “geoengineering” to
mimic the “Pinatubo effect”. Apart from the immediate effects close to the
eruption, humans frequently note their consequences when airplane routes are
disrupted. Jet engines are vulnerable to damage from volcanic dust.
The debate about the cause of the demise of the dinosaurs also considers
the possibility that volcanic action triggered fatal climate disruptions. And
while science fiction authors, and Star Trek fans in particular, may speculate
about controlling volcanic action, at least for the foreseeable future this is way
beyond plausible human capabilities. The possibility of a major long lasting
eruption exists, and that might have dramatic effects on the climate system
as has been the case in the past; the massive lava ejection into the so called
“Siberian traps” probably caused climate disruptions that led to the largest
recorded mass extinction in the planet’s history at the end of the Permian.
Another potential hazard is a supernova type stellar explosion somewhere in
the galactic vicinity which could cause atmospheric disturbances due to large
gamma radiation and, among other things, disrupt the earth’s ozone layer.
Although the chances of this are probably exceedingly remote, such specula-
58 Rethinking environmental security

tion is useful in that it also emphasizes the importance of thinking of the earth
as a dynamic celestial body, not a given stable habitat for humanity. This is
the planetarity context that matters in considering contemporary trajectories.
One additional inference is the point that, should future human colonization
of planets and asteroids occur, and conflict break out between those societies,
redirecting asteroids or comets to use as a weapon to impact earth would be
relatively easy for those colonists, and much more difficult for earth based
societies given the much greater “gravity well” of earth (Deudney 2020). In the
long run, space colonization cannot escape security dilemmas and inter-entity
conflict dynamics either, as Kim Stanley Robinson’s fictional speculations
about Mars colonization in his Mars novel trilogy suggests, another reason to
treat such projects skeptically when considering the long run human future.
Much of the contemporary discussion of global change, climate crisis, the
sixth extinction and questions of human survival is now formulated in terms of
the new geological age in which it is widely asserted we are now living. The
Anthropocene is first and foremost a geological term, one that denotes a major
change in the earth system. The finer points of the debate among earth system
scientists and geologists about its appropriateness and how it fits into the
larger construction of earth history are beyond the scope of this volume (see
Zalasiewicz, Waters, Williams and Summerhayes 2019), but the broad outline
of the discussion is key to understanding this new contextualization, and with
it the implications for international relations in general and the environmental
security discussion in particular. The crucial point is that we are now living
in new circumstances, ones wrought by human activity, and the massive
combustion of fossil fuels in particular. Historical analogies may help interpret
matters, but the novel dimensions of the Anthropocene require a rethink of the
human condition and who is securing what where.
It is noteworthy that while climate change and the larger ecological pre-
dicament is highly ranked by international relations scholars as an important
matter, as of the middle of the second decade of this millennium few scholars
in the field were taking it as their prime research concern (Harrington 2016).
Robert Keohane (2015) made a similar argument more generally about politi-
cal science in his 2014 James Madison lecture. More specifically the field has
been slow to adopt the Anthropocene formulation as the appropriate contex-
tualization for contemporary investigations (Pereira 2017; Simangan 2020).
Peace research likewise (Kelly 2021). Much of this is a matter of disciplinary
specialization; international relations is about states, institutions, world orders
and discussions of war and peace, not a matter of geology. As Hardt (2021)
notes, the debates about climate change in the United Nations have likewise,
as of 2020, mostly not embraced these new scientific contextualizations either,
although in contrast the United Nations Development Programme (2020) has
recently begun using the Anthropocene to contextualize what needs to be
 Geostory: deep time and history 59

done in terms of development in the novel circumstances of the twenty first

century. But, as this book and these other recent interventions make clear, the
implicit contextualization of a stable backdrop to human affairs that much of
international relations works within is increasingly out of date and as a result
a rethink is urgently needed.

UNIFORMITARIANISM AND CATASTROPHISM

While the history of the geological sciences since the early nineteenth century
has been one first of a recognition of how old the earth is, and how to unravel
its history from the accumulated sedimentary rocks with their fossil assem-
blages, more recent concerns have incorporated numerous novel scientific
methods both to accurately date rocks and fossils and to connect up seemingly
disparate geological features (Lewis and Maslin 2018). Nineteenth and early
twentieth century thinking frequently suggested a fairly stable earth with uni-
formitarianism as a key principle; contemporary processes were an accurate
guide to how geological processes had worked in the distant past, and gradual
changes were a matter of evolution by natural selection in ways outlined by
Darwin. The counter argument, that the world had been subject to dramatic
catastrophes in the past, with relatively stable periods in-between, the so called
catastrophist theories, suggested a very different history of the earth and its
modes of life, with huge, albeit infrequent, disruptions repeatedly reshaping
evolution.
In the second half of the twentieth century the gradual acceptance of theories
of plate-tectonics, and the consequent confirmation of continental drift, sug-
gested a dynamic earth where landmasses moved and continents coalesced and
broke apart, and did so leaving the evidence in rocks that were to be found in
widely dispersed locations. The movement of continents also implied shifting
ocean currents, and while much of geology is focused on the landmasses above
sea level, it is always worth remembering both that life started in the oceans
and that they cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface, a matter naval personnel
understand even if land based security thinkers sometimes forget. Ocean acid-
ification due to the rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which is being
absorbed by seawater looms over discussions of the future of the earth system,
and whether it will trigger a global extinction catastrophe.
As the history of the planet has gradually been pieced together in recent
decades, what has become clear is that conditions have fluctuated dramatically
in the past and life has nearly been extinguished on a number of occasions
(Rockström and Gaffney 2021). In events involving dramatic episodes of vol-
canic action as well as the extension of ice over much of the planet, a so called
snow ball world in the distant past, the planet’s physical configuration and the
chemical composition of its atmosphere and oceans have undergone dramatic
60 Rethinking environmental security

changes. These dramatic transformations are part of the earth’s history, and
remain so. Climate change is highlighting this point; the earth is a dynamic
system, and one that faces various rapid transitions in the foreseeable future
both in terms of climate disruptions and in terms of the ongoing dramatic
alterations to the species mix on land and in the oceans.
Once life established itself in the oceans it has persisted, and sometimes
become a significant player in changing how the earth system works. In the
1970s James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis posited that life itself played a key
regulatory function in keeping the overall system broadly within parameters
that allowed life itself to continue. This so called Gaia Hypothesis (Lovelock
1979) has been broadly confirmed in recent decades, and the significance it
has for how environmental security might now be understood is profound.
Living things have a role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,
and when they die they sometimes sequester it in sediments on land and on
the ocean floor. Volcanoes emit carbon dioxide among other gases, and the
amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere fluctuates, with
climate consequences. Now that humanity is rapidly adding carbon dioxide
to the atmosphere, and doing so much more rapidly than previous geological
transformations have done, the consequences are likely to be quick and dra-
matic in geological terms.
Life itself is a participant in the earth system, but not the only one. Moving
continents, the gradually growing intensity of solar radiation, the intricacies of
celestial mechanics and the fluctuation of planetary orbits as well as volcanic
action are obviously also key, but these constitute the context within which
life evolves, and in doing so it changes the chemistry of the system. The term
system here is key, as the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere
and biosphere are all interconnected in complicated and changing ways,
best encapsulated in the term ecosphere. There are feedback loops too where
changes in one component amplify or negate trends in others. No longer is it
possible to posit the planet as a given substrate on which life lives. If all the
world is a stage, to borrow the Shakespearian formulation, then it’s one with
props and characters repeatedly changing the structure of that stage. This is the
overall contextualization that now needs to be incorporated into discussions of
environmental security.
Crucial for the current discussion is the point that the Isthmus of Panama
closed about three million years ago, separating the Atlantic from the Pacific
and in the process changing ocean circulation and much of the world’s climate.
It’s about then that ice started collecting on Greenland and that the planet
adopted a climate pattern that has been fairly consistent throughout the period
since known as the Pleistocene. The more recent part of this was marked by
a long term ice age, with large masses of ice on the Northern continents much
of the time. But this was interrupted periodically by shorter term “inter-glacial”
 Geostory: deep time and history 61

warming periods where rapid warming led to the temporary retreat of the ice
sheets.
This system has come to an end very recently. The period since the last
retreat of the ice sheets, with the dramatic flooding events and rapid climate
fluctuations between twelve and ten thousand years ago, has been remarkably
stable in comparison to the previous million years. This recent period of the
Holocene has been when humanity flourished and came to be the dominant
species in the earth system. In part this related to the very stable atmospheric
conditions that have prevailed over this period, and the fairly consistent level
of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the crucial greenhouse gas.
But no longer; human actions have dramatically altered this, and the conse-
quences are starting to play out in ways that are already unsettling the largely
predicable climates in most parts of the world as well as the assumptions we
make about the future of the planet and how we can live as a result. Much
of this is because of the widespread use of fire by humans to change many
things. In the process we have introduced something novel into the earth
system, a collection of materials, technologies and waste best simply called the
technosphere, and the future of this is now key to human security in this now
increasingly artificial ecosphere (Zalasiewicz, Williams, Waters et al. 2017).
Human actions have also dramatically changed the mix of terrestrial species
and their locations, a process of habitat disruption and artificial migration on
a planetary scale analogous to earlier rapid geological transformations.
To put this larger context into the environmental security discussion requires
a brief but essential digression into matters of ecology and geophysics, the
latter at least being familiar to at least the more technical branches of security
studies. Indeed some of the key insights into how the earth system operates
have their origins in cold war science investigations. The carbon dioxide
monitoring station on Moana Lao in Hawai’i dates from the International
Geophysical Year in the late 1950s, a time of scientific collaboration in,
among other places, Antarctica, despite the obvious military dimensions to
contemporaneous research in both the United States and the Soviet Union.
The widely seen plots of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that iconic
upward curve that has come to symbolize climate change, date from 1958. In
this crucial sense some of the science that explains planetary geophysics is
a result of military research, and it is perhaps no accident that militaries around
the globe have long been more worried about climate change than many other
institutions.
The most obvious points sometimes are the most important in linking envi-
ronmental matters, security and the human place in the earth system, and this
is clearly the case in relation to fire, geology and life (Pyne 2012). The emer-
gence of fire as a geophysical phenomenon in the earth system is dependent on
both atmospheric oxygen and fuel to burn. That fuel in the earth system in the
62 Rethinking environmental security

detritus from terrestrial life mostly, because what burns is organic matter, rich
in carbon. Hence life is fuel for combustion; timber, grass and other vegetation
suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the process of photosynthesis,
and provide the fuel supply both for animals to eat and metabolize and for
combustion to burn, which returns carbon dioxide to the air. Prior to life
emerging from the oceans and colonizing terrestrial surfaces there wasn’t fuel
to burn. Life itself has produced the oxygen in the atmosphere that we breath
and that burns things.
Life itself pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, reversing the pro-
cesses of volcanoes that, among other things, expel carbon dioxide into the
air. Volcanoes do other things too, not least injecting aerosols into the upper
atmosphere and cooling the planet’s surface. But terrestrial life is a crucial
regulator of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Once life in the form of trees in
particular colonized land surfaces and subsequently got buried prior to decay-
ing, then fossil fuels were the result, deeply buried and stored carbon as part
of the geological processes of carbon sequestration. Other life forms buried
in the processes of sedimentation gave rise to petroleum and natural gases,
locking large quantities of carbon into the ground. At least this was part of the
natural history of the planet until Homo sapiens figured out how to reverse
the process and, in using fossil fuels for numerous combustion technologies,
started rapidly turning rocks back into air. Quite literally.
The climate of the earth system isn’t all about carbon dioxide levels, but they
matter not least because increases in carbon dioxide levels are clearly related
to perturbations of the earth system in the geological past. Severe extinction
events in the past have been related to rises in carbon dioxide levels and their
fall related to episodes of glaciation. Other factors such as the fluctuations in
the earth’s orbit and how the earth’s axis tilts in relation to the sun over long
periods have a profound effect on climate. These so called Milankovich cycles,
named after the astronomer who worked out their periodicity and how they
interconnect, have shaped the major glacial and inter-glacial fluctuations in
the planetary system over the last few million years. But the earth is a dynamic
system and the continents move, and with them the ocean currents too; only in
the last few million years, since the Isthmus of Panama closed and prevented
equatorial flows of ocean currents, has the configuration of the climate system
approximated what humanity has known throughout its history.
Crucial to this configuration is the role of the Gulf Stream in the North
Atlantic, pushing warm water north to give Europe a relatively mild climate,
and sucking carbon dioxide from surface waters in the North Atlantic down
into the depths prior to recirculating those waters deep below the surface into
the rest of the oceans. In 2021 alarm was expressed once again over the slowing
of that current and the possibility that melting Greenland ice is changing the
density of the surface waters and slowing this Atlantic Meridional Overturning
 Geostory: deep time and history 63

Current (AMOC) “conveyor belt” (Caesar, McCarthy, Thornally et al. 2021).

While its abruptly stopping, the scenario in the Hollywood disaster movie The
Day After Tomorrow, is unlikely, if it slows substantially then Europe, ironi-
cally, may temporarily suffer colder weather if the Gulf Stream’s waters don’t
warm the continent as they have done throughout human history.
Antarctica has been over the southern pole for much longer, accumulating
ice slowly for tens of millions of years there. White surfaces, ice and snow,
reflect much more sunlight back into space than darker ones, oceans or land
surfaces, and this affects the overall heat balance of the planet too. Melting ice
in the Arctic in particular is worrisome because of the enhanced albedo effect
of darker water surfaces and their presence in Northern regions for longer parts
of the year. Both Greenland and Antarctic ice cores have recorded changes
in climate over the last million years, trapped atmospheric gases revealing
the complex changes over this period, one that has seen repeated advances
and retreats of ice sheets over the Northern Hemisphere landmasses. Driven
by Milankovich cycles, and enhanced heating and cooling as greenhouse gas
levels rose and fell as vegetation spread and retreated with the glaciers, the
geological history can be traced by examining this frozen record.
But no longer do the Milankovich cycles drive the climate system in the way
they have done since before the emergence of Homo sapiens. Now the most
important driver of climate change is the extraordinarily rapid rise in carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere. Methane and nitrous oxide too, as well as other
gases given off by human activities, notably the ozone depleting chlorofluoro-
carbons, contribute to heating the planet, but carbon dioxide is the most signif-
icant trace gas in the atmosphere that traps heat. Human activities are now the
key to its rapidly growing presence. On current trajectories it is set to double
its concentration later this century, and one of the key scientific quests of the
moment is calculating exactly how sensitive the global temperature change is
to this rising level of the leading greenhouse gas. This climate sensitivity, as it
is known, is fundamental to projections of future disruptions. The question is
how hot will it get, and how fast? That all this recently added gas will increase
temperatures notably in coming decades is clear, but policy decisions to curtail
combustion will slow this down. The sooner combustion is rapidly reduced the
slower the increase in temperature and the easier it will be for human systems
to adapt to new circumstances. This is key to numerous forms of security in
the twenty first century.
If much of the realist literature that shaped international relations, and
more specifically strategic studies, since the middle of the twentieth century
is focused on the importance of power, then the Anthropocene discussion
requires consideration of the material processes involved in its operation.
Power in human terms is about the ability to shape circumstances and force
others to act in ways that they might not wish to. Coercion involves the
64 Rethinking environmental security

threats of violence and force and, when it meets resistance, the use of that
violence to either eliminate others or overcome resistance and force them
to do your bidding. Technology has been key to this in recent centuries, and
the ever larger application of industrial production systems to the production
of the mode of violence produced the mass conscript armies of the first half
of the twentieth century armed with ever more violent modes of firepower.
Subsequently the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons in turn dwarfed
these technologies, and missiles extended their range and speed dramatically
too, threatening all life on the terrestrial surfaces.
Now power is about the ability to shape the configuration of many of the
key planetary systems, not least the climate one. Determining how hot the
planet will get is a key part of global politics, and the Paris Climate Change
Agreement, with its aspirational statements about keeping the planet’s average
temperature increase to close to one and a half degrees Celsius, is about pre-
cisely this power. Who decides how hot it will get, and hence with what con-
sequences for humans in various parts of the planet, is now the most important
question of which forms of human power are applied how and where, with
specific consequences for human security depending on wealth and crucially
geography.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of all this is that the rise in concentration
of atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing the acidification of the oceans.
Already this is part of the problem coral reefs face, in addition to rising water
temperatures. The rapid acidification of ocean waters is happening at a rate
for which there is no obvious parallel in the geological history of the planet.
“The only thing that comes close to this is the Paloecene-Eocene Thermal
Maximum shock 55 million years ago—a major extinction event, particularly
in the ocean—but that happened over a much longer period” (Rockström and
Gaffney 2021, 80). Given that life is predominantly an aqueous phenomenon,
this is especially ominous for the future even if humanity, as a terrestrial rather
than oceanic species, is slow to understand how fundamental such a shift in the
earth system actually is. The possibility of such drastic disruptions to the earth
system looms if humanity continues burning fossil fuels into the future.

COMBUSTION AND FIREPOWER

Steven Pyne’s (2012) discussions of fire history offer the key here in linking
the historical and the geological. His argument is simple and profound for
rethinking environmental security. In all the discussions of what makes human-
ity unique among other species, he suggests that fire is the key. Historians
frequently look to other things: culture, language, technology, even bipedal
locomotion, habitat making and so on. But clearly animals have the rudiments
of language, and the ability to communicate and learn socially. Whales and
 Geostory: deep time and history 65

elephants obviously learn, and cooperate over large distances, changing migra-
tion paths in relation to changing ecological conditions, food supplies and
threats from humans. Birds, squirrels and other animals build substantial and
intricate nests. Ants and termites build complex communal habitats. Beavers
are fine hydrological engineers that have substantial ecological transformation
capabilities, their dams changing many landscapes for other species. But only
humans have learned to start and partially control fire. Some birds do try to
move smoldering embers from wildfire to start other fires to flush out prey, but
only humans have learned what Pyne calls the ignition trick.
Our ancestors learned to start fires, and keep them burning by providing
them with fuel. That changed everything for our species. It allowed us to keep
warm in places where survival without additional heat was difficult. Fire led
to cooking, and in the process, by changing diets and allowing humans to
effectively pre-digest various foods, extended what we could eat and hence
our ecological range. Fire offered a weapon against other animals, and against
other humans too. Driving animals into a killing ground by using fire is
organized human violence on a substantial scale. Scorched earth is a tactic in
hunting as well as in warfare. Fire allows the hardening of spear tips, which
also helps in contests with large animals, and as a mode of hunting for food
too. Hunting has over time reduced animal populations in numerous places
and is a contributing cause of the elimination of large species in the aftermath
of the last ice age. This was a large scale ecological change in many parts of
the world. Fire allowed humans to range widely as the glaciers retreated, and
the ecological consequences were profound as humans were able to eliminate
potential competitors in numerous places.
As more settled communities emerged, fire helped with deforestation, as
well as grassland regeneration and numerous other useful ecological processes.
Land clearing for agriculture is facilitated by burning forests, a phenomenon
that is still part of the process of expanding agriculture in tropical forests to
this day, and a matter of contentious politics, only most obviously in Indonesia
and Brazil, although caution needs to be exercised in attributing all fires to
forest clearing in these cases. Fires also allowed for the crucial innovation of
smelting metals, and with that the expansion of all sorts of technologies, not
only the obvious ones of weapons. Tin, bronze, iron and subsequently steel
have been key technologies of war, as well as much else in human history, but
smelting is a key geological process, effectively a new mode of metamorphosis
in geological terms where heated rocks transform their minerals as a result of
chemical transformation under pressure. And more recently heat is crucial to
the construction of that key new artificial rock that we know as concrete. Here
too military as well as civilian uses of this novel geological form matters.
Most recently humanity has taken these smelted forms and used them to
construct ever more sophisticated spaces for the controlled use of fire. Mostly
66 Rethinking environmental security

this is key in military terms, in terms of cannon, muskets and rifled weapons as
well as the propulsion systems of rockets, a matter of firepower literally. But
elsewhere, in what Pyne (2021) calls a pyric transition, ever more sophisticated
uses of fire have been harnessed in the technological transformation that is
usually called the industrial revolution. First in the form of the combustion
spaces of steam engines, concentrating heat to make steam and hence con-
verting heat into mechanical energy. This allowed for railways and what are
still called steam ships, using those engines to transform shipping and rapidly
expand global trade, European imperial reach and the processes of coloniza-
tion in the nineteenth century. Then subsequently, in what are correctly termed
internal combustion engines, fire was made to generate much more efficient
mechanical energy in the cylinders of those engines, setting weapons in motion
in tanks and armoured cars, and all the rest of us in motion in the extensive
expansion of suburbanization of the twentieth century, made possible by the
private automobile. And, despite the recent increasingly popular use of electric
vehicles, nearly all of those are still powered by gasoline and diesel engines
years after the signing of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
All of this is a matter of the ever more sophisticated utilization of combus-
tion, the power made possible by controlling fire. This firepower, to extend
the conventional use of the term to encompass these larger related processes,
is key to the extraordinary extension of humanity in recent generations. In
terms of the geological part of geostory, this is key, because at the heart of the
rapidly escalating climate crisis of our times, combustion is what is directly
causing greenhouse gases to rise and indirectly at the heart of most of the other
processes that are changing the atmosphere rapidly and dangerously. Military
power and ecological transformation go hand in hand, and therein lies one key
to the current crisis of global environmental insecurity. The other is the matter
of the extensive use of similar technologies for civilian use in the last three
quarters of a century.
In Barry Buzan’s (1991) synthesis of security studies he focuses on the
importance of arms races and both the quantity and the quality of weapons in
the hands of rival powers. Competition for a technical edge over adversaries
is a key dynamic in modern military rivalries. While this matters in terms of
particular historical circumstances, it is also worth noting that fire has long
been a weapon of war, even if the modes of starting it have changed. Scorched
earth tactics are as old as warfare; depriving rivals of resources, food, shelter
and fuel is a key to winning a conflict. In the history of the technologies of
violence, innovations in combustion with the invention and use of gunpowder
both to destroy things directly and, in the form of rockets, to propel projectiles
added to military capabilities (Crosby 2002). Ever more sophisticated explo-
sives are based on combustion, and the destruction they make possible is key
to combat capabilities for most military forces. Rockets have been updated into
 Geostory: deep time and history 67

guided missiles, and at the largest scale intercontinental ballistic missiles, all
requiring sophisticated fuels to burn for propulsion.
Fire too has made ever more sophisticated weapons possible. Smelting
metals and shaping swords, spears and armour requires metallurgy based
on combustion. Combined with gunpowder, metallurgy provides mortars,
cannons and ever more sophisticated muskets, rifles and subsequently machine
guns. Land based cannons of ever greater power required dramatically chang-
ing the configuration of fortifications; high medieval walls provided easy
targets, and had to be replaced by structures that resisted or deflected cannon
balls. Naval gunnery grew ever more sophisticated as metallurgy improved in
the nineteenth century in particular. As cannons gave way to breech loading
weapons and rifled barrels, the range and capabilities of these weapons gave us
iron clads, dreadnoughts and then battleships.
Key to these innovations was the development of the other use of firepower,
the industrial application of technology to turn heat energy into mechanical
energy, crucially in the iconic machines of the industrial revolution, steam
engines. Using coal or wood to heat water and generate pressure in boilers
allowed pistons and cylinders to generate mechanical force. Once that
trick was mastered, and James Watt’s more sophisticated versions of John
Newcomen’s designs could govern their power output, numerous things
became possible. Industrial power generation mechanized production, notably
first in the Lancashire cotton mills, as industrialists used these machines to
greatly increase their control over their labourers (Malm 2016). Put in motion
as railway locomotives and then propulsion units in ships, steam ships replaced
sail and dramatically enhanced long distance transport in the nineteenth
century.
Further control over combustion, moving the fire itself into the cylinders of
engines in the aptly called “internal combustion engines” powered by diesel
and gasoline, led to dramatic extensions of the range and power of transporta-
tion. Airplanes followed too, with piston engines and then jet engines making
the atmosphere a whole new arena for combat. Incendiaries could now set
distant cities and factories afire, but most of these new weapons still relied on
combustive explosions to do their damage, even if secondary fires consumed
enemy people, equipment and buildings. The firestorms in European and
Japanese cities demonstrated this all too clearly in the 1940s.
The rise of modernity has been about both colonization and industrializa-
tion, the former frequently providing the raw materials for key parts of the
production processes that were accelerated by industrial production systems.
The rise of industrial states is not unrelated to the growth of imperial power
in the nineteenth century, first in Britain and subsequently in other empires,
of which the American and Russian expansions in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were especially notable. The partly thwarted rise of
68 Rethinking environmental security

Germany and the constrictions of geography in Europe are part of the story of
how these expansions turned to war with all the tragic consequences in the first
half of the twentieth century. It is also worth remembering that imperial poli-
cies stymied economic innovation in many of the colonies, and delayed their
“development” into modern states. Amitav Ghosh (2016) notes that if Britain
hadn’t stopped Indian experimentation with steam engines in the early nine-
teenth century, and the industrial revolution had spread there then, the upshot
might well have been that the current climate crisis might have occurred some
decades earlier!

GEOPOLITICS

Crucial to the story of firepower and its role in the current security crisis is
the link between the increasingly sophisticated control of combustion and
geopolitics; energy systems are tied to struggles for political dominance much
more so than to the market forces that economic explanations for growth
frequently suggest (Daggett 2021). Steam ships were powered by coal in the
nineteenth century, and as steam power was gradually introduced into nautical
affairs following the initial naval engagements in the American civil war, coal
was the fuel used. But engineering innovations made possible the use of oil as
a much more effective fuel for ships. In the case of Britain, whose Royal Navy
did for a while rule the waves, coal was to be had in substantial quantities at
home. Petroleum was in short supply domestically and hence, while it might
be a better fuel, securing its reliable supply for the navy would require foreign
sources which might be at risk of enemy interdiction in the event of hostilities.
Thus the decision to change the navy from coal to oil came with huge
geopolitical consequences. As one of the key players in the British admiralty,
Winston Churchill was part of the decision making to take the risk. As he
wrote a couple of decades later:

The oil supplies of the world were in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign
control. To commit the navy irrevocably to oil was indeed to take arms against a sea
of troubles. If we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be
able to raise the whole power and efficiency of the navy to a definitely higher level;
better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense forms of war power—in
a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture. (Churchill 1923, as cited by Dahl
2001, 51)

The British involvements in what was then called Persia are tied into this
search for fuel supplies and the subsequent history of the region is in part
a result of this decision. Daniel Yergin’s (1991) history of petroleum is named
The Prize in recognition of Churchill’s formulation of the importance of petro-
leum in this mastery of the geopolitics of the modern world. The Middle East
 Geostory: deep time and history 69

has been a key supplier of petroleum since then, and much of the history of the
last few decades is tied to this geography; so too is the pattern of violence, the
incidence of wars and the fluctuating price of petroleum (Bichler and Nitzan
2004). The industrial infrastructure and logistics for both weapons systems and
fossil fuel extraction are interconnected in numerous complex ways.
A further extension of the connections between firepower, domination and
danger came with nuclear technology, once again offering greatly expanded
capabilities for destruction. The fission weapons that destroyed Nagasaki and
Hiroshima were puny in comparison with the subsequent fusion or thermonu-
clear weapons that were built and tested in the 1950s. While the initial deto-
nation isn’t technically combustion, the secondary effects of nuclear weapons
include widespread incineration and damage caused by fires (Peterson 1983).
Combustion remains at the heart of military capabilities; the technical innova-
tions in the Second World War with engines, vehicles and aircraft extended
the capabilities of firepower dramatically and in the process set in motion the
expansion of mobility that marked the second half of the twentieth century, the
period that earth system scientists aptly term the great acceleration (McNeill
and Engelke 2016). Nuclear technology has also enhanced naval mobility,
with reactors powering many of the large naval vessels as well as submarines
currently in service.
But the sheer scale of the potential destruction in the cold war arsenals of
the superpowers threatened complete destruction should they ever be deto-
nated in a conflict. The rapid expansion of the superpower arsenals amounted
to a logic of exterminism, in Edward Thompson’s (1982) phrasing, where
the competitive logic of building ever larger nuclear arsenals in the pursuit
of some chimera of security leads to annihilation. The arms culture that Our
Common Future criticized explicitly warned of this logic, one that threatened
to make environmental insecurity the future condition for all. The apotheosis
of firepower is the threat of nuclear winter and the destabilization of the eco-
sphere to such an extent that civilized life becomes impossible. Firepower has
become an existential threat to the civilization that has used it so extensively.
Understanding security in terms of power, the key to understanding it in terms
of dominance, has in a world altered by fire come to render humanity insecure
in novel ways, precisely due to the search for these forms of “security”.
Given these connections between firepower in the conventional military
sense of the ability to bring destruction to an enemy, and the technologies of
modernity, industrial and transportation related that are all reliant on combus-
tion, it’s not too much of a stretch to suggest that the term firepower can be
extended to this larger assemblage of technologies. The ability of combustion
based technologies to transform environments rapidly is part of the current
stage of the Anthropocene, one that is destabilizing the earth system. Fire is
still used to clear forests, as the concerns about tropical rain forest destruction
70 Rethinking environmental security

in numerous places in Africa as well as the headline cases of the Amazon and
Indonesia highlight, but a key part of this transformation involves the use of
chainsaws, mostly powered by that ubiquitous technology of modernity, the
internal combustion engine.
Concrete too requires the large use of combustion to generate the heat
needed to make it. Most industrial processes use heat in some form. Bulldozers
and excavators that are remaking landscapes and transforming ecosystems into
monoculture agricultural spaces likewise. Boats, planes and trains as well as
vehicles nearly all rely on firepower in this application to move. Modernity
may be epitomized by mobility, but much of this is a matter of applied power
provided by the technological control of fire. “Firepower” quite literally. Now,
as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, we have come to realize that
one of the consequences of all this firepower is climate change. History now is
about geological scale changes, hence the necessity of thinking about geostory
(Latour 2014), geology and history combined into one contextualization, one
narrative that emphasizes the fact that the future of the planet depends on how
firepower is shaped in coming decades.
In Pyne’s (2021) terms the first fires, of nature burning organic material,
were supplemented by second fires, humans working with fire to change
landscapes and, using organic materials, usually wood, to extend their range
and technological capabilities. All this changed when, in his terms, third fire
or lithic fire, using the long sequested carbon in rocks, in what are called
fossil fuels, powered novel industrial arrangements and unleashed a new
geological situation where fire now dominates the climate system, not the ice
of the Pleistocene period. Coupled with attempts in many parts of the world
to suppress first fires—where fire is a natural part of ecosystems, facilitating
their regeneration—and colonial attempts to prevent native peoples in parts
of the world using their traditional fire practices to shape landscapes, now
climate disrupted spaces are generating much more intense and larger wild-
fires, only most obviously in California, Australia, Greece and Portugal’s
“Mediterranean” climate zones, but also across the boreal forests of the
Northern Hemisphere. The implications in terms of ocean acidification are
especially ominous for the future of humanity.
There is simply far too much firepower now loose in the earth system.
Stephen Pyne (2021) suggests that we are living in the Pyrocene, a geological
period where fire now dominates the earth system in ways that, until recently,
ice used to. Precisely what has allowed the enormous expansion of humanity,
and the removal of most ecological competitors, is now endangering the future
success of the mode of human society powered by fossil fuels. Where security
dilemmas in the past have been about military preparations to provide security
for some, hence raising the alarm among those supposedly being defended
against, now the environmental security dilemma poses the issue of unintended
 Geostory: deep time and history 71

backwash effects at the global scale. The development and deployment of

firepower is endangering all by the disruptions of the climate system and the
eradication of biodiversity, with as yet unforeseen potential hazards. In the
words of Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo from the 1960s, “we have seen
the enemy and he is us”!
4. The geopolitics of colonizing nature

IMPERIAL LEGACIES

George Perkins Marsh, writing in the 1860s when he was an American diplo-
mat in Rome, focused attention on the third of Clarence Glacken’s (1967) three
questions, that of the human impact on the earth. March pondered the legacy
of the Roman empire and its impact on environments across the Mediterranean
area. There was little pristine left when the Western empire expired, and
the legacy of that empire impressed Marsh fifteen centuries later. Marsh
(1864/1965, 11) suggested that:

… the primitive source, the causa causarum, of the acts and neglects which have
blasted with sterility and physical decrepitude the noblest half of the empire of the
Caesars, is, first, the brutal and exhausting despotism which Rome herself exercised
over her conquered kingdoms, and even over her Italian territory; then, the host of
temporal and spiritual tyrannies which she left as her dying curse to all her wide
dominium, and which in some form of violence or of fraud, still brood over almost
every soil subdued by the Roman legions.

This empire, with its patterns of settling retired legionnaires in newly con-
quered lands and its fascination with using exotic animals in spectacles and
“games”, clearly transformed much of its region. That Marsh could see this
legacy a millennium and a half later suggests that the long term transformation
of the earth is just that—a long term human project.
But it is also the case that the expansive nature of the empire is replicated
in numerous other human histories, a matter of environmental history being
part and parcel of colonizing processes where frontiers are pushed back from
metropolitan centres precisely in the process of extracting resources to feed,
fuel and supply those centres. Prior occupants, both human and other species,
frequently resist these intrusions, but the dynamic of imperial expansion is
a repeated pattern in human history; environmental change has to be under-
stood in these terms, if the novel patterns of the Anthropocene are to be
understood in context. Assumptions of a pristine nature usurped by humanity
ignore the long history of colonization and its ecological transformations.
While European colonists, and the naturalists who often accompanied naval
expeditions of exploration, may have viewed what they came across as more

72
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 73

or less pristine (Grove 1995, 1997), and the peoples who inhabited their new
colonies in the Americas and Africa as primitive, in that they didn’t live in
European ways, the long history of human habitation had changed landscapes
and species mixes in numerous ways prior to their incorporation into the global
economy.
Looking further back in human history suggests that current changes can
be understood in terms of the expansion of our species over the period of the
Holocene to fill numerous ecological niches and, simultaneously, develop
numerous modes of life that interconnected in complex ways with the rest
of the ecologies that humans intruded upon. As Chapter 3 has indicated,
being the fire species allowed this spread in ways that other species could
not emulate. In the process the human influence has spread and dramatically
altered landscapes along with, more recently, seascape—where fishing has
extended the reach of human appropriations of nature—and the wider oceans
as they acidify. The expansion of humanity through the Holocene has been an
extended process. Iceland was first colonized a millennium ago, and likewise
some of the Pacific Islands on a broadly similar timescale.
One could argue that this process of reaching all the continents has only
recently been completed, when, in the twentieth century, permanent settle-
ments were finally established in Antarctica. But, and this is a crucial point in
the whole process of colonization, in this case, even more than others, these
communities are dependent on supplies of food, fuel and building materials
brought from a great distance. Crucially humanity has both brought with it
various biota, and in the process changed ecologies fundamentally wherever
it has gone, although once again Antarctica is an extreme case. Permanent
settlements on the moon, and perhaps later on Mars, are now being actively
discussed by aficionados of space exploration, suggesting that the colonizing
impetus is far from over (Davenport 2018). Curiosity about what’s over the
horizon combined with ever more capable technologies and the search of novel
ways to make a living persist as a powerful combination in human affairs.
Now, ironically, fear of catastrophe on earth is providing justification for space
exploration; having only one planet is apparently a dangerous gamble for the
human species.

SLOW VIOLENCE

In much of human history, however, colonization hasn’t been just about

humans using ingenuity to spread to uninhabited places. The first peoples to
inhabit a place have frequently been displaced, conquered and in some cases
eliminated by subsequent arrivals. This is only most obviously the case in
terms of the expansion of European colonization in the last half millennium,
a matter of slow violence in Rob Nixon’s (2011) terms, where landscape trans-
74 Rethinking environmental security

formation is tied into the spread of novel forms of economy, and where the
peoples are displaced, often violently, in the process. In the history of coloni-
zation, in the Americas in particular, native peoples have suffered destruction
and displacement, not least by the introduction of diseases to which they had
little or no immunity.
But, and this is crucial for how environmental security is now being
rethought, it is nearly always the colonists who get to tell the stories of the
places and societies they have occupied, stories of conquest and victory told
mostly by white men. Those eliminated by the processes of colonization have
only rarely got to tell their stories of violence, dispossession and lost cultures,
a matter in need of correction by contemporary social scientists (O’Lear
2021). The current movements to decolonize social sciences and recoup the
lost stories of the violence of colonization are attempts to retell the histories
obliterated by the triumphalist settler narratives. In the process the places in
these narratives, and how they fit into the larger scheme of things, are being
reimagined, and who endangers who or what where is being reconsidered. The
people without history (Wolf 1982) are starting to reclaim their silenced pasts
and in the process both challenging the triumphalist colonial narratives of the
past and raising key questions of how the transformation of landscapes is an
integral part of those histories (Graeber and Wengrow 2021).
Environmental history research has been recouping these understandings
while also charting the ecological consequences of colonization at the global
scale (Hornborg, McNeill and Martinez-Alier 2007). Aided by both better
dating techniques and innovations in forensic archaeology it is now possible
to reconstruct the histories of colonization and also the diseases that afflicted
societies. Clearly empires are about much more than battles, conquest and the
glory of emperors; the human history of these events is also very much the
ecological history of their context, something George Perkins Marsh under-
stood in general terms about Rome, but which contemporary historians can
now reconstruct in much greater detail. In the case of Rome this is being done,
and the interconnections between climate and disease add crucial additional
insights into the fate of the empire (Harper 2017).
All this matters because at the heart of much of the concern about environ-
mental security are fears of resource shortages and potential dangers that lurk
on the frontier, or at least at a distance from the metropolitan centres where so
many of the texts on environmental danger are written. The geographical imag-
inations implicit, and sometimes explicit, in these discourses shape the policy
prescriptions because designations of the attributes of places, which “require”
certain modes of conduct, are a key part of how this political discourse works.
As later sections of this book will elaborate, the technical practices of devel-
opment, frequently now rephrased in terms of climate adaptation as a potential
solution to environmental insecurities, specify landscapes and their inhabitants
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 75

in ways that are frequently in danger of perpetuating colonizing practices that

fail to grapple with the complicated ecological and social contexts of human
vulnerability in the processes of development (Taylor 2014).
Human populations have been in what is now Australia for sixty millennia
or so and learned to live in a landscape where fire and El Nino climate cycles
shaped life in ways very different from what the European colonists knew
when they, and their biota, arrived in the eighteenth century. This incorpora-
tion of European colonists and their biota dramatically accelerated ecological
change in places where mines, roads, deforestation, plantations and other
forms of agriculture intruded, but the prior cultivation and hunting practices,
as well as forestry, meant that these were far from “pristine” landscapes. The
indigenous inhabitants had used fire as a mode of adjusting landscapes for
numerous millennia, although the mostly British settlers would take a very
long time to begin to understand the very different landscapes and ecological
conditions that the aboriginal peoples had lived in and worked with for so long
prior to the disastrous disruptions of the colonization (Flannery 1995). But
these European colonies were understood as sources of resources for the met-
ropolitan countries more than anything else, and “developed” as such. Danger
on the colonial frontier frequently came from the efforts of the dispossessed
to resist their displacements, as well as from unknown ecological phenomena
such as animals, plants and ecological conditions that were unknown to the
settlers, if not to the dispossessed local inhabitants.
In the Americas the disease burden brought by the settlers worked in their
favour at least in the higher latitudes, with smallpox, measles and other dis-
eases causing the death of many millions of indigenous inhabitants there. In
Africa and some other tropical locations, diseases often limited the influx of
colonists; yellow fever in particular shaped military strategies in the Caribbean,
where European forces needed to move quickly while their soldiers still could,
prior to being afflicted by the disease (McNeill 2007). What has been crucial
in all this is the movement of fauna and flora around the world; the Columbian
exchange of plants and animals has effectively meant that natural evolution of
landscapes is over; the artificial movement of species has changed ecologies
dramatically. The process goes on; the very tasty fish eaten on the shores of
Lake Titicaca high in the Andes are a Canadian trout species introduced, suc-
cessfully, as a food supply in the middle of the twentieth century. The history
of introduced species in Lake Victoria has been less successful; the story of
Asian Carp in America’s rivers quite easily qualifies as an ecological disaster
(Kolbert 2021). The processes of natural evolution have been dramatically
altered by the human movement of numerous species, sometimes intentionally
with locally beneficial effects for local societies, sometimes disastrously.
These increasingly artificial landscapes are now the context in which security
and environment have to be considered.
76 Rethinking environmental security

The disruptions of ecologies and landscapes which so alarm both activists in

particular places and scientists concerned with the overall state of biodiversity
are the other side of the colonizing coin. While settlers in much of imperial
history may have sought agricultural lands for their subsistence, their coloni-
zation of uncultivated lands, or their occupation of places where populations
have been eliminated or relocated, is also tied into the larger economies from
which they came (Crosby 1986). While much agricultural produce may be
consumed locally, some of it is a matter of production for trade, and for supply-
ing the urban centres of empire. But colonization has also been about seeking
other resources, whether fish, wildlife, timber, fuel or minerals, to feed and
supply urban centres. This geopolitics of plundering (Le Billon 2012) is a key
part of imperial histories; supplying the economy and the war machines of
great powers with key supplies is, as the discussion of firepower in Chapter 3
emphasized, a longstanding matter of military and imperial history. This is the
key context for thinking through twenty first century transformations.

THE EUROCENE

But while military innovation and demands for supplies are a key part of
history, they should not be overemphasized as the prime cause of ecological
disruption. World system thinkers have of late been rethinking the ecological
dimensions of the rise of the global economy, and the importance of examining
the history of capitalism in Europe and the implications this has had for the
subsequent transformation of the earth system. Jason Moore (2015) points to
the long processes of gradual expansion of European economies to suggest that
the key causes of the contemporary earth system crisis have their roots there.
Hence his suggestion that the term Capitalocene might be more appropriate
than that of Anthropocene given the power of economic forces generated by
the logic of accumulation that drives capital accumulation. The expansion of
Europe in search of materials and markets is a key point in all this and the
source of much of the contemporary global economy. While the bulk of these
transformations may have initially been in Europe, the long distance conse-
quences in terms of imperialism and the search for new sources of materials
and wealth were a key part of the emergence of a world system.
The conquest of the Americas also led to the “great dying” of the American
native peoples. While some of the destruction was as a consequence of direct
military violence, and the use of musketry and cannons using forms of fire-
power that were unknown in the Americas prior to the Europeans’ arrival,
the dislocations caused by epidemics were key to the dissolution of prior
civilizations. The agricultural systems feeding these societies collapsed in
many places, and abandoned fields were widely reforested. Lewis and Maslin
(2018) suggest that this reforestation removed enough carbon dioxide from
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 77

the atmosphere to be noticeable in the climate records, where 1610 marks the
lowest point. They suggest this point as a likely candidate for the start of the
Anthropocene because it simultaneously marks the unintended climate effects
of the conquest of the Americas, the incorporation of the whole world into
a single global economy, and the beginning of what has been a rise in carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere ever since. They suggest this “Orbis hypoth-
esis”, a synthesis of natural and human actions, marks the appropriate starting
point for the Anthropocene.
As to whether this dip in the carbon dioxide levels is the key to the begin-
ning of the Little Ice Age in Europe at least, paleoclimate experts might disa-
gree; some estimates suggest that the Little Ice Age in Europe, while regionally
significant, wasn’t a global climate event (Neukom, Steiger, Gómez-Navarro
et al. 2019). Hence the implication is that the Orbis hypothesis is a regional
rather than global artifact, and hence that it’s not a good starting point for the
Anthropocene. But clearly the calamities of the seventeenth century, which
were worldwide, did shape the beginnings of the emergence of the modern
state system in Europe (Parker 2013), a system that has subsequently been
extended worldwide, but which fits uneasily with other historical civiliza-
tions, only most obviously China. Conventional histories of the modern state
arrangements date them to the settlements that ended the thirty years war, the
popularly called Treaty of Westphalia, where exclusive territorial jurisdiction
was established as a principle at least in terms of religious observance. But
the other social and military transformations of the period hastened by the
emergence of novel economic arrangements shaped modern modes of govern-
ance with their territorial states, professional bureaucracies, taxation schemes,
financial administration, policing and standing armies.
Jarius Grove (2019) suggests that these profound transformations, and the
destruction of the native peoples of the Americas in particular, require naming
the contemporary period as the Eurocene rather than the Anthropocene. The
key mover, he suggests, was European imperialism, and the technological
innovations related to its violence have reverberated through the earth system
ever since. The catastrophes faced by indigenous peoples whose societies
were in many cases effectively destroyed, and some of which were eliminated
altogether, suggest that the period of the Anthropocene has been disastrous
for many societies. The conclusion from this is that the current alarms about
climate change and other imminent disruptions is nothing new for many of the
world’s peoples. What is new is that the rich and powerful among the states
that did the colonizing are now starting to worry that their future is threatened.
Hence the implication is that the Anthropocene discussion is merely a matter
of novelty for Europeans and Americans, but that much of the rest of the world
has long been dealing with massive dangerous disruptions, caused by those
self-same Europeans and Americans. Much of the Global South is thus preoc-
78 Rethinking environmental security

cupied with justice while the Europeans and Americans are looking to techno-
logical innovations to render themselves secure from the disruptions that their
prior activities have set in motion. Security thus means very different things
depending on where you are in the global economy, and the endless arguments
about climate finance in international forums and the annual Conferences of
the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC COPs) bear out both its importance and the great reluctance on the
part of rich states, not to mention their corporations, to pay for the indirect
consequences of their profligate use of fossil fuels.
The Global South faces a double vulnerability, both as a periphery in the
global power structure and as places in harm’s way as climate disruptions
accelerate. They face a situation of “climate terror” where climate science
warns that accelerating disruptions are likely, while they are mostly power-
less to influence the trajectories of fossil fuel combustion, and unable to get
effective compensation and aid from those who have caused their difficulties
(Chaturvedi and Doyle 2015). National security for these states is being com-
promised by the direct impact of storms and droughts and indirectly by the dis-
ruptions these cause to agriculture and rural economies more generally. Even
if a plausible case could be made to justify their going to war as an attempt to
ensure their survival (Martin 2020), they don’t have military options to deal
with the sources of their insecurity and hence their security is entirely depend-
ent on persuasion and international diplomatic efforts, which have—despite
promising developments in the Paris Agreement in 2015, at least as of 2021,
and the endless promises of future action to constrain fossil fuel use, reiterated
once again at the Glasgow COP in 2021—yet to deliver meaningful global
reductions in fossil fuel use.
In grappling with these transformations and in posing security in terms
of nation states, one of the key difficulties in climate politics emerges very
clearly. In Paul Harris’s (2021) terms one of the pathologies of climate gov-
ernance is precisely this division of the world into supposedly autonomous
states, an arrangement that stymies effective action to deal with matters that
cross national boundaries. This is an old problem in discussions of global envi-
ronmental matters, but one that is now much more urgent given rapid climate
change and the biodiversity crisis.

TERRITORIES, SOVEREIGNTIES, JURISDICTIONS

Crucially the dynamics of capitalism require the ever larger appropriation

of nature to provide the raw materials to be processed into products that are
sold to accumulate yet more wealth. With that goes the property systems that
demarcate who owns what and facilitate the enclosure of spaces for exclu-
sive use by economic actors. The extension of property relationships in land
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 79

requires more sophisticated systems of surveying, demarcating and delimiting

territories (Blomley 2019). While the contemporary notions of territory have
a long lineage, their dominance in how the world is divided up and the implicit
assumptions of this as the appropriate mode of governance are relatively recent
(Elden 2013). The precise demarcations of territory were frequently a key part
of the expansion of European empires and the colonization of the Americas.
The geometric shapes of many of the states that constitute the United States,
and likewise those of the Prairie provinces in Canada, remain a cartographic
reminder of this. Africa’s borders too; they were formally agreed upon by
European colonizers in a Berlin conference in the 1880s.
This imposition of territorial and, on the smaller scale, property relations
on the landscape, frequently in ignorance of the precise physical geographies,
is the governance framework used for grappling with numerous ecological
changes, and the discrepancy between the maps and ecologies remains a major
obstacle to sensible environmental governance in numerous places (Head
2019). The subsequent decolonization of some of the colonial states likewise
leaves a series of territorial and governance mechanisms that are at odds with
ecological circumstances, compounding the difficulties. The integration of
these post colonial states into the global economy, mostly as a source of com-
modities for export, perpetuates practices of extractivism, and in the process
enhances vulnerabilities both economically and ecologically.
The expansion of European empires involved the extension of resource
extractions and the conversion of relatively wild landscapes as well as sub-
sistence based agriculture into plantations and commercial farms. While the
extension of commercial relationships, making farmers dependent on global
food prices rather than local conditions, is part of the story of accelerated
colonization in the nineteenth century (Davis 2001), the extension of the
agricultural frontier in the Americas in particular is a key part of the growth
of imperial economies. Most obviously in those regions that Alfred Crosby
(1986) terms the neo-Europes, the temperate grasslands of the Americas as
well as Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, sheep and cattle raising
displaced both indigenous peoples and the grazing animals that thrived in
those ecosystems. In the case of Australia and New Zealand the invention of
effective refrigeration in the latter part of the nineteenth century made meat
exports to Britain possible, emphasizing once again the link between techno-
logical innovation and the growth of what was by then, despite imperial trade
restrictions in many places, a global economy.
The conversion of the American prairies into farms and ranches generated
agricultural produce and led to the rise of Chicago as “nature’s metropolis” in
Cronon’s (1991) terms, as the centre for the cattle trade. The small wars on
the frontier, and the destruction and displacement of indigenous peoples once
again, remind historians that this was a violent process. Progress this might be,
80 Rethinking environmental security

but only for those who manage to take possession of the colonized spaces and
have some luck with frontier agriculture. These processes also subsequently
gave the world the culturally ambiguous character of the cowboy, as well as
Upton Sinclair’s classic novel of the suffering of immigrant workers in the city
of Chicago, The Jungle. Development is a very uneven process, one that both
incorporates distant lands into metropolitan consumption and drives innova-
tion in cities, which in turn creates demands for new sources of materials and
energy in distant places connected by trading links (Taylor 2016).
These processes of dispossession and the privatization of land in the hands
of settlers and corporations continue in many parts of the world, accelerating
land use change and habitat destruction in numerous places, usually justified
in terms of economic growth and the supposedly inevitable processes of
development (Buxton and Hayes 2016). In the early decades of the twenty
first century these processes have also involved the use of extensive fires to
clear forests, most notably in Brazil and Indonesia. Clearing these landscapes,
for cattle grazing, palm oil plantations and other commercial activities, con-
tributes to both biodiversity loss and climate change, both immediately in
terms of the fires and subsequently in the reduction of carbon sequestration
because the forests are no longer there to act as carbon sinks. These “shadows
of consumption” (Dauvergne 2008) both hide the impacts of metropolitan
consumption from those consumers and, because of the territorial divisions
involved, frequently assign responsibility for the damage to local authorities
while occluding the consequences of long supply chains.
The crucial point in all this in terms of security is that what is being secured
is the legal order of property, and the commercial arrangements that facilitate
the expansion of the modern economy. The processes of economic growth are
about enclosures, privatization and the extension of property arrangements
ever further into terrestrial landscapes, as well as into the oceans, and, as dis-
cussions of mining asteroids and setting up permanent settlements on the moon
and eventually Mars suggest, ever more distant arrangements for the extraction
of resources to support economic expansion (Davenport 2018). This economy
and its dynamics of contested expansion suggest permanent states of eco-
nomic insecurity, but also, simultaneously, the need to secure these economic
arrangements which provide the consumer goods of modernity.
Some of the roots of modern notions of security lie in the rise of commercial
society and the search by nascent capitalists for social and political guarantees
that their wealth would not be subject to arbitrary appropriation by govern-
ments (Rothschild 1995). The legal arrangements to protect property and guar-
antee contracts are key to notions of security, and with them go the operations
of most national agencies to maintain this order. On the larger scale this is the
bedrock of the liberal international order that American notions of national
security are tied into (Latham 1997). The explicit formulations of these things
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 81

in terms of the free world, or in recent rearticulations, matters of democracy,

may obscure the importance of these arrangements, but the global environmen-
tal crisis highlights the fact that this expansion of economic activity is what
is being secured, at the cost of the functional biosphere. Both climate change
and the current global extinction event are the ecological manifestations of the
expansion of this technosphere into most parts of the ecosphere.
The elaborate attempts to deal with these contradictions are what much
of the discourse of sustainability is about, and the repeated attempts to com-
modify ecosystems and monetize “ecosystem services” as commercial efforts
to “sink” emissions in tropical forests or elsewhere extend this logic. The
certification processes whereby ecosystems are incorporated into this process,
including such dubious ideas as using eucalyptus forestry schemes as ecolog-
ical sinks, perpetuates the colonizing processes (Lansing 2010). This rein-
vention of plantation agriculture extends the long term pattern of commercial
extraction systems that feed urban markets at great distance. Understanding
climate finance and ecological sinks in these terms also suggests clearly that
the ecological arrangements that are commercialized in these manners need to
be secured into the future so that they can continue to deliver what the original
contracts suggested. But, given the speed of climate change, and the larger
political and economic dynamics of many states, these may be highly dubious
arrangements, at least in terms of the promises about ecological services that
they are premised upon (Dehm 2021). In many cases its far from clear that
trees or other species planted today will have the necessary weather conditions
or water supplies to thrive long into the future. Neither is it clear that the
rapidly changing rural property markets and commercial arrangements, or dis-
possessed rural populations, will ensure the continued existence of plantations
and ecosystem reserves into the long term future.
Likewise the extension of commercial property arrangements in rural areas
continues and, to use the term popularized in the early twenty first century,
“land grabbing” (Sassen 2013), where commercial and state enterprises appro-
priate land from indigenous peoples or subsistence farming communities, is
now aggravated by international efforts to outsource food and raw material
sources as part of climate adaptation. The globalization of agriculture and rural
property markets drives these processes and extends the logic of colonization
ever further into rural areas in the Global South in particular. Land has become
a new global asset class driving financial initiatives (Fairbairn 2020). Where
this process extends the frontier into forested places, then, as the high profile
discussions of Indonesia attest, deforestation to provide supplies of palm oil
for global urban markets simultaneously extends extraction further into rural
areas but also commercializes land and by removing forests demolishes habitat
for numerous species (Davis, Koo, Dell’Angelo et al. 2020). Where domestic
sources of food are imperilled by climate change, water shortages or other
82 Rethinking environmental security

problems, then sourcing food from abroad makes economic and security sense.
But if it is done at the expense of local communities elsewhere, then their
displacement simply changes the location of human insecurity from domestic
situations to those abroad where the land is purchased and repurposed for
export production.
Not least, all this is made even more complicated by the fact that the worst
labour conditions, indentured contract arrangements, and what is technically
termed slavery in many cases, involve workers engaged in the extractive
industries that supply the fuel and materials for the global economy:

Whether slaves are extracting gold from Ghana, granite from India, or graphite
from China, the impact of modern slavery on the natural climate is immense. From
Eastern Congo to the Bangladeshi Sundarbans to the Brazilian Amazon, slave labor
is routinely utilized by some of the most ecologically toxic industries on earth, like
brick making, clear-cut deforestation, precious-woods logging, and strip mining.
(Bales and Sovacool 2021, 1)

The irony here is that various environmental protection arrangements often

facilitate the invasion of protected spaces by criminal operations operating
to grab trees or other resources in spaces where legal operations have been
curtailed but enforcement mechanisms are inadequate. Dealing with these
matters of illegal logging and the criminal appropriation of resources for sale
on various illegal or quasi legal international markets adds an additional crim-
inal enforcement dimension to discussions of environmental security, matters
of “ecoviolence” that are usually missing from the social science literature on
environmental security (Stoett and Omrow 2021), but which are an essential
part of any attempt to think about global governance related to long term
sustainability.
For those expelled from their landscapes, the ecologically marginalized in
Homer-Dixon’s (1994) terms, and forced to migrate because of these processes
of resource capture, often into the informal settlements surrounding Southern
megacities, the outcome is frequently more insecurity. This is part of the larger
processes of modernization which, by the expansion of global production
systems and supply chains around the world, are in Sassen’s (2014) terms
expelling workers and farmers from numerous traditional modes of employ-
ment. This globalization process is both rendering national economies more
vulnerable to economic actions in distant places and expelling smallholder
farmers and traditional subsistence modes of livelihood in places where com-
mercial monocultures colonize landscapes. These dramatic transformations
now form the context within which people are rendered insecure, and it’s not
surprising that in many cases traditional landholders and indigenous peoples
act to resist commercial encroachments, whether they are mines, forestry
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 83

extractions, commercial plantations or dam construction projects (Menton and

Le Billon 2021).

PANDEMICS, DISEASES, ECOLOGY

These processes of landscape transformation and the increased contact of

people with previously relatively remote regions also highlights the dangers
of zoonotic diseases. Ebola, SARS, Zika, AIDS and most recently COVID-19
have emphasized the role of landscape disruptions and the possibilities of
viruses jumping species from wild animals to human populations. They have
also reminded everyone that these things spread, and that geographical dis-
tance and the use of border controls isn’t going to stop future epidemics. This
isn’t a newly recognized problem. Laurie Garrett’s magnum opus from the
1990s on The Coming Plague clearly identified the dangers of new zoonotic
diseases emerging from what she called a world out of balance:

Ultimately, humanity will have to change its perspective on its place in Earth’s
ecology if the species hopes to stave off or survive the next plague. Rapid globali-
zation of human niches requires that human beings everywhere on the planet go
beyond viewing their neighbourhoods, provinces, countries, or hemispheres as the
sum total of their personal ecospheres. Microbes, and their vectors, recognize none
of the artificial boundaries erected by human beings. (Garrett 1995, 618)

But, these warnings aside, the practices of security in the contemporary world
have been revealed as seriously inadequate for dealing with these circum-
stances by the spread of COVID-19 and the failures to contain it effectively.
This all requires much more attention in the process of rethinking environ-
mental security. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed once again how ill
prepared international health systems are for coping with the consequences of
an infectious outbreak. Human insecurity is highlighted here too by the lack of
medical care available for the poor and marginal in most societies where sur-
vival odds are also compromised by poverty and lack of access to safe drinking
water and good nutrition. Likewise health infrastructures are also vulnerable
to climate disruptions as the World Health Organization (2021) recognizes; it
has begun preparing climate vulnerability checklists for health care facilities,
lists that include extreme weather vulnerabilities as well as sea level concerns!
In Garrett’s (1995) terms the world is out of balance, and not only are
humans moving into new areas but climate change and habitat disruption are
also causing other species to move, both away from areas being deforested,
but also towards areas that may be more suitable as climate change causes
conditions to change. Migration towards the poles as the planet heats might be
a general summation, but more detailed patterns include upwards on hillsides
to cooler conditions. Both processes change the pattern of human encounters
84 Rethinking environmental security

with wildlife. In addition the spread of patterns of eating wild animals, both
as a necessity by local peoples and in exotic consumption practices among
the wealthy who pay a premium for status consumption experiences, changes
ecological interactions. Concerns about ecological fragmentation and deforest-
ation are clearly related to matters of zoonotic disease emergence (Gibb,
Redding, Chin et al. 2020). Habitat fragmentation and the routine penetration
of humans into relatively wild areas increases the opportunities for viruses
to jump from animals to people (Bloomfield, McIntosh and Lambin 2020).
Further disruption of relatively remote areas may generate yet more zoonotic
hazards for humans as the processes of “development” intrude on more remote
places.
As the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services (IPBES) workshop on biodiversity and pandemics sum-
marized matters late in 2020:

The underlying causes of pandemics are the same global environmental changes
that drive biodiversity loss and climate change. These include land-use change, agri-
cultural expansion and intensification, and wildlife trade and consumption. These
drivers of change bring wildlife, livestock, and people into closer contact, allowing
animal microbes to move into people and lead to infections, sometimes outbreaks,
and more rarely into true pandemics that spread through road networks, urban
centres and global travel and trade routes. The recent exponential rise in consump-
tion and trade, driven by demand in developed countries and emerging economies,
as well as by demographic pressure, has led to a series of emerging diseases that
originate mainly in biodiverse developing countries, driven by global consumption
patterns. (IPBES 2020, 2)

Care needs to be taken here with colonial interpretations of landscapes and

disease origins; it is all too easy to revert to simple arguments about the failure
of Southern states to manage their environments effectively, or resort to stere-
otyping of mysterious threats emanating from the unruly spaces in the Global
South, without investigating the processes that have shaped the landscapes in
the first place.
These old familiar invocations of fortress thinking, where dangers to civi-
lization lurk in dark spaces of the Global South, are in many cases seriously
misleading in terms of the causes of disease and what needs to be done in a glo-
balized world to deal with health emergencies, not least because the driving
forces that have displaced many smallholder farmers in recent decades are key
to the processes that have fragmented forests and opened up the ecosystems
to human encroachment. “The colonial plantation connected to the metropole
through telegram and precarious shipping has morphed into networks of
digitized financial capital and transit corridors moving germplasm, animals,
plants, and humans across vast distances in a fraction of the time” (Liebman,
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 85

Perfecto and Wallace 2020). Traditional smallholder farming may be much

more productive in terms of food for local consumption, even if it doesn’t fit
well with the international commodity circuits of agribusiness (Clapp 2020).
But here too the specific ecologies are part of the larger processes of invest-
ment shaping landscape ecologies, and disease emergence is tied to these
patterns in some cases.
While clearly the dangers of wild species causing zoonotic hazards need
attention and provide another good reason to think seriously about ecological
change and conservation, many zoonotic diseases are a result of modes of
agriculture that involve human and animal proximity. The long term scourge
of smallpox originated from domesticated cattle, and numerous other diseases
are related to farming rather than wild animals. While the wet markets of
China, widely criticized as a source of the COVID-19 virus, may indeed be
hazardous in terms of potential zoonotic diseases, this focus overlooks the
complex artificial ecologies constructed by industrial farming. The dangers
there were highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Danish case of
mink farms and virus mutation (Leste-Lasserre 2020). In 2020 the virus was
transmitted from farmers to the mink in Northern Denmark, and apparently
mutated in the mink. Fearing further spread of a novel mutation back to the
human population, the decision was taken to slaughter the millions of mink
living in the industrial facilities.
As to why human societies need to farm mink by the millions to provide furs
for status clothing was rarely part of the conversation, but it once again empha-
sizes the sheer scale of the global economy which generates such demands on
what can no longer be reasonably called natural systems. Agriculture and the
mass breeding of numerous species for food and fur no longer rely on hunting
in the wild, and the mass use of food supplements and antibiotics to try to
limit the diseases in these incarcerated animals adds another dimension to the
increasingly artificial circumstances of the Anthropocene. The destruction of
mink in Denmark is far from the first attempt to deal with potential pandemic
diseases by mass extermination; the case of H5N1 in Asian factory farms
illustrated this process years earlier, highlighting the international connections
within animal production corporations and the complexity of the political
economy of biosecurity efforts in the face of very different production systems
(Hameiri and Jones 2015). Prior to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic
the annual influenza outbreaks were usually sourced in the agricultural regions
of China and South East Asia, another reminder that animal agriculture is
hazardous in ways that are often forgotten.
86 Rethinking environmental security

A POST COLONIAL WORLD?

While formal decolonization has, with the notable exception of many of

the indigenous lands of the former settler colonies, been accomplished, and
national sovereignty asserted in most terrestrial spaces, this formal mode of
governance frequently obscures the economic relationships that dominate the
global system. Much of this still works in terms of transfers of wealth from
the Global South to the North. While these geographical designations are very
rough, nonetheless the overall patterns of wealth accumulation and the discrep-
ancies between metropolitan peripheral states are clear. There remain major
wealth transfers from the poor to the rich, and from rural resource supply areas
to the urban centres of consumption. Calculating these patterns with precision
is a fraught exercise, but the overall transfer, established with the expansion
of European empires in previous centuries, has been maintained in many
places. Resources and cheap labour in the Global South remain key parts of
the global economy, while at the other end of those long supply chains human
production systems have allowed an extraordinary expansion of consumption
so that human biomass and the farm animal populations that support us are
now massive in comparison with the remaining “wild” animals.
The processes of transforming the biosphere, accelerated so dramatically
first by the expansion of the European empires and their trading schemes and
then by the rise of industrial production systems, have now so transformed
things that humanity is clearly the dominant species in much of the world, and
has consequently become the key biomass in the biosphere (Elhacham, Liad,
Grozovski et al. 2020). This is now a very different world from that inhabited
by humans even a few centuries back (Ellis 2011); now humanity is producing
vast quantities of material in novel forms, a rapidly expanding technosphere
that is shaping the world dramatically and within which policies to deal with
growing vulnerabilities in this artificial world have to be considered.
The continued appropriation of wealth, including billions of tons of mate-
rials, and the use of cheap labour to produce commodities for Northern con-
sumption continues the patterns established in colonial times (Hickel, Sullivan
and Zoomkawala 2021). Obviously this is now much more complicated with
the rise of Asian economies in the period of the great acceleration, and the
recent rise of Chinese production systems in the global economy in particular,
but the wide discrepancies in wealth and life chances for populations in many
places remain. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted these discrepancies
both within states and between them; this global pattern underlies the pro-
cesses that are now rendering environments vulnerable in numerous ways. In
Richard Falk’s (1999) apt phrasing, the world has been living through a period
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 87

of predatory globalization where the rich get richer at the expense of the poor
around the world.
While formal slavery has supposedly been ended in the global economy by
nineteenth century innovations in Europe, and after the civil war in the United
States, numerous forms of indentured labour and related patterns of economic
coercion remain. This is, it seems, especially the case in extractivist industries,
and artisanal mining operations where many of the key minerals in the current
global economy are sourced (Bales and Sovacool 2021). While the finer termi-
nological points of who is technically a slave may obscure the argument, it is
clear that the worst jobs, with the highest rates of illness and accidental death,
coincide with key extractivist tasks. Ironically the root source of the materials
that are causing climate change and biodiversity reduction are directly linked
to the worst labour practices and the poverty in marginal places. Human
insecurity is most palpable at the heart of the harshest extractivist economic
processes.
Not surprisingly local inhabitants and marginalized workers resist these
processes and the dispossession involved in land clearing, mining and other
forms of “development”, and are often subject to violence and assassination
in the process. Violence on the frontier isn’t new, but now it’s part of inter-
national environmental politics too, as human rights monitors and journalists
repeatedly suggest, sometimes at the cost of their lives (Menton and Le
Billon 2021). In terms of security these processes raise the crucial questions
of security for whom and of what. If the planetary system is being damaged
by these extensions of extractivist activity, then the local land defenders and
their international supporters in human rights, environmental and indigenous
peoples movements are protecting the ecological integrity of the earth system.
When, as is frequently the case, these activists are termed dangers to
national security (Matejova, Parker and Dauvergne 2018), criminalized and
punished as agents of foreign powers threatening national sovereignty, the
contradictions between global and national security are palpable. In the case
of mining companies despoiling indigenous peoples’ territories, the resistance
to their activities generates similar dynamics, once again highlighting the
conflictual processes of contemporary colonization and the need to think about
both security and environment in ways that challenge the ever larger spread
of extractivist activities. What is being secured here in the use of violence
against indigenous peoples and environmentalists is the property “rights” and
territorial arrangements of commercial society, not the ecological integrity of
these landscapes.
These struggles frequently don’t fit easily into traditional political notions
of left and right, nor do they necessarily map well onto nationalist agendas.
In the case of Ecuador (Riofrancos 2020), struggles between national govern-
ments anxious to use national resource revenues gained from exporting oil and
88 Rethinking environmental security

minerals run afoul of indigenous and rural peoples resisting the expropriation
of land and the destruction and pollution of petroleum and mineral extraction
processes. The complexities of these conflicts and the possibilities of using
non-violent resistance to proposed developments depend in part on local politi-
cal circumstances, but rural conflict is frequently violent in struggles over what
Markus Kroger (2020) calls “investment politics”. Mass protests and peaceful
opposition are often met with violence on the part of governments, corpora-
tions and paramilitaries, or attempts to criminalize opposition.
These contradictions have spilled over into opposition to supposedly
renewable and sustainable developments too, not least where windfarms and
dams are imposed on rural populations without consultation and without the
economic benefits flowing at least in part to local communities. Fights over
proposals to establish windfarms in rural Mexico have turned violent, with
complex conflicts leading to attacks on local opponents (Dunlap 2017). In con-
trast research in the rather different circumstances of Scotland has suggested
that consultations with local communities, and efforts to ensure that local
employment at the facilities and revenue streams from the electricity gener-
ated by the windfarms go to those local communities, can be useful modes
of rural regeneration (Mackenzie 2013). The connections between violence
on the frontier and urban consumption, whether it is of electricity or material
commodities, are now an inescapable part of the larger discussion of environ-
mental security, and the related matters of how environmental justice might
be reconsidered (Ryder, Powlen, Laituri et al. 2021) and conflicts decolonized
(Oswald Spring and Brauch 2021).

WAR AND CITIES

One interesting argument in this process is the suggestion that such patterns are
in fact very old, and link violence directly to extraction and to urban processes
(Taylor, O’Brien and O’Keefe 2020). Conventional archaeology and history
suggests the gradual growth of populations linked with domestication of plants
and animals, leading to first villages and then gradually to larger urban settle-
ments as surplus production made more sophisticated societies possible. But
Taylor, O’Brien and O’Keefe (2020) suggest instead that this gradual increase
in economic surplus may have been driven by conflict and the demands that
this made for supplies of food and weapons. Their rethinking of early urban
settlements suggests that violence and competition among early humans led
to the warfare and the need to accumulate resources to support military opera-
tions. Trading to provide these was related to raiding and conquest; protected
spaces in the forms of fortified camps are nascent urban arrangements. To this
day expanding empires and colonizing states build forts and observation facili-
 The geopolitics of colonizing nature 89

ties as part of the colonization process to survey and control spaces before they
become formally integrated into permanent territorial arrangements.
Crucially, Taylor, O’Brien and O’Keefe (2020) argue, these early urbaniza-
tion processes led to the extraction of resources at distance, and the impetus for
innovation to supply warriors based in nascent cities. Urbanization, they argue,
was about fortification, violence and logistics, with long distance indirect
trading consequences right from the beginning. Trading is an urban phenome-
non mostly, and as such it is key to invention and travel. Food, fuel, weapons
and clothes draw resources from distance, and this is, so they argue, key to
understanding the trajectories of human transformations of environments.
Drawing on Jane Jacobs’ (1994) ideas of innovation as the key to economic
growth, they argue that is still the case today with ever larger appropriations
from distance to feed the metropolitan demand. Thus the key to climate change
is urban demand, and how cities are rebuilt and reimagined is key to future
climates.
The geography of all this doesn’t fit well with territorial states, but clearly
the question of urban demand is fundamental to the processes linking the
global economy together and now shaping the overall use of fossil fuels, and
the matter of rural transformations as development and industrial agriculture
rework rural areas. The point about this is that resource extraction to fuel
metropolitan demand is not new, but now in the Anthropocene it has reached
such a scale that it is destabilizing the earth system. The rapidly growing
technosphere, which is the global economy understood in material terms, is
now a novel entity linking places and processes together in new topological
patterns, but ones which have long historical antecedents in the extension of
imperial powers and the disruption and denudation of more realms than those
of the Caesars.
How all this is interpreted as a matter of security is important for current
reconsiderations. Likewise it is a concern in the discussion of the Anthropocene
and its origins. The key point in this discussion is the matter of who is insecure
where and how. The genesis of insecurity is tied to the transformations of the
Anthropocene, and in terms of the current alarm about climate and biodiver-
sity, this discussion is unavoidably about who is to blame for current difficul-
ties. The widespread assumption in Europe and North America that these are
technical matters that can be fixed by innovation contrast dramatically with
perspectives from parts of the world that are former colonies or whose socie-
ties were disrupted by the rise of European and subsequently American power.
There the matters of climate and biodiversity are seen as matters of justice, and
of the need for those who became wealthy by exploiting colonies and extract-
ing wealth from the Global South to recognize that this is what they did and act
to help the most vulnerable cope with the disasters that they are suffering but
which are not of their making.
5. Global security/environmental conflict

ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICT

The more alarmist arguments about climate change and coming disruptions
paint dystopian pictures about the future which also feed into larger narratives
about conflict and the supposed need to prepare for violent situations brought
about by environmental disruption. Popular culture reinforces widespread
alarms in media, drawing on a wide repertoire of disaster narratives in tackling
the consequences of climate change, although only sometimes assuming that
major disruptions will cause warfare. All this matters because the politics of
security is about fears, foes and anxieties and where these can be marshalled
to shape state actions. Environmental matters have long been discussed in
terms of securitization, as a threat requiring emergency action, and hence in
some circumstances involving military activity (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde
1998). But the precise modalities of environmental change that might lead to
conflict are much less than clear in the academic research literature and the
relationships between small scale conflicts and larger security concerns no
better understood.
Contemporary concerns with climate security and the growing policy focus
on the relationships between climate change and conflict raise questions of
global security policy and the matter of whether climate change will cause
conflict and if so where and when. More specifically issues arise as to if and
when climate disruptions lead to warfare or, as is frequently discussed in these
cases, simply aggravate or accelerate tendencies to violence. Most of this
research and academic discussion has recently dealt with analyses of conflicts
in Africa and Asia, with attempts to trace links between climate change and the
onset or persistence of violence. Claims about climate change causing war in
Sudan (Mamdani 2009), and more recently in Syria (Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane et
al. 2015), have been prominently used in policy discourses arguing that climate
is thus a matter for consideration in the field of global security. Resource scar-
cities, and most notably worries about water supplies, populate the narratives,
many of which suggest that warfare is inevitable as conditions worsen. And
climate models suggest that more extreme weather is likely in many places.
But the empirical record on the relationships between environmental change
and conflict is far from clear, and much of the alarmist literature, while pos-

90
 Global security/environmental conflict 91

sibly effective at raising concern and gaining a hearing in policy circles, is

misplaced because of, as this volume emphasizes, its inadequate focus on both
the specific contexts invoked in these narratives, and the failure to consider the
long term transformations of landscapes by the patterns of human colonization
that have marked recent history. Detailed research into recent conflicts in
which water is ostensibly a cause suggest that institutions and infrastructure
are key rather than water per se (Zografos, Goulden and Kallis 2014). There
is little doubt that through much of human history weather changes, often as
a result of volcanic action and El Nino/La Nina cycles, as well as longer term
climate trends have been profoundly disruptive of agricultural societies. The
political turmoil, famines and epidemics that often follow from crop failures
have also influenced religious movements in numerous ways. But as Jenkins
(2021) emphasizes in the case of both religious and large scale political
changes, what has been crucial in recent history is the rise of stronger states in
Europe in particular, with both institutions partly capable of dealing with food
shortages due to the use of industrial scale farming and artificial fertilizers, as
well as huge quantities of fossil fuels, and security apparatuses much better
able to stifle large scale dissent and potential insurrections. Ironically its
precisely the success of these efforts in recent centuries in providing enhanced
security to their populations, if not to their colonial subjects, that now presents
people in the twenty first century with crises of climate change and global
extinction that require rethinking environmental security.
This point about political institutions is key to the environmental change and
conflict issue, and as later chapters in this book suggest, it needs to be worked
into both national and international adaptation strategies to cope with climate
change (Benzie and Persson 2019). Grappling with how environment has been
and continues to be invoked as a dangerous cause of conflict requires noting
both the empirical realities in particular places and the conceptual framing that
security narratives bring to bear in providing interpretations. This chapter does
just this, making the point that both are related to issues of security ontology,
the sense of who we are and what threatens that identity, and hence who gets
to write texts that portray threats that require policy responses. Knowledge
and politics are, as usual, deeply entwined with larger cultural formations
and climate imaginaries. The role of states and their efficacy in dealing with
dangers has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, where some states
have been able to initiate substantial measures to buffer their populations from
the worst effects of the virus and measures to cope with it, while others have
not (Tooze 2021).
Given the scale of the current transformations it is noteworthy that much
of Western culture has had what Amitav Ghosh (2016) terms a crisis of
imagination, a great derangement in which the contemporary culture indus-
tries, and novelists in particular, apart from those writing specifically in the
92 Rethinking environmental security

science fiction genre, have been very slow to grapple with climate change
and the sheer scale of what has been set in motion in the period of the great
acceleration. This has changed in the second decade of the third millennium as
novelists and other cultural productions have begun to grapple with the rapidly
transformed world that we now live in, and in turn generated numerous works
of eco-criticism grappling with the representations of climate catastrophe
(Andersen 2020), as well as other Anthropocene concerns (Dell’Agnese 2021).
Part of the reason for the relative silence in thinking through climate change
in larger political and cultural modes until recently is the representation of
climate as a technical matter of science. Focusing on the complex global
circulation models, and interpreted through the arcane scientific language in
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, much of the
discussion of climate change in the Global North has narrowed the matter to
technical discussions (O’Lear 2016). This happens while excluding the larger
questions of modes of political and economic life that have generated the
climate crisis in the first place, and which need to be drastically transformed
to stop the massive production of carbon dioxide that support them. Related to
this is the key assumption in modern socio-technical imaginaries that climate
catastrophes and their societal disruptions are a thing of the past in “modern”
societies where industrial systems, agricultural innovations and international
trade in food have rendered famines only of concern in the Global South.
The popular imaginations tend to assume either catastrophic violence in
climate futures or gradual peaceful transitions to a post carbon fueled future
(Benner, Rothe, Ullstrom and Stripple 2019). Prior concerns with catastrophe,
and the 1980s discussions of nuclear winter in particular, have morphed into
fears of climate change. The possibilities of nuclear war induced climate
chaos, dramatized in the 1983 movie The Day After, were reprised in a movie
title two decades later on rapid climate change, The Day After Tomorrow.
One of the notable scenes in the 2004 disaster movie is of American refugees
heading south trying to cross the border into Mexico, neatly reversing common
fears of Latin Americans “invading” the United States. Despite the fact that
scholarship suggests that, while climate migrants are obviously an issue in
many places, massive sudden displacements over long distances are unlikely
(Selby and Daoust 2021), disaster scripts persist. Images from Europe in 2015
of refugees walking from Turkey towards Western Europe quickly became
iconic in these discussions, linked to generalized fears of the other and that
destination states would be unable to cope with the social disruptions.
These violent imaginaries link fairly directly to assumptions of environmen-
tal causes of conflict, and popular images feed into securitizing moves where
climate disruptions abroad are portrayed as threats to domestic peace and
security. While this theme has been a popular mode of mobilizing attention to
the importance of climate change, in so far as it is then framed as an external
 Global security/environmental conflict 93

threat, it’s less than helpful in tackling the sources of climate change or provid-
ing efficacious policy measures (Miller, Buxton and Akkerman 2021). It links
quite directly to discussions of climate as a threat multiplier, a formulation
that has come to dominate American discussions of climate security since it
appeared in think tank reports in 2007 and was reworked in the 2009 United
Nations Secretary-General’s discussions of climate risks to security (CNA
Corporation 2007). The most high profile case in the second decade of this
century was clearly Syria, and the discussion about the relationship between
drought and conflict highlights the difficulties with proving causation.

CLIMATE AND CONFLICT IN SYRIA

The case of Syria and climate change generated media headlines, alarmist sug-
gestions of this as a case of a climate caused war, and considerable scholarly
dispute over the claims of such a linkage as well as how such claims have been
substantiated (Gleick 2014; Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane et al. 2015; Werrell, Femia
and Sternberg 2015; Ide 2018). The argument is that severe drought in Eastern
Syria in the final few years of the first decade of the new millennium caused
much hardship among farmers. Many were, through lack of adequate rainfall
and hence crop failure, forced to leave their land and seek sustenance in the
rapidly growing cities. Unhappiness with the state failure to provide aid led to
protests, and in turn to violent state repression of the protestors. This in turn
escalated as protestors resisted police and military actions and the result was
a series of increasingly violent confrontations that morphed into ongoing vio-
lence and eventually a full scale civil war. If this is in fact what happened, then
it is not hard to make the case that climate change causes war. That being the
case, then it follows that if it happened in Syria as a result of a climate change
induced disruption, it likely will happen elsewhere, and hence this is a matter
of global significance and a clear warning of future trends.
But is, the critics argued, this really what happened, or is the climate security
narrative being foisted on a situation that might be better interpreted in other
ways, ones that do not lead to conclusions that climate causes conflict (Selby,
Dahi, Fröhlich and Hulme 2017). As the scholarly research has grown, the
skepticism has increased, and while there very obviously was rural distress
and unemployment in Syria in the period coinciding with the start of the Arab
Spring, it has, so the critics argue, much more to do with flawed government
policies, the bungled transition to grain farming, and larger political economy
matters, including the removal of subsidies on fuel needed for pumps for wells
at a crucial moment, than any direct connection with climate (Daoudy 2020).
That there was serious rural distress and unemployment in Eastern Syria as the
Arab Spring unfolded isn’t in doubt, but did it cause conflict?
94 Rethinking environmental security

To make the case for climate caused conflict a number of key links in the
causal chain have to be verified, and the case for most of them is empirically
weak, in some cases derived from media reports rather than on the ground
investigations. First the drought has to be linked to clear indications that
climate change caused it. Climate modellers may argue about this causation,
and regional variations are hard to attribute to macro scale changes, but if
it is the case as determined by climate modelling, then the supposed initial
cause is established. But establishing what is actually a drought isn’t so
simple. Detailed rainfall figures as well as temperature and evapotranspiration
measurements are needed to establish conditions that are far from the norm.
A drought doesn’t matter if farmers aren’t trying to grow crops that can’t
survive in those conditions. Seasonal average rainfall figures aren’t key either;
what matters is if there is rainfall when crops need it to mature. Inadequate
rainfall may not matter either if there are either river or lake sources for
irrigation or groundwater supplies available along with pumps to get it to the
surface, combined with irrigation systems to get it on fields, to compensate for
lack of rainfall.
An additional complication in this initial part of the argument is simply
that there were worse droughts in previous decades. Hence why, if drought is
a cause of migration and conflict, did the earlier ones not lead to violence? The
earlier more severe droughts would seem to have been more likely triggers for
disruptions and hence violence. Did large numbers of farmers move to cities in
earlier droughts? Even if they did they didn’t apparently protest in ways that
might have brought about conflict. At least in part the answer might be that
changes on the ground had made people more vulnerable in some ways in the
later drought, and indeed the growth of grain farming and increased reliance
on pumps for irrigation may explain much of this (Selby 2019a). In the later
drought episode the Syrian regime removed subsidies for diesel fuel to run
pumps, and this apparently made at least some farms financially unsustainable.
As a consequence, widespread layoffs of farm labourers may have generated
migration to the cities in search of employment.
But a further link in the causal chain needs to be demonstrated here, because
if migrants to the city are to be seen as a key part of the whole process, then
they need to have been involved in protests which the regime then repressed.
Or perhaps indirectly they need to be seen as a cause of unrest in the cities,
causing residents to resent the migrants or perhaps the failure of the regime to
provide housing and other assistance which, because of the rural influx, was
then in even shorter supply. But the empirical evidence from Syrian cities
seems weak on this point too; many rural residents apparently left the cities
either when it became clear that there were no opportunities there, or once the
violence started, fleeing back to the country for safety.
 Global security/environmental conflict 95

Perhaps the most important point in all this is that what the simple climate
causing conflict argument overlooks are the processes of rural change that were
underway prior to the drought, in the extension of commercial agriculture, and
the role of the state in promoting particular modes of farming. Likewise the
corruption and failure to supply good quality seed and fertilizer may have left
farmers vulnerable, and also resentful of the regime (Schwartzstein 2021).
Here the point is about the particular modes of development in rural areas
and the failure to consider the local needs of rural populations struggling
with multiple difficulties, which drought compounded. Climate here is indeed
a factor, a conflict multiplier, but it is inadequate governance and neglect,
corruption and incompetence that are key to turning stresses into larger polit-
ical problems. More specifically the Syrian case reinforces Baechler’s (1998)
earlier focus on maldevelopment and conflict related to these difficulties, now
in places enhanced by the stresses of less predictable weather patterns and
extreme events.
The Syrian case garnered headlines, and attention from the burgeoning
think tank and policy community on climate security (Mabey, Gulledge,
Finel and Silverthorne 2011), but the critical research on this case suggests
that establishing causation linking climate change to the Syrian civil war is
at best difficult, and it may simply be wrong, or at least misleading in terms
of the policy implications. But given that numerous researchers have been
investigating relationships between environmental change and conflict, there
are numerous other cases that might be more illuminating, and that might
establish the causal links that were imputed but not proved in the Syrian case.
The debate about climate as a cause of conflict is in some ways a reinvention
of the debate about environment and conflict from the 1990s, although at times
it seems that these earlier discussions have either been forgotten or ignored in
the focus specifically on climate.

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFLICT: EMPIRICAL

EVIDENCE

In the 1990s, following the focus in Our Common Future on environmental

insecurity as a cause of conflict, and the emergence of the environmental
security policy discussions in American publications (Mathews 1989; Renner
1989), Thomas Homer-Dixon (1991) and others pondered the empirical case
for linking environment and security, and at least initially concluded that while
there might be much low level conflict there was little plausible evidence to
suggest that environmental scarcities were likely to be a cause of large scale
inter-state warfare (Homer-Dixon 1994). In February 1994 journalist Robert
Kaplan brought high level attention to this discussion with his cover story in
Atlantic Monthly on “The Coming Anarchy”. There might be some important
96 Rethinking environmental security

exceptions to this suggestion, but nowhere was there a plausible alliance

system of environmentally vulnerable states that might engage in combat as
a result of strictly environmental causes. For all the headlines about water
wars, empirical examinations of historical records suggested that wars over
water were mostly fiction not established historical fact (Wolf 1999). As to
whether that will change as climate change accelerates remains a key but open
question, partly a matter of the specific geographies involved.
In parallel, Daniel Deudney (1990) argued vehemently that linking ecology
and security was a bad idea, not least because of the obvious incompatibility
between environmental issues and the dominant modalities of security forces.
They were not equipped or trained to deal with ecological restoration, pollu-
tion controls, agricultural innovations or wildlife management. The record of
the US military a couple of decades previously in massive defoliation efforts
in South East Asia suggested that they were the last agency to invoke in envi-
ronmental matters. Matthias Finger (1991) suggested that the military, and the
industrial system supplying it with weapons, fuel and all the other parapher-
nalia of warfare, was a prime cause of environmental degradation; providing
“security” in these terms was anathema to ecological sanity.
Where major warfare on environmental matters might be highly unlikely
the questions then turned to smaller scale disturbances and civil wars, and the
relationships between resources, environmental change and conflict. Defining
what was a resource made matters difficult here, as did what constituted
scarcity and how it might be linked to conflict. Thomas Homer-Dixon (1999)
concluded that there were links between environmental scarcities and conflict,
but ones that usually required additional factors to be considered. While migra-
tion caused by environmental scarcity might trigger conflict in destinations
where newcomers clashed with locals, or possibly with previous migrants
anxious not to be economically undercut by recent arrivals, nonetheless
this wasn’t a matter of major warfare. The opportunistic actions by political
elites in a crisis to gain access to resources, a matter of resource capture in
Homer-Dixon’s terms, might also lead to displacements and the ecological
marginalization of disadvantaged people forced either on to marginal land or
into cities in search of sustenance. Structural scarcity is clearly a factor too in
these circumstances where access to resources is restricted by elite control.
Guenter Baechler (1998) led a European initiative looking at the relation-
ships between conflict and environment and concluded that while there were
linkages, many of them occurred in regions that were undergoing what he
termed maldevelopment, and in marginal locations between major ecological
systems, ecotone boundaries on the large scale, and notably in mountainous
areas. In a formulation loosely parallel with Homer-Dixon’s he suggested that
discrimination in terms of resource access was a frequent problem, and that
conflict often happened in ecotones between large biomes. The displacements
 Global security/environmental conflict 97

along with failures of governments to handle the unfortunate consequences of

development projects were part of the problem, but once again little of this was
likely to lead to traditional security problems in terms of inter-state warfare,
however much intra-state violence might be implicated. Colin Kahl’s (2006)
empirical follow up looking at a comparison of Kenya and the Philippines
suggested that much rural violence was generated by elites trying to extract
resources and being resisted by locals, rather than being a matter of scarcity
per se.
Two major counter arguments emerged in the 1990s. The first was from
political ecologists and critical development researchers, mainly geographers
and anthropologists who objected that there was a longstanding literature on
violence in rural areas, and much of the research showed that a fair amount
of the violence related to the expropriation and displacements of peoples by
colonization and more recently development (Peluso and Watts 2001). There
was little cause, so the argument went, to reinvent neo-Malthusian concerns
about population and scarcity when the established frameworks for investi-
gating conflicts around resource capture and violent dispossession were well
understood, at least in those disciplines. Watts’ (2013) work in Nigeria had
long shown that in cases of extreme scarcity, what resulted was famine, and
that state actions, or in fact inaction, frequently was a contributing cause of the
suffering and death.
The second counter argument, drawing in part on the discussions of new
wars (Kaldor 1999) and the failures of development in many places, pointed
to resources, where they were in enough abundance to be worth fighting over,
as a much more significant source of conflict in the Global South. Here the
longstanding patterns of conflict over the sources of resources, part and parcel
of the long term European expansion (Le Billon 2012), were replicated in
struggles to control the rents from land and the revenue streams that came from
the export of resources to global markets. In the case of the new wars, combat,
control over territory, access to resources and international financial and
weapons trading were tied into low grade violence where controlling territory
and extracting wealth were obviously more important than victory. Insurgent
forces need supplies and funds, and these too can come from the control over
mines, oil wells and forestry.
An especially chilling variation on this theme at the larger scale emerged
in Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan’s (2004) analysis of the political
economy of violence in the Middle East. They noted an empirical pattern in
the differential accumulation rates between the weapons and logistics compa-
nies and the rest of the economy, where low oil prices tended to predict the
imminence of war in the region. Logistics companies provide support for oil
industries, who need their services most when prices are high and exploration
and construction of petroleum related facilities are underway. With low prices
98 Rethinking environmental security

in that sector, profitability suffers for those in the “petro dollar weapon dollar”
portion of the global economy; warfare reverses this trend as logistics are key
to modern warfare, and the disruptions also may have the effect of heightening
oil prices once again. While the precise mechanisms whereby low oil prices
necessarily trigger wars aren’t clear, the correlation in this data is certainly
suggestive.
One of the implications of this analysis is a clear refutation of the argument
that US policy is simply about intervening in the Middle East to ensure access
to oil supplies; the situation is much more complicated than such simple argu-
ments suggest (Meierding 2016a). Key to this isn’t access but profitability,
and that has been the key factor in the long term history of petroleum politics
(Yergin 1991). It was an issue in the 1950s too, as petroleum was promoted
as a fuel in Europe, in part as a policy to break the hold of coal on energy
supplies, but also to expand the automobile industry and increase the control
of American companies over energy markets (Mitchell 2011). Likewise this
argument has ramifications for the transition off oil to renewable energy that
is a key part of mid twenty first century geopolitics. There is a long history
of political instability in oil producing states, where drops in prices are often
related to unrest (Vadlamannati and de Soysa 2020). A sustainable future
has to require that much of the remaining fossil fuel resources remain in the
ground, and the consequences of transitions and declining oil revenues in the
region connect directly to matters of security. Transition strategies related to
international climate policy that requires the reduction in fossil fuel production
are thus part of future geopolitics quite directly, a matter that will be discussed
again in Chapter 8.

CLIMATE WARS?
Much of the discussion of resources and conflict and the role of environmental
change in causing violence has been reworked in the more recent debate about
whether climate causes conflict. Much of this too is focused on the Global
South, where people are widely engaged in agriculture, which is obviously the
economic sector most directly impacted by changing climatic conditions, but
at best the numerous attempts to quantify the putative links between climate
and conflict have produced ambiguous results, not least because of the narrow
focus on conflict as an outcome (Meierding 2016b; Selby 2014). As already
mentioned in the previous chapter, many of the rural areas of the world have
been remade by the processes of colonization and the rapid introduction of
agricultural innovations which changes both production methods and property
relationships in rural areas. Both of these things can cause conflict, especially
where subsistence modes of economy are replaced by commercial ones. It is
a sad fact that those who die first in famines are farmers and their families. This
 Global security/environmental conflict 99

happens precisely because their wealth is tied up with land and when that fails
to produce they are bereft of economic resources; commercial relationships
are usually more flexible, allowing trading to provide essential food and other
necessities.
Not all farmers are sedentary; in some parts of the world, and the Sahel
region of Africa in particular, migratory herders continue to be a substantial
part of rural economies and their animals a source of wealth and food, as well
as status. Harmonious relationships with pastoralists, whose fields are some-
times grazed by herders’ animals after harvest, can work to mutual benefit, but
if the rhythms of planting and migration are interrupted, conflict is frequent.
Likewise cattle raiding is common in some places, but made much more lethal
by the addition of modern firearms. Climate change on top of the rapid spread
of modern commercial economic development adds additional stresses to
these complex relationships. Not surprisingly some of the obvious empirical
relationships that have been investigated linking climate to conflict focus on
these rural areas.
But these small scale disputes in rural areas are a long way from major
inter-state warfare. Given the relative paucity of international combat in recent
decades, researchers have looked to longer term historical studies in search of
answers to questions linking climate and conflict. There is a notable passage in
Thomas Malthus’s (1798/1970) Essay on the Principle of Population in which
he claims that it was absence of grazing in Asia that set nomadic peoples in
motion west into Europe and to the eventual fall of Rome following repeated
migrations and conflicts with the declining empire (Heather 2006). Geopolitics
and climate are implicitly related here but in circumstances that are very differ-
ent from those pertaining to the twenty first century. The barbarians are not at
the gates, and as much of this volume suggests, it’s not clear exactly who they
actually are, a theme explored in exquisite detail in Iain Pears’ novel on the
theme The Dream of Scipio.
Historical analysis has to be treated very carefully in terms of drawing
lessons applicable to a global economy of nearly eight billion people, the
majority of whom now live in cities. Territorial states now claim all the ter-
restrial surface of the globe with the exception of Antarctica, and much of the
aqueous world too. Satellite surveillance, air power, naval forces and all the
other paraphernalia of modernity makes historical analogy difficult. As noted
in Chapter 3, the disruptions of the seventeenth century, which might be traced
to the temporary cooling of much of the earth following the reforestation of the
Americas, did indeed involve much conflict (Parker 2013). Famines and dis-
ruption followed poor harvests and then made farming more difficult too, but
those circumstances are not an obvious analogy with present times, not least
because temporary cooling was at least part of the problem then, whereas now
it is rapid heating that is causing disruptions. But as Parker (2013) also makes
100 Rethinking environmental security

clear, dealing with the violence and disruption of the seventeenth century led
to innovation in state structures, and the emergence of both political theories
about states and practical innovation in terms of bureaucracy, taxation and per-
manent military institutions too. International relations textbooks frequently
refer to the Treaty of Westphalia as the origin of the modern international
system, even if they don’t connect it to the climate disruptions of the period.
Some of the most comprehensive historical records of calamities and wars
come from China, with its very long history of continuous civilization. Harry
Lee (2018) has carefully assembled these records and, using statistical analy-
ses, tried to tease out the relationships between climate change, disasters and
conflict in the form of internal wars within agrarian China through the last half
millennium. “Generally, socio-ecological catastrophes are the proximate trig-
gers of internal wars. Specifically, internal wars are triggered by epidemics in
the wheat region, while ignited by famines in the rice region in historic China.
Furthermore, internal wars in the two agro-ecological zones are revealed to be
context-dependent” (Lee 2018, 1079). Lee makes the point that disasters lead
first to economic disruptions and social failures, not directly to wars, which
may come later. The analysis is complicated to say the least, but the findings
suggest that while climate change may be a background factor, internal wars
within China are more obviously related to short term disasters. As is to be
expected in an agrarian society, food supplies are a key part of this history,
with famine as one trigger for conflicts. While this history is suggestive,
care has to be taken in applying these insights to the twenty first century,
where industrial farming techniques and international food aid, as well as
global markets, add novel complexities to such analyses. Likewise, as other
longitudinal studies suggest, complex causalities are intertwined with shifting
agricultural practices related both to subsistence strategies and to commercial
opportunities, making clear causal claims difficult (Deligiannis 2020).
Despite all these difficulties, the repeated invocation of security dangers
in policy debates and the use of securitizing rhetoric to raise the profile of
climate dangers has meant continuing research efforts grappling with some of
these issues. Not surprisingly the results have been mixed (Scartozzi 2021).
Statistical correlations between climate fluctuations have been claimed as
proof of climate as a cause of conflict (Hsiang, Meng and Cane 2011; Hsiang
and Burke 2014). Analyses from Africa dispute these findings (O’Loughlin,
Witmer, Linke et al. 2012). Equally other studies have suggested that if not
spurious, such correlations are just that—correlations—and don’t provide
proof that climate is a cause of conflict (Selby 2014). Part of the problem is
also a matter of scale; data crudely aggregated may suggest things that don’t
make sense once the detailed cases are investigated. Likewise disputes over
the appropriate threshold in terms of numbers of casualties needed to qualify
as a conflict or a war complicate conclusions. Is average temperature a rea-
 Global security/environmental conflict 101

sonable proxy of climate change, and how is that to be reliably ascertained

prior to contemporary standardized thermometers being widely available?
Aggregate rainfall statistics aren’t much help either because what matters in
terms of agricultural productivity is whether reasonable amounts of rain arrive
at crucial stages in planting and crop maturity. In pastoral economies raiding
and conflict are more likely in good years when herds are prolific than when
attention is focused on trying to find forage in drought conditions to keep at
least some animals alive. But the statistical interpretations remain murky,
making attempts to synthesize the research for policy makers a fraught exer-
cise (Buhaug 2015; Detges 2017).
In attempting to tease out what can be learned from these numerous studies,
which are often at odds with one another because of differing definitional,
scale and statistical assumptions, recent efforts at expert elucidation have come
to at least some tenuous conclusions (Mach, Kraan, Adger et al. 2019). Clearly,
underdeveloped regions are at greater risk, although even here climate change
is, at least so far, less of a driver of conflict than many other social and eco-
nomic factors. But clearly too, much additional research work on the precise
relationships between climate and conflict will be needed, both to evaluate the
links and to think through what interventions can prevent conflict even in cases
where climate has generated conditions of severe social instability (Mach,
Adger, Buhaug et al. 2020). All of which suggests that longstanding concerns
about good governance and equitable development are key to shaping more
resilient societies that are likely to be less conflict prone.
In trying to resolve some of the difficulty with empirical cases, Josh
Busby’s (2022) attempt at a synthesis analyses comparison cases, trying to
find situations where climate disruptions apparently caused conflict, and some
where they didn’t. Such comparative studies ought to clarify what factors
are involved in making causal links between the two. While no two cases
are identical, if at least broadly similar sets of circumstances yield different
outcomes, then the factors that differ in these paired cases may provide clues
to what is most important in determining which trajectory results. But there
is more to security problems than acute conflict and therefore Busby chose
to include large scale humanitarian disasters in his security case studies. He
compared Somalia, where famine killed hundreds of thousands, and Ethiopia,
where it didn’t at the same time, as well as looking at historical comparisons
with earlier famine in Ethiopia, pointing to governmental capacity as key to
avoiding major death tolls. International aid also matters: people died when aid
wasn’t allowed into the country. Droughts in Lebanon and Syria are compared
in another paired case comparison, pointing to the inadequacy of the Assad
regime’s response but a better performance in Lebanon.
A third case comparison in terms of responses to cyclones in Bangladesh,
Myanmar and India adds another dimension to the discussion focused on
102 Rethinking environmental security

rapid onset disasters, in contrast to slow onset drought events. There the key
factor in the death toll from cyclones was once again government capacity,
and a willingness to accept international assistance, in the case of Bangladesh
over the long term to build disaster preparedness and resilience. Failure on
the part of the Myanmar government to either prepare or allow international
assistance into the country led to large numbers of deaths in 2008. Busby
also notes that attempts to respond to climate change may cause conflicts and
difficulties too, and that thinking about the future, where past histories are not
necessarily appropriate models for a climate altered world, has to be part of
the research agenda for the future on climate security. Climate insecurities are
now a major matter in international politics even if the traditional themes in the
international relations discipline have been slow to grapple with these novel
circumstances of the Anthropocene.
European policy formulations of these matters have tended to think in terms
of a broad formulation of security, understanding it as more than a matter
of conflict and thinking about strategies to avoid the worst possible futures.
A key report from the Adelphi think tank in Berlin commissioned by the G7
posed matters in terms of “A New Climate for Peace”, looking at the need to
take action to reduce the dangers of climate change and in particular the fra-
gility of many institutions in the face of coming disruptions (Rüttinger, Smith,
Stang et al. 2015). Subsequently the United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) and the European Union collaborated on programs to try to tackle
environmental matters in crisis ridden states, combining development, disaster
reduction and peacemaking efforts to better anticipate and hence avoid poten-
tial conflicts and disruptions (Rüttinger 2017). Disaster planning, international
aid and careful foresight all matter, and are frequently in short supply where
they might be most useful, in poor states with limited infrastructure and man-
agement capabilities (Moran, Busby, Raleigh et al. 2018). Dealing with those
fragilities is understood as a key theme in climate security and a key matter for
climate diplomacy as well as the larger discussions under the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on adaptation and the
fraught matters of loss and damage compensation funding, not to mention the
rising frequency of litigation on these matters (Byers, Franks and Gage 2017).

THE NEW GEOPOLITICAL LANDSCAPE

While the initial years of the war on terror, in the aftermath of the events of
9/11, were preoccupied in international relations with American concerns
about terrorism and military interventions in Afghanistan, and subsequently in
Iraq, behind the scenes in various think tanks and university research efforts
the debate about environmental security continued. One report, in the form of
a scoping exercise on likely climate and conflict futures (Schwartz and Randall
 Global security/environmental conflict 103

2003), caused a flurry of media attention in 2004, in part arguing that the Bush
administration was so preoccupied by Iraq that it was ignoring climate dangers.
But it is noteworthy in that it suggested that climate change might happen
abruptly with obviously disruptive consequences, rather than as a matter of
gradual environmental change. This scenario was based on the possibility that
the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic might stop flowing, with numerous climate
disruptions resulting on a much larger scale than the empirical investigations
of rural African violence caused by climate change discussed above suggest.
In 2007, after years of relative public neglect during the global war on terror
period, a number of reports appeared pointing to the potential for violence
related to climate change in particular. In 2007 the CNA corporation (formerly
the Center for Naval Analyses) released a report arguing that while climate
itself might not be a direct cause of conflict, the disruptions it was starting to
cause were likely to be a “threat multiplier”. Instabilities and distress, espe-
cially in rural areas in Africa, would, so the report contended, provide fertile
recruitment areas for insurgent groups, especially so where they could pay or
at least feed recruits in economic situations where few other options existed.
Connected to Al Qaeda or other “terrorist” organizations, the report suggested
that climate multiplied the possibilities for conflict and as such vulnerable
regions needed to be taken seriously because of the enhanced risks of political
violence. Other similar publications followed quickly (Campbell, Gulledge,
McNeill et al. 2007), and European efforts to draw these links proceeded too,
with a high profile German report on climate security risks pointing to numer-
ous dangers that needed attention in terms of security more broadly defined
(German Advisory Council on Global Change 2008).
Seven years after their initial report on threat multipliers, the military
advisory committee to the CNA corporation (CNA Military Advisory Board
2014) released an update where they suggested that climate change was
already a “catalyst of conflict”. Throughout this period the US military became
increasingly concerned that climate change was a factor driving both conflict
and increasingly disasters, and as such a factor that was changing their oper-
ational environments and requiring them to undertake more emergency relief
and disaster response missions (Briggs and Matejova 2019). In addition they
became increasingly concerned that climate change would directly threaten
operations because of rising sea levels threatening naval facilities in particular,
and storms and droughts threatening bases and training facilities; the major
naval base at Norfolk, Virginia is already suffering regular high tide flooding
(Klare 2019). A report from the US Army War College also noted that climate
change will put increased strain on the national electrical grid in the United
States, making the Army vulnerable to service interruptions, and emphasized
that environmentalist political pressures may constrain its activities, not least
because of objections to its large use of fossil fuels (Brosig, Frawley, Hill et al.
104 Rethinking environmental security

2019). It is a notable irony that the US military is the largest single institutional
user of fossil fuels, and the carbon footprint of its worldwide military opera-
tions is a substantial contributor to climate change (Belcher, Bigger, Neimark
and Kennelly 2020). Reports on climate security now frequently mention this
point, but fewer of them, at least those generated in Washington, suggest that
this global military footprint needs to be fundamentally rethought as part of
tackling climate insecurity.
The view from the think tank world in Washington has generated numerous
reports, particularly from the Center for Climate and Security, but their 2017
report on “Epicenters of Climate and Security” was tellingly subtitled “The
New Geostrategic Landscape of the Anthropocene” (Werrell and Femia 2017).
Trying to encapsulate this novel landscape suggested some clear focal points of
concern, which they defined in terms of three criteria: critical for global secu-
rity, vulnerable to a rapidly changing climate, and categories of risk present in
multiple centres. These criteria are obviously about much more than specifying
particular places or states as the problem, and the analysis is noteworthy in
its attempts to think through the ripple effects of climate induced difficulties
running through the global security system. Local events may have complex
consequences elsewhere, and this requires analyses that focus on systemic
risks, and specifically, to use the chapter titles in the report, “eroding sover-
eignty, water towers, disappearing islands, dire straits, nuclear and climate,
health security, coastal megacities, water weaponization, melting Arctic, fish
and conflict, the coffee belt as well as migration and displacement”.
The report also focuses on some relevant management tools, including the
use of foresight and early warning systems, mapping and earth observation
tools, that might be useful. Worried about the declining effectiveness of states
in many places as well as the rapidly changing political and economic circum-
stances of many places beyond the stable metropoles of the global economy,
this list of potential difficulties and their complicated geographies offers
a smorgasbord of policy concerns with the danger of spillover effects. The key
point is that while climate is changing and making rural life less predictable,
the huge transformation wrought by colonization and subsequently globaliza-
tion in the period of the great acceleration means that climate plays out on this
novel stage. It isn’t an exogenous variable acting on a stable environment; it’s
a variable that has to be understood as a factor in the larger transformations of
the Anthropocene. Now the task for security policy makers is to try to shape
the transformations to increase the resilience of increasingly artificial eco-
systems, while avoiding social breakdowns that stymie attempts to adapt. As
with so many of these reports there is little discussion of the causes of climate
change, and from whence the driving forces that are making these epicentres
a matter of concern in Washington come.
 Global security/environmental conflict 105

WHOSE SECURITY?

Which brings the argument back to the questions of security ontology and the
issue of who is that “we” that is threatened (Mitzen 2006; Rossdale 2015).
Much of the discussion of climate security, and the American variation on it
in particular, is about threats from rural peripheries in the global system, and
climate threat multipliers enhancing terrorist and insurgent activities in Africa
and Asia in the earlier formulations, and now with the “Epicenters” formula-
tion, more complex interconnected risks (Werrell and Femia 2017). The who
that is threatened here is the American world order, and its embeddedness in
a “liberal” trading and financial order premised on endless economic growth.
Threats to this are about peripheral disruptions, whether in terms of extreme
meteorological events disrupting supply chains or extremists attacking those
supply chains in insurgent actions, or some combination of both. Maintaining
this geopolitical arrangement has long been seen as essential to national secu-
rity planners and policy makers in the United States.
But if it is to be maintained into the long term future then clearly, in the face
of accelerating climate change, it can no longer be powered by fossil fuels. The
accelerating disruptions will clearly come home too; hurricanes, wildfires and
extreme weather events are already overwhelming infrastructure in the United
States. Water shortages in the American South West and in California in
particular are now routine, as are huge wildfires, and more extremes will only
aggravate the stresses on existing systems, not least the air conditioners needed
to keep the housing and businesses there liveable in summer. This model of
using technology to change environments, replumbing rivers, irrigating deserts
and golf courses to maintain a particular lifestyle, and a sense of who “we” are
as consumers of luxury items and recreational activities, is increasingly diffi-
cult to sustain. Failure to do so could lead to nightmare scenarios like Paolo
Bacigalupi suggests in The Water Knife.
A very different set of priorities in terms of who that “we” might be looms
in the campaigns for green new deals and justice in the face of glaring ineq-
uities in the polity accentuated by the rapid roll out of emergency funds to
deal with COVID-19. These struggles are key to the future and to what kind
of “we” becomes the subject of security policy (Holthaus 2020). The “ever
larger technological control over environment” model that has been key to the
expansion of American modes of life throughout the period of the great accel-
eration is now seriously in doubt as it confronts its own limits and generates
discussions of degrowth and related economic initiatives (Kallis 2018). Simply
changing the technology and running it on “renewable” energy has been much
of the focus among American elite thinkers focused on placating and assuring
middle class consumers that climate change is manageable (see for example
106 Rethinking environmental security

Bloomberg and Pope 2017, Gates 2021 and even Mann 2021). But no longer
is this adequate in the United States, as mounting disasters make it clear that
extreme weather is a hazard at home as well as one that may cause dangerous
complications abroad; storms and disasters as well as the COVID-19 pandemic
have very clearly raised the question of who is being secured in present cir-
cumstances (Buck 2019).
Viewed from elsewhere this preoccupation with preserving the resource
intensive lifestyle that advertising agencies have been defining as the good life
and the aspiration for all has long been under challenge. In the early enthusi-
asm for tackling climate change in the 1990s one of the most effective critiques
of climate policy and the “we are all in this together” line on the need to deal
with climate change was the argument from India that a distinction had to be
made between subsistence and luxury emissions (Agarwal and Narain 1991).
Suggesting that carbon dioxide from rural farming for immediate sustenance
in the Global South and emissions from luxury vehicles or recreational equip-
ment in the North should be treated as equivalent in carbon dioxide policy
making brought charges of colonialism, and arguments that those who had
created the problem and who generated the most emissions needed to be those
that solved it, or at least moved first in terms of policy response.
Viewed from Bangladesh, the Mekong Delta, or other places facing immi-
nent inundation, these suggestions that emissions from recreational vehicles
in the North are the equivalent of their agricultural emissions make no sense.
The most vulnerable people in these places have done little to cause climate
change and what minimal carbon dioxide and methane they do add to the
atmosphere is to provide food and sustenance, not for status and thrill seeking.
“The Anthropocene, however, indicates that injustice is now global in the most
literal sense. Extending human presence to the far corners of the earth, and
doing so in ways that reward the already rich and powerful and punish the poor
and voiceless, has created the spectre of both grinding injustice and planetary
fragility” (Wapner 2019, 224). Worse, when those people are forced to move
and are then portrayed as a threat to the places they aspire to move to, they are
rendered doubly vulnerable. And when informed that there is little they can
do to ameliorate their condition they face a condition of what Chaturvedi and
Doyle (2015) call climate terror, where forces beyond their control require that
they stay put and suffer the consequences of climate change.
The most basic mode of adaptation in the face of disaster is to move, but
in a world of hardening borders this is now all the more difficult (McLeman
2019). If the projected need to migrate as a result of increased temperatures
in numerous places comes to pass, then the human insecurities as borders are
closed become ever greater. Discerning likely migration patterns is a fraught
business, but at the largest scale as global heating progresses, clearly some
parts of the planet will become ever more difficult to live in, and heat waves
 Global security/environmental conflict 107

may drive people to move. At least it may do so in places where farmers

can no longer grow food due to drought and temperatures too hot for crops
to mature. If climate patterns migrate towards the poles, then up to a point
agricultural patterns may do so too (Xu, Kohler, Lenton et al. 2020). As
residents in Phoenix in the United States who own air conditioners, as well as
long term inhabitants of various deserts, show however, there is a danger of
climate determinist type arguments where average temperatures are linked to
migration patterns without the careful consideration of the adaptive capabili-
ties that local cultures may have to cope (Horton, de Sherbinin, Wrathall and
Oppenheimer 2021). Many of the areas most likely to face extreme heat are
among those where the poorest societies live, and clearly at least some of these
populations will seek to move in coming decades.
But in so far as these potential migrants are then portrayed as threats to their
destination areas, and a “fortress” mentality of security invoked to keep them
out, then fences, walls and armed patrols become part of the security imaginary
(White 2014). Linked to white supremacy or white nationalist movements in
the United States in particular, nativist narratives rework climate change into
a matter of external threats to domestic landscapes (Hultgren 2015). In Europe
such xenophobic concerns have a long history, not only in the romantic fan-
tasies of racially pure homelands in Nazi thinking (Snyder 2015), but also in
other more recent articulations, including in Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp
of the Saints reflecting on the European response to starvation in India in the
1960s, which has circulated in right wing circles in various versions since its
original publication in France.
These questions of racial purity and spatial boundaries invoked in border
narratives are precisely what concerns Alex Alvarez (2021) in warning that
climate change narratives carry with them potentially genocidal implications.
“Such spatiality has meant that border zones are regions that have often been
swayed by belief systems and popular movements defining specific population
groups as a source of contamination and pollution and deciding to remove the
offensive physical presence of the group so designated” (Alvarez 2021, 139).
In the case of American security narratives, Reece Jones has recently reminded
us once again that American borders have frequently been defined in terms
of whiteness (2021). Notions of climate apartheid fit all too neatly into these
formulations of external dangers to white populations from tropical peoples
set in motion by rising sea levels, droughts and agricultural disruptions. This
focus on the symptoms of climate disruption neatly evades considerations of
causation.
108 Rethinking environmental security

ENDANGERED, ENTANGLED, EXTRACTIVIST

In making sense of the multiple conflicting interpretations of the various narra-

tives linking environment and global politics in the Anthropocene, Lövbrand,
Mobjörk and Soder (2020) suggest that three dominant modes of discourse
can be discerned in current academic discussions, those of endangered
worlds, entangled worlds, and extractivist worlds. These categories are largely
self-explanatory, but they add a key dimension to the questions of ontological
security, and the question of what identities are invoked in the discussions of
global security. They also emphasize the importance of shifting the focus from
the narrow one in many versions of sustainable development discourse on
resource scarcities to environmental security understood much more broadly
(Pirages and Cousins 2005).
The endangered world discourse engages with the discussion of the
Anthropocene and earth system science concerns that human actions have
changed humanity’s relationship with the earth. “The endangered world
presents a global scene where new environmental threats and dangers are
causing socioeconomic turbulence and gradually altering the geopolitical
map” (Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder 2020, 3). Citing Dumaine and Mintzer
(2015), Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder state that

… traditional security thinking makes little analytical sense in a world bound

together by complex, non-linear and closely coupled environmental risks. In the
Anthropocene security analysts must move beyond the assumption that the main
purpose of defense is to secure the nation against external, state-based, mainly
military threats. In order to respond to the dangers of a radically transformed
global environment, states need to cultivate a shared view about common threats
and improve collective capacities for early warning, rapid response, and disaster
mitigation … (2020, 3)

The entangled world is a discourse drawing more explicitly from international

relations themes and less focused on a series of problems that can be solved.
It “instead represents a new reality where humans, nonhumans, things and
materials coexist in complex relations of life and non-life. … In a world
marked by melting ice caps, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans, accelerating
deforestation, degraded agricultural lands and dramatic species loss, human
activity and nature are so enmeshed that they are existentially indistinguish-
able” (Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder 2020, 4). The implications of this for
security thinking are profound. “Security cannot be achieved by resolute
actions grounded in expression of power targeting ‘external’ threats, but only
by re-embedding modern humanity in the multi-species world that we now are
remaking” (Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder 2020, 4). This requires a different
politics, one that makes other species part of the discussion and understands
 Global security/environmental conflict 109

security in terms of a functional biosphere, not a matter of domination and

force.
The third Anthropocene discourse focuses on justice and the social-ecological
consequences of the expansion of a capitalist world economy. “In the extrac-
tivist world the center of concern is instead the global capitalist system and
the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expan-
sion, accumulation and extraction” (Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder 2020, 4).
Drawing from Saskia Sassen (2016), Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder suggest
that

(T)he development of capitalism has, since its origins, been marked by violence,
destruction, and appropriation. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossil-
ized carbon, industrialized economies have long done damage to the biosphere and
people living on the edges of the Western world. However, the past three decades
of petroleum-powered economic globalization have reorganized human-nature
relations on the largest possible scale. The extraordinary growth in industrial pro-
duction, commodity markets, technological innovation and consumerism is now
remaking the entire ecological context for humanity. (2020, 4)

Dealing with this world requires rapid changes in political economy and aban-
doning both a simple conflation of all of humanity as a single actor in the earth
system and assumptions that fiddling with market arrangements will bring
about appropriate economic innovation to produce a sustainable future for all.
Clearly numerous things are endangered in this world, and the climate dis-
cussion highlights many of them. Hence the general alarm about many climate
issues and the importance of considering policy actions. The entangled formu-
lation suggests long distance connections, and the fact that simple policy solu-
tions working in silos or stovepipes, focusing on just one aspect of a problem,
are often likely to make things worse precisely because they don’t think about
the entanglements. The extractivist world is in many ways the antithesis of the
endangered world, because it posits a separate world as a source of resources
for use by humanity, rather than a world whereby the disruptions set in motion
by extractivist activities are the source of the endangerments. Clearly extrac-
tivist activities are entangled in the global economy, but the focus on one at the
expense of the other is likely to miss key connections between the two (Bales
and Sovacool 2021).
Crucially what is most concerning in all this is the interconnections between
all three and the fact that extractivism is occurring in an entangled world that
precisely by the interconnections is now endangering numerous things. The
entanglements suggest tele-connections too, between systems that at least until
recently were understood to be relatively separate (Benzie and Persson 2019).
In Clive Hamilton’s (2017) terms the epistemological rupture that marks the
difference between the Anthropocene and earlier formulations relates to this
110 Rethinking environmental security

interconnection at a global scale. But more than this is the fact that the sheer
amount of human activity is now shaping the future configuration of the earth
system, and in the process raising the spectre of catastrophic or existential
risks, not just for individual civilizations or societies, as has been the case in
the past, but now for the survival of the species itself.
The expanding awareness of interconnections and the recognition that in
total human actions are now potentially leading to our extinction puts matters
of catastrophic and existential risk back into the security frame. They have
been there in the past, prior to the 1980s and 1990s focus on smaller scale
issues of overt conflict and environmental change in particular locales. Now in
a return to the discussions in 1972 and 1987, in the United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment (UNCHE) and around Our Common Future, new
earth system science research is once again raising the possibility of making
the planet uninhabitable due to some combination of the extinction crisis
(Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017), climate change (Steffen, Röckstrom,
Richardson et al. 2018) and ocean acidification. These questions of environ-
mental security at the largest of scales are the focus of Chapter 6.
6. Catastrophic and existential risks

EXISTENTIAL THREATS

In 2017 David Wallace-Wells published an article in New York Magazine that

galvanized attention to the potential disastrous effects of continued global
warming, posing the question as to whether climate change might in fact lead
to humanity’s own extinction. Read by millions of readers, it clearly had an
effect in changing American attitudes at least to the seriousness of climate
change and posed the question starkly in terms of likely future events in
a climate disrupted system. If there is an existential question for humanity it
is this one. At least the Biden presidential campaign in the United States in
2020 talked in terms of climate as an existential issue, and undoubtedly gained
youthful support in the American electorate by doing so. But while the jour-
nalistic flourishes and campaign rhetoric are clearly important politically, the
larger questions about the likelihood of extinction and disaster ahead concern
numerous scientific disciplines. What are the lessons from prior catastrophes
and extinction events? These are issues much bigger than traditionally under-
stood in terms of environment and resource management issues.
On the other side of the Atlantic, and more or less at the same time as
Wallace-Wells was getting attention too, David Bendell (2018) generated
controversy with a paper and subsequent edited book on what he called deep
adaptation (Bendell and Read 2021). When the paper was rejected by a journal
he self-published it online, arguing that contemporary trajectories, especially
melting permafrost and methane releases in the Arctic, were happening much
faster than conventional analyses were suggesting. The acceleration of climate
change suggested to Bendell that conventional assumptions about climate
adaptation were underestimating what was coming and that civilization was
unlikely to cope without dramatic social and economic change. These he saw
as unlikely to transpire in a timely manner, hence societal collapse looms in
the near term future. Some of these arguments were influential with parts of the
Extinction Rebellion movement in Britain in particular.
One notable point in Bendell’s argument is that his paper was rejected on
the grounds that it didn’t engage the contemporary social science literature.
But, he argued, that was his point; conventional social science assumes that the
future will be more or less the same as the present, hence it doesn’t generate the

111
112 Rethinking environmental security

kind of material that Bendell is concerned about, a rapid climate transition that
is outside what conventional projections, and economic analyses in particular,
are assuming. Not surprisingly there wasn’t much of a social science literature
for him to engage! While Bendell doesn’t use Michael Albert’s (2020) formu-
lation of social science as committed to “continuationism”, the argument is
loosely consistent with the use of this term. Projections into the future assume
that social patterns change gradually, not abruptly.
The case of international relations as a discipline failing to anticipate the
demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s suggests linearity and persis-
tence as key assumptions in security studies. What both Wallace-Wells and
Bendell suggest is that current trajectories are likely to lead to non-linear
responses, both in terms of natural change and in terms of social change.
Gradual linear changes are what one assumes if market mechanisms and tech-
nical innovation form the policy framework for tackling climate change. But,
and this is a key point, it’s mostly rapid severe and unexpected shocks, and
tipping points in natural and social systems, that worry people thinking about
climate as a security problem.
Failure to respond appropriately and in time to indications of likely future
risks may indeed lead to catastrophe. In security studies at least, histories of
war suggest that militaries are usually preparing to fight previous wars, or at
least frequently find themselves ill equipped for novel circumstances. This was
the case most recently when the United States fought the war on terror in the
aftermath of 9/11 mostly with an organization and armaments which had been
designed to fight the Soviet Union decades earlier (Dalby 2009a). Likewise
it seems that the military now are ill equipped to deal with the challenges
that climate change and biodiversity decline present. As noted earlier, Daniel
Deudney (1990) pointed out at the beginning of the environmental security
discussion that given its training, missions and equipment, the military is
hardly the appropriate institution to tackle ecological matters. Its equipment
is frequently useful in responding to disasters, but the huge use of fossil
fuels involved in military transport, frequently not counted in greenhouse
gas emission calculations, is part of the problem (Belcher, Bigger, Neimark
and Kennelly 2020). Prevention is key; drastic reactions after the fact are an
indication of failure. To paraphrase the key argument from classical Chinese
strategist Sun Tsu, if you have to fight your strategy has failed. In the case of
climate change this adage is directly applicable; avoiding catastrophic climate
change is the only security strategy that is feasible, and a functional civilization
of many billion people in a radically destabilized climate system is simply not
possible.
There is a very considerable social science literature engaging with the
dangers of environmental collapse and the lessons that might be learned from
historical cases of empires and societies disappearing as a result of calamities,
 Catastrophic and existential risks 113

some of which they brought upon themselves. Jared Diamond’s (2005) volume
Collapse is an especially high profile example. What is new in the case of
Wallace-Wells and Bendell is the projections that climate change and radical
disruptions caused by humanity will be the likely cause of civilizational col-
lapse in coming decades. While much of the discussion about historical cases
of societal collapse has focused on naturally occurring climate change, or in
many cases on the exhaustion of agricultural resources by either ill-considered
farming and irrigation practices or natural limitations in particular ecosystems,
the current apocalyptic framing doesn’t focus on resource shortages or direct
poisoning by pollution. The 1970s discussion of the Limits to Growth too
focused on resource shortages as a cause of the collapse of industrial civili-
zation (Herrington 2021). The formulation of environmental security derived
from Our Common Future likewise suggests that resource shortages are a key
problem. But now, with both the extinction crisis and climate change, the
discussion is focused on the opposite argument: the consequences of too much
economic growth based on the dramatic expansion of firepower in the period
of the great acceleration.
In contrast climate disasters are projected as the indirect result of disrup-
tions caused by greenhouse gas emissions, and the response of such things as
melting permafrost and the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and, in Bendell’s case,
alarm about collapsing marine methane clathrates which might cause a huge
spike in methane in the atmosphere with disastrous rapid global heating as
the outcome. At the worst these disruptions and the failure to deal with them
might, so these narratives of doom suggest, lead to the elimination of humanity
in toto. Science fiction writers have explored these scenarios too. John Barnes
in Mother of Storms offers a cautionary tale of rapid heating caused by military
action; Frank Schatzing’s nightmare scenario in his novel The Swarm focuses
on other dangers from clathrates but cautions against military attempts to
destroy environmental threats. While both are excellent entertainment, there is
little in the scientific literature to suggest that disintegrating ocean bed clath-
rates offer immediate threats of destabilizing the earth system.
A failure to anticipate such concerns with possible dramatic destabilizations
of the earth system in time, or instigate actions to slow climate change and
make societies much more adaptable, might lead to elites struggling to main-
tain control, in the process leading to major wars. If they went nuclear, which
given the number of nuclear arsenals currently in existence is quite possible,
then once again nuclear winter raises its head as civilization’s fate. Glikson
(2017) makes the argument that we might better term present circumstances
the Plutocene, because of the future persistence of plutonium and the long
lasting isotopes that it generates. In this context the concerns raised by the
delegates at the 1972 conference in Stockholm about the need to eliminate
nuclear weapons as part of any serious attempt to grapple with global environ-
114 Rethinking environmental security

mental issues seem prescient, even if they were dropped from the sustainable
development discourse once the cold war ended.
Human extinction looms over this discussion and has led to more recent
systematic discussions of this possibility, and a larger scholarly engagement
with the question of long term human survival (Bostrom 2013). This now
provides the largest scale contextualization for security studies, and in terms
of how environmental security might be rethought, is an essential part of the
discussion for a discipline that has survival as its core concern. But this isn’t
just a matter of human extinction: earth system trajectories in motion suggest
that fossil fueled civilization is already causing the sixth overall extinction
event in the planet’s history (Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017). The potential
for major biosphere disruption because of ocean acidification looms over
much of this discussion too. This is now the key context for engaging with
environmental security, rather than the narrow focus on resource shortages as
putative causes of conflict in the Global South.

EXTINCTIONS, AND MERE CATASTROPHES

While there are some technical arguments about what counts as a global
extinction event and whether we are living in the sixth one at the moment,
conventional wisdom counts five major extinction events in the geological
record. As noted in Chapter 3, the most famous is the episode ending the age
of the dinosaurs, with a massive asteroid collision with earth being a key part
of this story. Reconstructing such episodes is key to stratigraphy, the study of
the layers of rocks that tell the story of the planet in the history of sediments
and volcanic episodes, and paleontology, the study of fossil life that charts the
rise and demise of forms of life in the biosphere, the living part of the planetary
system. The major periods of earth history are designated in terms of the dom-
inant forms of life that lived in those times. Now the dominant form is human,
the Anthropos is us; hence we now live in the Anthropocene.
The discussion of the Anthropocene highlights the simple but profound fact
that humanity is now causing geological scale transformations of the earth,
something that is not intuitively obvious to most people, and something that
is clearly well beyond the scope of many politicians to grasp, and also beyond
most efforts, at least so far, at global governance. While climate change is
mostly discussed in terms of more extreme weather, potential violence and
the costs of storms and floods, that larger context is more fundamental once
one considers the long term fate of humanity. Hence the growing use of terms
such as existential crisis, even if it is frequently far from clear precisely whose
existence is threatened and hence what kind of security policy is needed for
whom where. The David Wallace-Wells (2017) article posed the question of
whether all of humanity might be eliminated by climate change and the disrup-
 Catastrophic and existential risks 115

tions likely to follow from failures to anticipate what might be coming and act
in time to prevent calamity. His subsequent book (Wallace-Wells 2019) may
have been less apocalyptic in tone, but the question hangs over the discussion
of climate change, and work in the field of environmental security simply has
to confront it even if conventional international relations analyses have been
slow to engage these larger questions.
Because one thing is clear: the prior climate history of the planet demon-
strates that popular journalistic and policy maker assumptions of gradual
climate changes, of slowly rising temperatures and weather patterns shifting in
predicable trajectories towards the poles, are unlikely to be correct (Barnosky,
Hadly, Bascompte et al. 2012). While clearly climate systems will move, and
where soils can accommodate plants from distant places, agricultural oppor-
tunities may open up (Xu, Kohler amd Lenton 2020), the newly ice free parts
of Greenland being a case in point, assuming that these transitions will be
either smooth progressions or predictable sequences has long been recognized
as assuming too much (Alley 2004; Schneider 2004). These possibilities are
key to thinking about global security, a very different set of assumptions than
those that have long populated economic risk analyses relating to climate, with
linear projections far into the future (Keen 2021), and implicit assumptions of
the inevitability of economic growth.
One particular worrisome scenario that has engaged popular culture is the
matter of the dangers of the Gulf Stream stopping, or at least slowing notice-
ably (Caesar, McCarthy, Thornally et al. 2021). If substantial meltwater from
Arctic ice changes the density of water in the North Atlantic then it will not
sink as it has been doing since the end of the last glaciation. If this occurs, in
technical terms the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) stops,
then the global circulation of ocean currents would stop, and this would have
numerous ecological effects. Should that happen, then European climates are
likely to be very substantially cooler in the short run (farmers in Greenland will
have their hopes disappointed) and agriculture there will be disrupted. (This
too has been presented in hugely exaggerated form in the 2004 Hollywood
disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow.) If the AMOC slows or stops it
might temporarily slow melting in Greenland, but presumably heating would
intensify further south as the warm waters no longer move heat to higher lati-
tudes. More than this, the various crucial parts of the earth system that may be
destabilized as the earth heats are not independent, and if one crosses a tipping
point and begins to operate differently, others may follow (Wunderling,
Donges, Kurths and Winkelmann 2021). Cascade disruptions make predicting
these interactions difficult, and because there is lack of clarity in terms of what
amount of heating is required for tipping points to be crossed, predictions are
difficult. But that doesn’t mean these dangers aren’t foreseeable, and if rapid
decarbonization of the global economy is set in motion, they might be avoided.
116 Rethinking environmental security

The crucial point in all this is that regional consequences are likely from
global climate change, and average temperature changes over the whole
system aren’t helpful as indications of how conditions in particular places are
likely to be affected. All of which means that risks to specific places, as with
specific economic systems, need to be evaluated in much more detail, and in
the case of supply chains in the global economy, points of vulnerability iden-
tified. Policies over the next few decades need to grapple with the disruptions,
extreme weather and heat waves that are likely, rather than assume a smooth
transition to a future stable state (Albert 2020). The key question for con-
sideration specifically of security is whether states, societies and economies
with production systems, and crucially infrastructure designed for one set of
circumstances, will be flexible enough to handle disruptive transitions.
Failure to do so, leading to social breakdown and conflict and violence on
a large scale, is the nightmare scenario that environmental security researchers
wish to convince policy makers that they need to avoid. It doesn’t help when
these considerations are refracted through security discussions that emphasize
fortress formulations of distant threats to metropolitan prosperity (White 2014)
and that there has been a rise in survivalist literatures and fantasies on the part
of the rich and powerful that they can hide from the ecological disruptions
that are coming (Katz-Rosene and Szwarc 2021) or, as critics of conventional
climate security discussions suggest, protect themselves by building walls and
securitizing climate migration rather than tackling the source in terms of fossil
fuel emissions (Miller, Buxton and Akkerman 2021).
In his warning about possible extinction, Wallace-Wells was following
in the footsteps of Jonathan Schell (1982), who had ruminated over the
possibilities of major nuclear war causing human extinction in his bestseller
book The Fate of the Earth. As van Munster and Sylvest (2021) emphasize,
what was especially interesting in this volume was speculations about the
ecological consequences of a major nuclear conflagration, which suggested
that more than immediate destruction, firestorms and nuclear fallout were the
dangers. This came the year before the “nuclear winter” discussions (Turco,
Toon, Ackerman et al. 1983), and highlighted the then emergent recognition
in nascent earth system thinking that humanity had, with its technological
capabilities, become an earth system scale transformative force. The possi-
bility of human extinction, as a direct outcome of the enormous destructive
capabilities of technology, posed nuclear war as an existential threat to the
whole of humanity, and hence a compelling argument for rethinking the logics
of deterrence and the assumption that as these weapons had apparently kept
the superpowers in check so far, they would continue to do so in perpetuity.
But as noted above, this is only a new condition for some peoples; notably it
is new for those who actually built and now operate nuclear weapons systems.
In that sense the claim that this is an existential threat for all of humanity
 Catastrophic and existential risks 117

simply shifts the referent object somewhat to, in this case ironically, those
societies whose leaders built the weapons. One of the key counter arguments
to adopting the Anthropocene as a novel condition for humanity points to the
fact that extreme dangers, and the wholescale elimination of peoples in warfare
and by imperial conquest, only most obviously by Europeans and Americans
in the last few centuries, are far from new. In political terms many colonized
peoples have already faced catastrophe, violence and displacement, whether
it’s native North Americans, Pacific Islanders or Palestinians. Hence Jarius
Grove’s (2019) suggestion that the last few centuries might better be termed
the Eurocene to highlight the destruction and disruption, and the wholescale
elimination of many millions of humans particularly in the Americas, as
a result of conquest. The Beothuk people of what is now called Newfoundland
simply don’t have a say in the future—they are already extinct.
It is also worth noting that, until recently, at least Western cultures hadn’t
considered the possibility of human extinction (Moynihan 2020). If there was
a divine plan then humanity had little concern with such things; we were here
since creation apparently and were likely to remain until end times of some
sort or other, but the possibility of our elimination, whether by geological
misadventure or due to human folly, simply wasn’t a consideration. But fol-
lowing the acceptance of Darwinian notions of evolution and the widespread
understanding of fossils as the remnants of once existent life forms that were
no longer living, the question of the future of the species becomes unavoid-
able. Nuclear angst in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes this
question palpable; now this is revisited by discussions of climate change and
the elimination of numerous species in what is increasingly understood as
a current extinction crisis, now usually considered the sixth in the planet’s
history (Kolbert 2014).
These reassessments of humanity’s place in the larger order of things raises
questions of environmental insecurity at the global scale, and does so because
these concerns now impact the global political and economic system. Climate
justice advocates often focus on the short term distributional consequences of
regional climate vulnerabilities, which in terms of security studies unavoida-
bly raises the key political question, the matter of “whose security?” (Walker
1997). Much of the security discussion of climate is, as this book highlights,
about the survival of Americans and Europeans, and in particular the relatively
affluent parts of those societies whose lifestyles are obviously potentially
affected directly by storms, floods, wildfires and droughts. Likewise the poli-
tics of this insecurity is tangled up in fears of government actions to deal with
these hazards, in the process constraining aspects of this consumption driven
lifestyle which has come to be equated with “freedom”.
While this may lead to particular invocations of what exactly is in need
of securing, as previous chapters have made clear, the earth system sciences
118 Rethinking environmental security

have made major advances in understanding the dynamics of the earth system,
and the dangers to many species in addition to humans, that are unfolding as
climate change accelerates on an already radically altered earth. At the largest
scale the analyses of existential risks have identified potential terminal events
that endanger the future of humanity in toto. And this now presents the largest
canvass for considering environmental insecurity, and for considering who
might respond how to shape the future in less dangerous directions.

NATURAL, ANTHROPOGENIC AND FUTURE RISKS

Following in the path of earlier work on major risks to humanity (Smil 2008;
Al-Rodhan 2009), Toby Ord (2020) uses a threefold categorization of the
dangers: natural ones that arise from being part of a small planet; artificial
ones already created by the actions of the rich and powerful among us; and
possible future ones, that at least in part could be avoided by wise action and
sensible policies. The natural risks have been discussed in Chapter 3; the arti-
ficial risks are part of the larger considerations of environment that now have
to be integrated into discussions of security if the newly understood risks to
humanity that the Anthropocene entails are to be worked into a revised agenda
for international relations.
In terms of artificial risks, Ord’s (2020) overview suggests three very
obvious ones that we understand in at least broad outline, those of nuclear
war, climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. All three
of these are within the ambit of the initial concerns at the Stockholm United
Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in 1972, and
were detailed in Our Common Future fifteen years later. Ord emphasizes
the dangers of accidental nuclear warfare and includes a listing of nuclear
accidents, some of which in the context of the cold war confrontation and hair
trigger alert systems could well have caused a major nuclear war between the
superpowers. The subsequent historical analysis of the Cuban missile crisis
of 1962 has suggested that there were serious misunderstandings on the part
of the major protagonists, and failures to comprehend the actual situation on
the ground (Blight and Lang 2018), either or both of which could easily have
led to rapid escalation and nuclear war. It is also worth noting that a key link
between these risks is the danger of a nuclear winter caused in the aftermath of
multiple nuclear explosions by the cooling effect that smoke and soot would
have over an extended period if that material was lofted into the stratosphere.
Climate change and the biodiversity crisis likewise are now key to the global
ecological crisis to which the whole discussion about environmental security
is at least a putative response.
The third category of existential risks that Ord (2020) focuses on are likely
future ones, caused by human activity in part. Crucially he notes that scientists
 Catastrophic and existential risks 119

have frequently been wrong about novel technologies. Practical engineers

likewise. He instances the case of Wilbur Wright, who thought heavier than
air flight was many decades in the future, two years before he actually proved
that it could be done. Ord warns that predicting technological innovations and
their dangers accurately is nigh on impossible, but something that clearly has
to be attempted, even if only in rough outline, in a world being rapidly remade
by the growing technosphere.
In light of subsequent events, Ord is clearly right to list pandemic dangers
as a key risk that humanity faces; the COVID-19 pandemic has proven how
interconnected humanity is, the importance of public health preparation and,
not least, the possibilities of medical science generating vaccines relatively
quickly. The history of pandemics and infectious diseases is one of a huge
toll of human casualties, and one often linked to climate disruptions too
(McMichael 2017). The possibilities of major disease events can’t be ruled
out, and the disruption of relatively wild spaces by the ever larger colonization
and intrusion of agricultural populations and those hunting for food around the
world heightens the dangers of zoonotic disease outbreaks. As COVID-19 has
shown, once one is widespread in the world, containing it is nigh on impossi-
ble. Ebola, SARS, Zika and MERS have been contained, or turned out not to
spread in pandemic fashion; the world has not been so lucky with COVID-19.
Ironically the success in partly containing SARS, Ebola, MERS and Zika in
the years prior to the COVID-19 may have lulled security experts into falsely
believing that diseases distant from Europe and North America would stay in
their regions of origin.
The possibilities of both a deadly and a highly infectious disease dramati-
cally reducing human population has been amply illustrated by the Black Death
in Europe, and the demise of Native American populations after the introduc-
tion of European diseases following the colonization of the Americas. The
possibilities of a bioweapon escaping a laboratory or being used in a conflict
offers one potentially deadly risk for the future (Ord 2020). The possibilities of
DNA sequencing linked to the rapid spread of the technological knowledge to
make use of it poses risks that are far from clear. Biological threats are many,
and while there have been successes in eliminating diseases, and smallpox in
particular, there is no guarantee that future biological dangers can be dealt with
effectively, as the COVID-19 event makes very clear. That said, it is also the
case that innovations with mRNA technologies that facilitated the rapid roll
out of COVID-19 vaccines may offer promise of further health improvements,
at least for those living in the wealthy parts of the world that can pay for them
if they are made by private corporations.
At least as unknowable are the effects of artificial intelligence and possible
threats from its getting loose, or being weaponized in as yet unknowable
ways. Linked to an interconnected cyberspace where all sorts of viruses and
120 Rethinking environmental security

weaponized software are already lurking, the possibilities of disaster mount.

Already, directed attacks on public utilities, either as a criminal act in the
case of ransomware attacks or for geopolitical leverage as in attacks to switch
off electrical utilities in moments of heightened confrontation, have become
relatively commonplace. The potential to link these to environmental disasters
suggests compounding risks where infrastructure merges with environmental
factors to increase vulnerabilities (Briggs and Matejova 2019). Environmental
security is now also about preventing hostile disruptions of infrastructure, and
questions about digital governance are linked here quite directly to questions
of human vulnerability to “artificial” disasters.
The widespread prevalence of microplastics in both human bodies and the
wider environment is but one additional worry in how the technosphere is
changing the context for life, both human and other (Amarel-Zettler, Zettler
and Mincer 2020). The sheer amount of artificial materials that constitute the
new technosphere, and potentially compromise the operation of numerous
parts of the biosphere, is worrisome to anyone thinking intelligently about the
future of the planetary system (Mitchell 2015). Such formulations are now an
unavoidable part of security thinking because the expanding technosphere is
the context for human societies, and as such built and digital environments
provide security and vulnerability.
The failure to anticipate the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the
scramble to provide basic public health measures in the face of the rapid spread
of the disease, makes very clear that the state systems, surveillance systems
and security planning in the contemporary world are ill equipped to deal with
the kinds of threats that medical experts have been warning about for decades
(Elbe 2009; Price-Smith 2009). In part this is because specialized knowledge
is compartmentalized and frequently not easy to communicate in culturally
appropriate ways. Likewise political authority is frequently challenged by
expertise that requires acting in ways that disrupt “normal” life, and in the
process challenges the prerogatives of politicians who are used to making
decisions. The intense lobbying by corporate and institutional interests in the
face of crises likewise shapes public agendas, and the perpetual desires to be
in control have played their part in stymying innovation (Stoddard, Anderson,
Capstick et al. 2021). Nowhere is this clearer than in the current climate crisis,
where in so many instances existing institutional and corporate entities have
responded by either denying the severity of the situation (Speth 2021) or trying
to shape the response so that the consequences are born elsewhere.

CLIMATE RISKS

While these academic discussions of catastrophic and existential risks encom-

pass the largest scale environmental insecurities that humanity as a whole
 Catastrophic and existential risks 121

faces, much of the discussion in the West in recent years has been about the
financial risks that climate disruptions might entail. One key point in the
climate risk discussion that has to be emphasized is that climate risk on the
planetary scale doesn’t fit the conventional schemes used in risk analysis.
Usually these operate on the assumption that there are frequent small scale
risks at one end of the scale and few high consequence ones at the other end.
Insurance and other financial calculations frequently operate on such premises
in calculating likelihoods and consequences. But climate risk doesn’t operate
this way. Climate change is a certainty, and the longer effective policies to
deal with it are delayed the greater the long term disruptions will be (Mabey,
Gulledge, Finel and Silverthorne 2011). This is not least because carbon
dioxide is very persistent in the atmosphere, hence the urgency in curtailing
its accumulation. Failure to do so will obviously threaten to disrupt economic
activities, and considerable intellectual energy has gone into working out the
likely economic risks of a warming world.
One of the key methodological issues in economic evaluations of risk is
the use of simple calculations of risk related to future average temperature
estimates and such questions as to how to add in losses from disasters, which
may not follow linearly from average temperature increases (Howard and
Sterner 2017). How one specifies future conditions is of course a key to esti-
mating what disruptions might cost. And given the rapidity of technological
change too, and the presumed ability of economic production systems to
incorporate risk calculations and move facilities and supply sources in the face
of changing circumstances, projections are fraught with assumptions. This
isn’t a new problem, but nonetheless estimates of climate induced costs vary
widely. Projections far into the future make matters even more uncertain, but
this hasn’t stopped various think tanks and academic research projects trying
to make forecasts!
Some of these look to total estimated costs, and others calculate things in
terms of reductions to future GDP. Once one digs into this literature it is also
clear that different reports highlight different aspects of the economy, and
financial consultants, banks and research agencies connected to particular
economic sectors look at matters through sector specific lenses. Early attempts
to think through the costs of adaptations to deal with these risks likewise
struggled with huge uncertainties both in terms of how to calculate risks and in
terms of what would be needed to cope with them (Parry, Arnell, Berry et al.
2009). Not least, in the early years of this century, data on the costs of disasters
frequently ignored small events and focused on the insurance payouts which
emphasize large scale economic operations and not the frequently uninsured
smallholders in rural areas. Estimates from central top down global calcula-
tions didn’t necessarily mesh with local or sectoral estimates from the bottom
up.
122 Rethinking environmental security

All such estimates of course have to make assumptions about how societies
and investors will choose to work future potential dangers into their calcula-
tions, and as with so much of risk communication in environmental matters,
the whole point is to try to make sure that such future costs are avoided by
timely investments to pre-empt them. Wei and colleagues (2020) suggest
that if states do follow through with their declared nationally determined
contributions to the Paris Agreement, then they will have a net economic
benefit. Failure to follow such “self-preservation strategies” might cost the
world anywhere from 150 to 792 trillion dollars by the end of this century.
A working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), looking back at
past fluctuations in temperature and linking them to productivity, suggests that
temperature fluctuations have a pronounced effect, and that failure to abide by
the Paris Agreement will over the course of this century reduce real per capita
GDP worldwide by 7 percent (Kahn, Mohaddes, Ng et al. 2019).
Analysis of particular countries is likewise dependent on numerous assump-
tions. In one study of the United States detailed estimates of the vulnerabilities
to particular climate change induced hazards, such as increasing hurricane
damage, were coupled with attempts to categorize them geographically.
This was an attempt to provide insights into likely risks while trying to add
consistency between bottom up and top down estimation methods (Hsiang,
Kopp, Jina et al. 2017). Estimates in this case of cumulative damage by mid
century, which might include social conflict induced by climate disruptions,
suggest that between 1 and 3 percent of GNP might be forgone due to climate
disruptions. One key point in this analysis highlights the discrepancies
between likely vulnerabilities. Relatively speaking the United States has a very
small part of its labour force and economy directly supported by agriculture,
so unlike many states in the Global South, climate disruptions are much less
likely to induce direct costs than they are in countries with a large agricultural
sector. The inequity of those causing climate change not feeling its most direct
consequences is once again clear in such estimates.
While the detailed financial calculations continue to be made, the political
attention to them has escalated. This is clear in the repeated suggestions from
World Economic Forum meetings in Davos and their global risk assessments
that climate is an increasingly severe risk (World Economic Forum 2020), in
addition to statements from G7 and G20 meetings emphasizing the need to act.
The United Nations Secretary-General (2020) in particular has made climate
action a priority. In doing so the politics of this is clearly taking the risks much
more seriously than many of the financial calculations suggest would be the
case if purely financial matters were the criteria for judgement. After all, if
a few percent reductions of GDP many years in the future are all that are in
play, then the case for acting is minimal. If economic growth is a few percent
per annum, then a few percent per annum cost of climate change simply means
 Catastrophic and existential risks 123

reaching a particular GDP goal a year or two later decades in the future. On
the other hand, if climate change only implies a slight slowing of economic
growth, then policy makers focused on GDP increase as the overarching social
goal are unlikely to be concerned. As with so much of contemporary econom-
ics, the potential for dramatic geophysical disruptions, and the need to either
integrate the biophysical transformations of the present into its calculations or
think very differently, is manifest (Gopel 2016).
Beyond these global estimates of danger, the Paris Agreement and ever more
alarming warnings on the part of scientists, researchers and policy makers in
specific segments of the economy have also been evaluating both the risks
to existing investments and the possibilities of practical policies to minimize
exposure to both climate damage and the likely policy responses that such
policies are likely to face. In the aftermath of the Paris Agreement on Climate
Change, investors and central bank operatives have gradually paid increasing
attention to the risks to their systems from climate disruptions (Diringer and
Perciasepe 2020). Real estate in vulnerable coastal locations subject to rising
sea levels and storm exposure presents problems for the insurance industry,
and here novel, if dubious, forms of insurance linked securitization have
emerged in the financial sector in response to growing hazards (Taylor 2020).
Fire risks in California likewise have been highlighted in recent years as the
risks from wildfire have escalated. Here too, because of high housing prices,
many people have been forced to live in rural areas vulnerable to fires and
where insurance may simply not be available, emphasizing the difficulties that
climate change enhances for economically marginal citizens (Flavelle 2020).
By the beginning of 2020, climate risks and the implications for investors
were clearly penetrating the corridors of high finance, and investment houses
were taking note. High profile director of BlackRock Corporation, Larry Fink
(2020), penned an open letter to CEOs in January 2020 warning that climate
risks were setting in motion a substantial reconsideration of investment
strategies and anticipating that sustainability would become a key criterion
for future capital allocations. The following month the Guardian newspaper
obtained an internal report generated by the JP Morgan financial corporation,
which has invested large amounts of money in fossil fuels, suggesting that the
world was on course for climate disaster and the corporation needed to address
the related risks (Greenfield and Watts 2020). Simultaneously McKinsey’s
consulting group was thinking along similar lines (McKinsey Global Institute
2020), pondering the climate risks to many corporations which had not thought
through the likely disruptions that climate change will bring (Kormann 2020).
In the last few years these formulations have begun to shape a new dis-
course on climate and economics that looks to the possibilities of remaking
the economy after fossil fuels, one that looks to investments in green energy
and innovation to deal with social and economic ills while simultaneously
124 Rethinking environmental security

slowing the rate of climate change. The arguments about climate risks and their
complex interconnections (Yokohata, Tanaka, Nishina et al. 2019) have per-
meated the World Bank, the IMF, and even the International Energy Agency
(2021), which abandoned its focus on fossil fuels in at least one prominent
report to suggest that an energy transition was necessary and financially feasi-
ble given the reduction in renewable energy prices and the urgency of tackling
climate change. The IMF Economic Outlook in the Fall of 2020, which high-
lights risks, concludes that while the window of opportunity for transition to
renewable energy and limiting global heating to less than 2 degrees Celsius is
closing, it is still possible to do this globally (Barrett, Bogmans, Carton et al.
2020). This transition will have to involve carbon pricing, which is essential
to shift energy systems away from carbon fuels. But they argue that with
sensible policies to use revenue from carbon fees to cushion the impacts on
poorer consumers and enhance transitions for displaced workers, it is possible
to facilitate a structural economic transition to a post carbon future. Doing so
should make avoiding the nightmare scenario of climate induced civilizational
collapse possible.

WHICH RISK TO WHAT FUTURE?

While the pandemic disruptions of 2020 and 2021 partly shifted these con-
cerns to focus on short term disruptions, the fiscal stimulus provided to many
economies to tackle the economic shutdowns suggests a more active role for
governments in directing economies than had been the case in previous years
(Tooze 2021). Risks to the financial system drove these innovations, but raise
the question as to whether other risks now might generate similar responses.
Key to this is the formulation of climate as a risk to the existing economic
system, and how this thinking tries to bridge the gap between the physical
science of climate and the economic calculations in global estimates of losses
and economic costs, as well as think through the variable geography of risk
(Hedlund, Fick, Carlsen and Benzie 2018). There are numerous epistemo-
logical incongruities between these fields, and at least part of the discussion
about climate and risk is explained by the different assumptions brought to
bear. Steve Keen’s (2021) full scale assault on William Nordhaus’s widely
influential climate models suggests that their major flaw is simply that they
don’t consider the geophysical realities of climate change in any detail. Keen
(2021) suggests that the expert elicitation used to calibrate the costs of change
came mainly from economists’ estimates of what has come to be known as the
social cost of carbon, rather than from any attempt to engage with physical sci-
entists’ methods or data, much less serious projections of climate trajectories
or tipping points (Lenton, Rockström, Gaffney et al. 2019).
 Catastrophic and existential risks 125

In particular the assumptions that disruptions can be dealt with by ever more
affluent future societies, and that major discontinuities in the climate system
are not forthcoming, skew the policy making framework towards minor tink-
ering and pricing carbon rather than more transformative reorientation to deal
with the novel geophysical context of the Anthropocene. In terms of security
most of the climate models assume that relative social stability persists, in
Albert’s (2020) terms, continuationism, and the possibilities of major social
discontinuities are not worked into the projections. Which suggests another
discrepancy between economic models and physical ones which are much
more concerned with discontinuities, and the difficult to predict interactions
between parts of the earth system.
Where economists assume the continuity of economic growth and the
potential for technological innovation, earth system scientists are concerned
about destabilization of the earth system. Climate models that suggest
a gradual movement of weather systems towards higher latitudes and to higher
altitudes are premised on gradual change and evolutionary adaptations, not
a rupture or phase shift transition in the climate system, precisely what most
worries climate scientists (Asefi-Najafabady, Villegas-Ortiz and Morgan
2020). Climates are not likely to migrate smoothly, and the disruptions in the
Arctic regions in particular, due to melting permafrost and sea ice, complicate
matters greatly. This suggests very clearly that while in theory the warming
Arctic region may increase access to petroleum and gas resources, extracting
them and getting them to market will not be easy in many places. Doing so
would exacerbate climate change inducing positive feedback loops that make
everything more difficult, and the likelihood of collapsing societies greater.
Projections into the future and fears about imminent collapse have a long
history, and the discussion of the Limits to Growth in the 1970s is a salutary
tale about misconceptions and assumptions not meshing across disciplines
(Turner 2014). Not least in the case of the Limits to Growth discussion is the
failure of early critics to engage with the long term forecasts that were at the
heart of the models, ones that suggested that the crunch decades would be in the
2020s and 2030s, not in the 1970s or 1980s (Cole, Freeman, Jahoda and Pavitt
1973). The Limits to Growth suggested that rising population growth and with
it resource usage would encounter limits in terms of shortages of supply, and
also rising levels of pollution. But the key focus was on resource shortages.
The economics response is that rising resource prices will encourage innova-
tions and hence resources never actually run out because new resources, novel
technologies and processes substitute for shortages and change how economies
operate prior to complete exhaustion.
But in the case of current discussions of environmental security, resources
aren’t the main issue; the indirect effects of elevated greenhouse gases are.
This point is frequently obscured when the disruptions of climate change
126 Rethinking environmental security

are folded into standard scarcity narratives, especially about water supplies
as a likely cause of conflict in many places. It is noteworthy that the iconic
graph of the “standard run” of the limits to growth computer model suggested
that subsequent to the rapid decline of industrial production when resources
shortages caused economic disruptions, pollution would fairly quickly drop
too as ecological processes recycled materials (Meadows, Meadows, Randers
and Behrens 1972). But at least in the case of carbon dioxide, the key sub-
stance driving climate change, this obviously is not going to be the case,
and disruptions as a result of climate change are likely to be long lasting as
the stability of the Holocene period, and the larger ice age dominated period
of the Quaternary, is overturned by the new climate systems of a hothouse
world. Nonetheless it is also worth noting that Jorgen Randers (2012), one of
the original Limits to Growth authors, suggested forty years after the initial
publication, using the updated World3 model, that despite these difficulties
there was still a substantial chance that industrial humanity could survive the
contemporary global crisis (Herrington 2021).
Time is a key matter in climate change, mostly because carbon dioxide is
accumulating in the atmosphere much faster than either terrestrial or oceanic
systems can remove it. Carbon dioxide remains in the air for centuries and as
such the longer effective action in reducing emissions is delayed, the worse
the consequences will be in terms of climate disruptions (Funk 2021). These
are already kicking in; the policy questions are now about how quickly to act
to slow the pace of climate change and attempt to reduce the impact of what
is already unavoidable. Time also matters here in terms of economic fore-
casts, because the future doesn’t send any market signals; the consequences
of today’s actions will show up in future economic activities, but potential
hazards in decades hence are not usually integrated into purchasing or invest-
ment decisions. In former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank
of England Mark Carney’s formulation: “Once climate change becomes a clear
and present danger to financial stability it may already be too late to stabilize
the atmosphere at two degrees” (cited in Gaffney, Crona, Dauriach and Galaz
2018, 3). What is uncertain is how fast policies, market forces or technological
change will influence the production of greenhouse gases or further either the
deforestation or the regeneration of key ecosystems. These are policy depend-
ent up to a point, hence the importance of politics and policy actors moving
to shape investment choices and regulate dangerous activities. These social
tipping points (Otto, Donges, Cremades et al. 2020) are the other side of the
climate change risk issue; if and how fast they will operate is key to shaping
the future.
In terms of risk, the cultural framing of the climate discussion clearly
plays a key role. While environmentalists are looking at the science of the
earth system and the repeated warnings of the scientific community about
 Catastrophic and existential risks 127

looming hazards, thresholds and tipping points in the earth system, it seems
that many business people and entrepreneurs operate in a cultural frame that
often precludes taking these warnings seriously. In Jane Jacobs’ (1994, 43) apt
summary:

As a generalization, people with a commercial cast of mind find it almost impossible

to believe they’re headed willy-nilly into irreversible environmental disaster. They
can’t believe there’s no way out. It doesn’t ring true emotionally. Instead, what does
grab commercial people, emotionally as well as practically, is ingenious ways to
forestall disaster.

Hence the endless search for technological innovation and assumptions that
some new technical fix will emerge so that the social order that has created the
climate change crisis will be the one to solve it.

COLLAPSE OR REFORM?

The overarching conclusion from such deliberations is that there is a multitude

of dangers which might threaten long term human survival. The exhaustion of
resources and dramatic changes in ecological circumstances raise the issue of
the collapse of civilizations, a theme that is highlighted by Jared Diamond’s
(2005) book simply called Collapse. Crudely put the collapse arguments
suggest that ever larger use of limited resources and ever more complexity in
societies lead to eventual demise as innovations fail to engineer a way out of
the social traps that limit possibilities (Tainter 1988). Attempts to perpetuate
traditional ways of doing things in the face of changed circumstances may
lead to disaster. In terms of security understood as the perpetuation of modern
modes of fossil fueled industrial society and dealing with threats to these
modes from outside, this then seems likely to be civilization’s fate. Hence the
rallying cry of young protesters, climate strikers, extinction rebels and others
that demands a change of course before it’s too late, and a refusal to accept that
reform isn’t possible despite the reluctance of their elders to contemplate social
change and essential novel economic models.
But there is another possible trajectory, one where environmental trou-
bles cause radical reform in how resources are used or societies organized
(Holthaus 2020; Rudel 2019). In the face of accelerating climate change,
species extinction, ocean acidification and all the other issues identified by
contemporary ecological science, the possibilities of radical and rapid changes
in policy and a reconsideration of what environmental security might mean
open up as necessities, if, that is, the traps that Tainter (1988) and other
scholars of collapse suggest are a looming danger can be avoided. If however
these dangers exacerbate international tensions, or even as Allison (2017) has
128 Rethinking environmental security

suggested, present the United States with a situation in which its elites think
events are slipping out of control, could they lead to war?
It is important to note that Jared Diamond emphasizes that our current
civilization has one large advantage over its predecessors: it knows what
happened to previous ones. We both understand some of the causes of failure
and live in a social system that innovates with technology rapidly, hence the
possibilities of learning our way out of potentially deadly trajectories exist. But
to tackle this requires focusing explicitly on what needs to be done to function
in a dynamic world where human decisions about what to produce are a key
component shaping the future of the technosphere, and with it the other key
components of the earth system. Can the flexibility of the global supply chains
and the sheer capabilities of science, technical innovation and social learning
avoid Tainter (1988) style collapses, as Diamond suggests is possible? Or will
disasters provoke defensive parochialism, as some climate politics in response
to disasters suggests (Cohen 2021), and a return to a geopolitics dominated by
security dilemmas and fortress politics where threats are seen as external hence
obviating domestic responses (White 2014)?
Or is the complexity of the global economy reaching such a state that with
so many potential choke points in the supply chains, should a number of them
be disrupted simultaneously, chaos would result and the complex edifice of
international trading would unravel? The situation in early 2021 when the
Ever Given container ship ran aground in the Suez Canal, further disrupting an
international shipping system that was already reeling from the pandemic, sug-
gests the brittleness of much of the economy so heavily dependent on just in
time deliveries. The priority in just in time deliveries is efficiency understood
in terms of minimizing costs, and effectively having inventories on board
ships rather than in warehouses. Contingency planning in terms of “just in
case” preparation implies redundancy, in the sense of having supplies on hand
in case of disruptions, but this increases storage costs. The logics of cost and
security do not align.
But this discussion too may be misleading. While Diamond’s and even more
so Tainter’s discussions relate to historical and archaeological cases, what is
noteworthy in Diamond’s account is how immensely tenacious many societies
actually are in the face of profound challenges to their ecological context.
Subsequent historical and archaeological research may dispute or refute their
analyses, but as in the case of the persistence of the Greenland Norse in par-
ticular, the more important question in terms of security may be how, despite
the odds, they survived for as long as they did, not the question of what finally
caused their society to die out. As McNeill (2010) points out in his rejoinder
to Diamond, the Norse settlement there survived longer than most modern
settler colonies have so far done. Three centuries into that Norse history, it
would have been judged to be a success for having survived that long. While
 Catastrophic and existential risks 129

in this case Diamond suggests their failure to adapt technologies and practices
that allowed indigenous peoples to live in these circumstances caused their
eventual demise, their tenacity in terms of the centuries long survival of an iso-
lated society in very marginal ecological conditions may have more important
lessons to teach.
McNeill’s (2010) additional suggestion is a key to considering all this in
terms of security. He poses the question of what survives through long periods
of history. No states that existed fifteen hundred years ago are now extant.
Chinese civilization stretching back nearly four millennia is more or less a con-
tinuous society, but the numerous dynastic changes, the rise to power of the
communist party in the mid twentieth century being only the latest one, were
frequently violent collapses out of which a novel ruling elite gained temporary
control. Is it culture that should be made to survive, its future secured by
political methods and the threat of violence if necessary? Once again the key
question is “whose security?”
What is clear from earth systems research is that the current global economy
based on the massive energy subsidy from the past in the form of fossil fuels is
destabilizing many things, and the current imperial mode of life, to use Brand
and Wissen’s (2021) terms, of the affluent part of the world’s population,
based on consumption using resources from all over the world, is unsustaina-
ble. In Diamond’s terms the collapse of this particular social order would seem
to be essential for the long term survival of many human cultures. What then
is being secured by whom and for what purpose? How might a rapid transition
to a post carbon fueled global civilization be facilitated? From the perspective
of many in the Global South, the collapse of the affluent fossil fueled SUV
driving capitalism of the Global North would seem to be essential to slow
global ecological transformation and give them a chance to thrive, a view
that is anathema to traditional Northern security thinking which is premised
on modernity and consumption as the key economic process that is to be
sustained.
Likewise, given the scale of the global economy and the enormous speed of
technological innovation in particular, it’s an open question as to whether the
lessons from many of these prior histories are directly applicable. The world
isn’t running out of fossil fuels any time soon; their abundance and the ease
of access to them has generated the climate problems we face. Clearly a lack
of social flexibility matters greatly in terms of adaptation, but the ability to
substitute products and technologies in the present global economy is on an
unprecedented scale. So too of course is the scale of ecological transformation
and the abilities to use massive amounts of firepower to both fight and produce
novel things. Hence the human induced existential risks are now global in
scale, where prior to this they were largely a matter of geology and biology,
and disease in particular in specific regions.
130 Rethinking environmental security

In current circumstances, one of an interconnected human and natural

world, one that is ever more modified by engineering of both artifacts and ecol-
ogies, clearly the most important thing that needs to be secured is the ability
of societies to adapt, both in terms of rapidly moving away from fossil fuels
and in terms of coping with the changes that are already “baked in” to the earth
system by the recent overabundant use of firepower. Securing this requires
simultaneous recognition of the necessity of contextualizing the human pre-
dicament in terms of a whole earth, contextualizing firepower as the threat to
security, and thinking through how to facilitate preventing conflict, or ending it
where it occurs, as the precondition for long term survival. Chapter 7 addresses
this contextual question; Chapter 8 the institutional one.
7. Whole earth security: an engineered
world

THE ANTHROPOCENE

Human actions have already transformed the world fundamentally. This is the
key point about the Anthropocene, one that needs to be clearly integrated into
how environmental insecurity is now understood. In practical terms, as Chapter
6 has suggested, investment decisions in coming decades will determine how
the earth system functions long into the future. Our fire age circumstances, or
to use Stephen Pyne’s (2021) formulation, the Pyrocene, mean that the future
is being shaped by fire ecology, and the domestication of combustion, much
more than celestial and orbital mechanics. The Milankovich cycles that used
to determine the earth’s climate have been replaced by combustion processes
as the driving force shaping future climates. This is the world that colonization
and firepower has wrought. It’s the circumstances within which scholars and
policy makers now have to rethink security and environment. How these are
formulated and acted upon in coming years will shape the future of the earth
system profoundly. Living in the Anthropocene means just this, and the impli-
cations for how security is rethought need to be integrated into international
relations and many other disciplines.
While Lövbrand, Mobjörk and Soder (2020) have outlined the domi-
nant geopolitical formulations that appear in the scholarly analyses of the
Anthropocene, what is needed now, this chapter suggests, is another one
that explicitly deals with the future and how to shape it. The rich and pow-
erful among us are effectively designing the future world even if they don’t
understand that this is what they are doing. What gets made, how, with what
materials, powered by what energy and where is being decided by investment
decisions and government policies. This is a matter of engineering on the
planetary scale, and as this chapter suggests, we now need to engage matters of
environment and security in terms of an engineered world. This doesn’t neces-
sarily mean a dystopian world of ever more drastic chemical and mechanical
interventions in the atmosphere, the scenarios of solar geoengineering that so
concern many environmentalists; but as the largest climate forcing agent in the

131
132 Rethinking environmental security

earth system at present, industrial actions are charting the future configuration
of the earth’s climate and, as such, in practice engineering the future.
The alternative socio-technical imaginary, of ecological actions involv-
ing working with ecosystems, planting, nurturing and living in flourishing
habitats, of permacultures and agroecology, rather than extractivist projects
to supply resources from afar to consume, is key to thinking about global
environmental security once the modernist premises of endlessly manipulating
an external environment are abandoned. On a smaller scale, decisions about
what to plant where, reforestation, carbon sequestering farming techniques
and rewilding projects shape the earth system too. Thinking about these too
as forms of engineering, matters of design and the application of particular
ecological techniques, is congruent with thinking in terms of reshaping the
technosphere in particular and the earth system in general.
This chapter first revisits some key points about traditional environmental-
ism, then addresses conventional matters of geoengineering in terms of solar
radiation management, before moving on to discuss passive modes of “albedo
modification”. Then the chapter focuses on the need to not only protect envi-
ronments and hence, as traditional sustainable development thinking assumes,
ensure resources for future societal needs, but also to think about dramatically
enhancing the ecosystem functions of landscapes, both rural and urban. This
is necessary both to attempt to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations and to
buffer existing systems from the more extreme events that will result from the
levels of greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere. These efforts
are novel forms of ecological engineering, but engineering nonetheless in the
sense of shaping new habitats for numerous species, not only for humans.
Crucially these considerations now require a focus on China, where the scale
of urbanization and industrialization shapes the planetary future and where
considerations of “eco-security” are becoming part of the planning process
there—one more twist in the environmental security story which concludes
this chapter.

ENVIRONMENTALISM REDUX

What is needed now is to think about how to arrange legal matters in a rapidly
changing world, one where given the speed and trajectory of current trans-
formations, preserving the past as a matter of stability is not what is most
important (Kareiva and Fuller 2016). Substantial rethinking, especially when
it comes to matters of how geoengineering might be governed, is now essential
(Reynolds 2019b). Much of the environmentalist criticism of geoengineer-
ing proposals, and fears of further attempts to manipulate nature, draws on
longstanding concerns with the hubris of humanity attempting to dominate or
manipulate natural phenomena that would be much better left alone (Baskin
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 133

2019). The oxymoron “wildlife management” epitomizes this fear of hubris,

of attempting to manage things that are very imperfectly understood. More
importantly, however, the discussion of geoengineering is understood as a dan-
gerous distraction from undertaking the climate change mitigation actions that
are urgently needed to tackle the crisis (Biermann, Oomen, Gupta et al. 2022).
But the point of the Anthropocene is that actions by the rich and powerful
among humanity are already on the scale of geological forcing mechanisms.
While this may be regretted, it’s the context within which decisions have to
be made; we live in an increasingly artificial world where the technosphere
is changing key aspects of the ecosphere, and as summarized in Elizabeth
Kolbert’s (2021) musings on geoengineering, there are growing fears of
living “under a white sky”. But as yet there is nothing approaching a single
coherent plan or governance structure for all this, and the key point is that
the disruptions already set in motion have to be coped with in the world of
non-stationarity. Experiments with rewilding, ecological regeneration and
agroecology in particular will be ongoing in coming decades (Lorimer 2015).
While in some cases protected areas may be a key part of these experiments,
clearly they cannot be isolated or cordoned off from the rest of the ecosphere,
and adaptations will have to be sensitive to large scale contexts rather than
just local ecologies. Given the jurisdictional divisions of territorial space that
are used in contemporary governance, this is anything but easy. The popular
imagination in many Western states of environmental disruptions as something
distant from their concerns, and matters for containment rather than a reduc-
tion of luxury consumption and lifestyles, is an especially difficult aspect of
this politics (Gough 2017).
The term engineering also conjures up futures of geoengineering with strat-
ospheric aerosol injections, artificially cooling the planet by fiddling with the
chemical composition of the upper atmosphere. The dangers of doing so, and
the potential for conflicts should some states or corporations try this unilater-
ally, are very considerable. The logic of traditional American national security
formulations also lead inevitably in this direction, attempting to use technol-
ogy to maintain some form of control over the whole planet (Surprise 2020).
Cold war technostrategic discourse was all about nuclear bombs, missiles and
force, a matter of firepower writ large. The subject of security was reified into
arcane considerations of missiles, megatonnage and game theory, and in the
process people and ecologies were occluded. But, as this book emphasizes,
this mode of thinking is now precisely the problem; force, firepower and state
rivalry lead to insecurity in so many ways that new modes of thought, and
a focus on altogether different modes of life for the future, have to be the basis
of rethinking environmental security. In McDonald’s (2021) terms, the focus
has to be on ecology.
134 Rethinking environmental security

It is also the case that artificially altering both urban spaces and rural land-
scapes to make them much less dependent on fossil fuels, or political econo-
mies of extractivism, monocultural industrial agriculture included, is a form of
engineering, but engineering that takes ecology seriously, a shift from physics
and force to biology and life effectively. This shift requires looking to different
sources of knowledge too to inform security policies, one that also has had
resistance in the American academy in particular, where physics and engi-
neering have so long dominated the knowledge practices brought to bear in
security thinking (Lahsen 2008). In contrasting old fashioned cold war vintage
technological tinkering and security focused on force and firepower with the
novel considerations of agricultural innovation, including ideas of regenerative
farming, permacultures and agroecology, as well as carbon neutral and nega-
tive building linked to renewable energy sources, what is at stake in terms of
securing futures for many societies is clarified.
The title for this chapter picks up on Daniel Deudney’s formulation from
a Worldwatch Institute paper written in 1983 suggesting that the planetary
system itself was what needed to be secured. Peacefully that is! Worried about
the spread of nuclear weapons and the focus on orbital space as a potential
battle space as well as the neglect of planetary perspectives in revived cold war
thinking in the 1980s, he suggested that the whole earth was what was in need
of securing. The focus in earth system thinking in recent years suggests that
this formulation was indeed prescient. Eight years later Jeremy Rifkin (1991)
posed similar matters in terms of “Biosphere Politics”, sharply contrasting
traditional notions of security and containment strategies linked back as far as
Halford Mackinder, with the need to reformulate security thinking in terms of
the biosphere rather than traditional geopolitics. The contrast between ecopoli-
tics and geopolitics has long been highlighted by other scholars too (see Dalby
2002), but those discussions now have to be revisited and updated in light of
climate change and biodiversity loss, and discussions about their relationships
to global security, and now to proposals to artificially alter the composition of
the atmosphere in a deliberate attempt to “shade” the earth.

GEOENGINEERING

If the whole earth is understood in terms of the ecosphere, or as an arena

for conflict arbitrated ultimately by the threat of the use of firepower, then
dramatically different notions of security inform policy. Underlying these
are simple but powerful matters of geopolitical assumptions. Loosely these
distinctions also parallel Amory Lovins’ 1970s formulations of soft paths
involving renewable energy, carefully calibrated task appropriate technologies
and energy efficiencies, or hard paths involving the ever larger use of nuclear
and fossil fuel energies with all the geopolitical difficulties resulting from
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 135

world spanning vulnerable supply chains, nuclear proliferation and climate

change. More recently this contrast has been reworked in terms of the formu-
lation of a security paradox that Jonna Nyman (2018) posed in terms of the
discrepancy between energy security in terms of reliable fossil fuel supplies
in the short run, and the possibilities of a sustainable climate policy for the
long term future. Short term rivalries may be facilitated by firepower, but
long term survival of a relatively stable climate system requires an altogether
different understanding of the human context as part of an ecosphere, and as
a result a drastic reduction in the use of firepower. This contrast is now sharply
refracted through the discussion of geoengineering, and the definitional issues
related to what it is that needs to be done by whom and how to offer security in
various forms (Hamilton 2013).
Key to all this is a matter of time; slowing climate change requires rapid
reductions in the use of fossil fuels (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change 2018), and the wholesale rethinking of agriculture and land use, as
well as water systems for human use. Or, at least, it does if the long term future
for a habitable planet is taken seriously as the premise for security thinking.
Failure to do this may lead to political elites trying to use extraordinary
measures to shape the future in ways that maintain their control, looking to
technological fixes rather than social change as modes of security provision to
prevent social breakdown. Top of the list seems to be ideas of solar radiation
management and stratospheric aerosol injection to cool the planet by shading
the surface from sunlight, a matter of “albedo modification” in technical terms
preferred by the National Research Council (2015). In June 1991 Mount
Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and lofted large amounts of material and
gases into the upper atmosphere, allowing for fairly detailed measurements of
the global cooling effect over the following few years (McCormick, Thomason
and Trepte 1995). Solar geoengineering is thus frequently understood as arti-
ficially mimicking “the Pinatubo effect”. And yet once these forms of active
interventions in the earth system are investigated in detail they, not surpris-
ingly, potentially present more problems than solutions (Pierrehumbert 2019),
only most obviously the fact that cooling would be uneven geographically, and
key systems like the Asian monsoon might be affected in unpredictable ways.
Dreaming of a designer climate, in Oomen’s (2021) terms, may be easy, but
the implementation would be fraught with practical and political difficulties.
The terminology used in the discussion of geoengineering is far from con-
sistent, but a basic division between solar radiation management and carbon
dioxide removal is widespread. The former involves active attempts to reduce
insolation and hence cool the planet, an active mode of intervention in the
immediate problems of heating. Carbon dioxide removal might be understood
as a passive response, focused on removing the cause of the heating and hence
dealing with the problem by removing its source. Avoiding excessive heating
136 Rethinking environmental security

precludes the need for geoengineering, hence the longstanding insistence by

climate activists that mitigation, as in reducing the causes of climate change
in the first place, is job one. The sheer complexity of the earth system makes
thinking in system terms essential for policy making related to geoengineer-
ing proposals (Chris 2016), but given the numerous uncertainties about how
the climate might react to aerosol injections, thinking in those terms is no
guarantee that either the physics is understood adequately or the governance
mechanisms that might be invoked to cope with solar engineering could cope
with the complexities (Burns and Strauss 2013). In a rapidly changing earth
system, where massive use of fossil fuels is the key source of heating, and the
conversion of land for agricultural purposes an important secondary source,
whatever policies are adopted and production systems introduced in coming
decades will have to be on a large enough scale to make a difference. But in
these terms carbon dioxide removal is a form of climate change mitigation;
hence some of the difficulties with the terminology in this discussion! In
general terms there are many fewer objections to carbon dioxide removal than
to albedo modification by adding reflective substances to the atmosphere.
Reframing this in the innocuous language of “Reflecting Sunlight”, as
the title of a subsequent National Academies of Science report did in 2021
(National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2021), may
be good public relations, but the ecological consequences are hard to predict
whatever terminology is used. Unilateral research into solar geoengineering
likewise generates increasing suspicion and potential political conflict too in
the absence of widely agreed governance arrangements (Stephens, Kashwan,
McLaren and Surprise 2021). Much initial attention was paid to the possibili-
ties of using sulfur dioxide, which ought to be relatively easy to manufacture
and, with some minor modification to existing airplanes, easy to disperse in the
upper atmosphere (Keith 2013). The immediate concern with this technology
is that this chemical turns into sulfuric acid in the air and would, when it even-
tually falls into the lower atmosphere, become acid rain. Other suggestions to
use finely ground calcium carbonate, in effect limestone, should at least solve
the acidification problem because this is an alkaline chemical.
While laboratory experiments can explore some of the parameters of such
technologies, field testing would seem to be essential to get a clear sense of
what might be possible if stratospheric injections are tried in future. Preliminary
efforts to calibrate monitoring equipment needed to run field experiments of
this technology have run afoul of indigenous peoples’ objections to these
activities being carried out on their territories without their consent. In Arizona
and subsequently in Sweden, failure on the part of would be experimenters to
gain local consent for their tests using high altitude balloon based measure-
ments stymied their efforts (Greenfield 2021a). But there is a long history of
such objections to geoengineering experiments, a matter aggravated by the
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 137

absence of any clear governance mechanisms that might oversee experiments,

never mind the actual implementation of some of these proposed techniques
with their plethora of ethical, political and governance issues (Preston 2016;
Talberg, Christoff, Thomas and Karoly 2018; Blackstock and Low 2019).
Stratospheric injections of suitable chemicals to shade the earth could be
started on a small scale with a small fleet of aircraft operating in the strat-
osphere. An alternative might be to use tethered balloons with chemicals
pumped up to them for release in various parts of the atmosphere. In the strat-
osphere the rate of exchange of air masses with the lower level troposphere is
relatively slow, allowing chemicals a long residence time in the upper reaches
of the atmosphere. Eventually chemicals will fall out of the stratosphere and
this requires repeatedly “injecting” substances into the stratosphere as long as
such geoengineering programs are carried out. But assuming that preliminary
demonstrations prove their efficacy, for the use of these technologies on the
large scale to be effective, at least in theory, once it was started it would have
to be continued for as long as shading was considered necessary. If carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to increase then to maintain an even
average temperature would require increased stratospheric injections in lock-
step with the accumulation of carbon dioxide. The planes would effectively
have to keep flying, or if balloons were used, assuming it were possible to
continuously pump chemicals up many kilometres, the pumps would have to
keep pumping effectively in perpetuity.
If for whatever reason these “injections” were to stop, than very rapid
heating would result. This so called termination shock, where heating would
rapidly accelerate once “injection” ceased, would induce potentially cata-
strophic weather disruptions. Hence, once started, so the argument goes, this
will have to be continued until such time as carbon dioxide levels are low
enough for it to be safely discontinued. As this is a matter for many decades or
centuries into the future, while this isn’t a huge investment relatively speaking
to other human industrial activities, the necessity to keep it going regardless
of political, economic or budgetary conditions for the operating states or cor-
porations make it a dangerous gamble. Apart from this very obvious concern
with a termination problem, the more immediate security dimensions of this
problem could emerge if one state starts to use geoengineering technologies
unilaterally regardless of international opinion or a collective effort to regulate
the process. In this case it is plausible that a weather disaster in one state could
be blamed on the geoengineering activities by another. Gwynne Dyer posed
these questions in terms of possible confrontations between India and Pakistan
over disputed geoengineering efforts in his 2008 book Climate Wars (Dyer
2008). Demands for compensation, or demands that the program be halted,
might easily lead to conflict should the state doing the geoengineering reject
138 Rethinking environmental security

the imputation of causation, or even if that is accepted, refuse to supply the

remedy.
The arguments don’t stop there, however, because even if one state’s leaders
don’t take military action in the face of what is judged to be a hostile act by
another state, countermeasures might be taken instead. The possibilities of
counter-geoengineering, where one state, unhappy with another’s geoengineer-
ing efforts, takes countermeasures, perhaps even ramping up the use of fossil
fuels, adds further potential security dimensions to this discussion (Parker,
Horton and Keith 2018). Most obviously where states disagree as to how much
cooling or how much heating is optimal, conflict is possible. Scenarios where
military action is taken against the infrastructure used in climate engineering
projects are not far-fetched; the sabotage of Iranian nuclear efforts by the use
of the Stuxnet virus to wreck engineering control mechanisms, and numerous
other episodes of bad or explicitly aggressive behaviour in cyberspace causing
disasters of various kinds (Briggs and Matejova 2019), make this kind of con-
flict possible even without direct “kinetic” interventions.
All of which suggests clearly that climate engineering proposals need to be
carefully considered by the international community, and unilateral geoengi-
neering rendered anathema prior to any state trying to do it in coming decades.
Similar reasoning applies to any proposals to use space based mirrors to reflect
some solar radiation and hence cool the earth. Given how much material would
have to be put into space, and perhaps transported to the appropriate solar
LaGrange points distant from the earth, it seems unlikely that such engineering
options will be seriously considered in coming decades. The environmental
disruptions involved in making and launching the necessary rockets to lift
mirrors into space might well be more severe than the putative benefits of such
sun dimming efforts.
Regional efforts, among other things to refreeze the Arctic Ocean and in
the process reflect more sunlight from the planet, a procedure that involves
chemical injections of substances to whiten Arctic waters and enhance freez-
ing, offer other possibilities which, given the interconnected nature of the
planetary hydrosphere, might present numerous other potential hazards. Might
it be possible to use mega-engineering projects to slow or halt the movement
of major glaciers in Greenland or Antarctica towards the sea, hence protecting
coastal cities from the most rapid sea level rises? More innocuous efforts, such
as making ship wakes whiter, or injecting seawater into low lying clouds to
enhance their scale, might provide some shading or enhanced reflectivity of
the atmosphere and hence cooling of the surface too.
Simply painting buildings, roads and other infrastructure would likewise
marginally change the planet’s albedo. White buildings both reflect more
sunlight and, in winter, emit less waste heat, so these on a small scale help
too. In the process they would also reduce the energy needed to cool them
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 139

in summer and heat them in winter, so too slightly assisting with both local
climate extremes, energy costs and conservation. These innovations are in that
sense forms of geoengineering too, ones that are mostly innocuous in ecolog-
ical terms. All of which emphasizes the point that decisions made about how
to shape the technosphere matter, but distinguishing all these from deliberate
artificial attempts to manipulate the earth’s temperature by using stratospheric
injection in terms of their overall impact is a matter of degrees.
The prehistory of geoengineering, as it were, is the earlier discussion in
the cold war of weather modification as a potential weapon of war. Cloud
seeding techniques, where silver iodide or similar chemicals are used to “seed”
clouds to provide condensation nuclei and hence form rain droplets, were tried
in the United States. Then these ideas were weaponized in South East Asia
with efforts to make it rain on the Ho Chi Minh trail that North Vietnamese
forces were using to send supplies to the war in the South. Combined with
the widespread use of aerial spraying of pesticides, and the notorious Agent
Orange in particular, these initiatives led to international efforts to curtail the
use of environmental modification techniques in warfare and the Convention
on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental
Modification Techniques (“ENMOD” Treaty) resulted (Juda 1978). The
peacetime use of cloud seeding is still widely used in China in attempts
to make it rain in agricultural areas and, famously, not rain on the Beijing
Olympic Games in 2008. Repeated efforts to modify rainfall patterns in China
persist, and in late 2020 an announcement of expanded efforts suggests that
this will be continued (State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2020).
But given that this is specifically aimed at rainfall patterns, once again the
question of whether this qualifies as geoengineering raises its head.
The difference between solar radiation management proposals and many
more conventional conservation projects, and why so many doubts about
geoengineering the planet keep appearing, is in part about the active nature of
stratospheric injection, and the necessity of keeping the systems running once
they have been started. More passive measures, such as painting buildings
white, planting more trees in urban areas and certifying forestry plantations as
carbon sinks, in complicated arrangements to monetize “ecosystem services”,
generate less open opposition, even if their ecological impacts may be dubious
beyond temporarily sequestering carbon dioxide.
The point seems to be that deliberate engineering for climate control is
just one step too far for most activists and many scientists as well as security
thinkers. The largely unknowable global consequences are especially worri-
some, and the danger of excessive cooling or unanticipated effects in particular
regions suggests large scale strategic uncertainty (Abatayo, Bosetti, Casari
et al. 2020). The counter argument that present trajectories are heading for
a world of precisely these kind of dangers is of course precisely the longstand-
140 Rethinking environmental security

ing case for doing albedo modification experiments (Keith 2013). If all else
fails in terms of preventing climate change, then precisely these technologies
may be needed as a last resort to buy time while methods of removing carbon
dioxide in particular from the atmosphere are worked out and implemented.
The suggestion that solar radiation management is doing the marginalized
peoples of the Global South a favour (Keith 2021), because they are likely to
suffer worst from climate change, is easily countered by the ethical argument
that they are not being consulted, and full consultation and informed consent
principles are not applicable. This perpetuates colonial power relations, with
rich Northern engineers once again deciding what is good for people in the
Global South or, in the case of the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation
Experiment (SCoPEx) programs in Arizona or Sweden, the indigenous peoples
of those regions. Very little of the discussion so far on climate engineering has
involved active participation by researchers from the Global South (Biermann
and Moller 2019), and the implications are that once again those in the North
will make consequential decisions without the input of those most obviously
in harm’s way. Many of those people are obviously in the Global South, where
climate model projections are suggesting they may be living in places where it
will soon become impossible to live without extensive air conditioning tech-
nologies (Xu, Kohler, Lenton et al. 2020; Horton, de Sherbinin, Wrathall and
Oppenheimer 2021).
More importantly this discussion focuses on how the issue of crisis is
framed, and what options are thus considered appropriate policy “solutions”
(Peoples 2021). It is worth remembering that the construction of a climate
crisis as an epistemological project in the first place is to a substantial extent
a matter of states focusing on the geophysics of climate, and carbon as a key
entity in this, rather than on the larger political economy of environmental
transformation (Allan 2017). These limitations in problem definition are now
at the heart of the political discussion of climate change and efforts to limit it
to technical matters beyond politics, a matter of post politics (Swyngedouw
2013) wherein the continued technological expansion of economic growth is
taken as a given and only technical details are up for discussion.
As Jasanoff (2021) puts it, there is an absence of humility in the Anthropocene,
where less physical engineering and more engagement with politics and ethics
are sorely needed to chart the future. But in the present geopolitical circum-
stances of inter-state rivalry and the unquestioned centrality of economic
growth as a necessity, such humility is in short supply among political elites,
even if such considerations are actively being engaged by civil society, in par-
ticular by a youthful generation in Western states worried about what current
trajectories may mean for their future later this century.
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 141

ECOSYSTEM ENGINEERING

Many of the major rivers on earth have been dammed. Highways and cities
cover an increasingly large portion of the terrestrial surface. Agriculture has
transformed much of the fertile landscape of the planet into monocultures; the
Aral Sea has been reduced to the status of a small lake. All of which suggests
that the scale of human activities is already a matter of mega-engineering in
some senses; numerous individual large scale projects are shaping the earth
profoundly (Brunn 2011). So, in this context, what is geoengineering and what
isn’t, and how might this discussion be suitably contextualized? Is deliberately
introducing relatively small amounts of calcium carbonate into the upper
atmosphere really qualitatively different?
Major tree planting initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide, or industrial scale
efforts at carbon capture through “enhanced weathering” or other techniques,
are considered in terms of geoengineering too (Herzog 2018). But such carbon
dioxide reduction techniques are much less obviously direct interventions
into the atmosphere, and as such, while they are more difficult and perhaps
expensive than stratospheric injection, are less likely to raise environmental
alarm. Not least this is so because they tackle the key issue of carbon dioxide
levels in the atmosphere, rather than trying to mask its effects. Tree planting
and ecosystem regeneration efforts are also feasible at the local level, a matter
of enhancing existing efforts at resource management and conservation, and
as such familiar practices with, in at least some cases, tangible local benefits
likely to garner political support.
As more extreme weather and less predictable rain patterns stress traditional
agricultural systems as well as the commercial arrangements of industrial
farming, the urgency of doing practical environmental management in particu-
lar places has revived longstanding environmental concerns with food supplies
and the dangers of famine. The 2021 famine in Madagascar, as is so frequently
the case, may only be partly a consequence of climate change driven rainfall
reductions, but it emphasizes the point. Failures of governance are also part of
the long story of famine, where ironically it is food producers who are usually
the first to die when crops fail and governments fail to provide sustenance
(Watts 2013).
Given that much of humanity in the Global South depends on small scale
production systems, there are widespread fears that food security will be
increasingly compromised. Simultaneously the appropriation of traditional
lands for commercial megafarms, many of which supply global markets rather
than local ones, suggest increasingly dangerous trajectories both for food
supplies and local ecologies and water supplies (Clapp 2020). The attempts
to “modernize” agriculture and commercialize and regulate it have generated
142 Rethinking environmental security

protest throughout history, only perhaps most obviously in the 2021 high
profile protests in India, where smallholder and traditional farming practices
are once again under legal assault from Delhi, in processes designed to mod-
ernize agriculture. Struggles elsewhere over access to land and subsistence,
in particular the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement appropriating land
for food production, reprise long histories of peasant struggles and resistance
to enclosures and commercialization of land. Given the rising impacts of
a disrupted climate, these are once again a key issue in governance; land
reforms and rural economy are intertwined with notions of sustainability, and
challenged by “land grabbing” for industrial monoculture cultivations to feed
global markets (Sassen 2013), or for that matter to supply greenhouse gas
emission offsets.
This is about much more than tree plantations, which while they may work
in the short term to capture carbon, operate as offsets for metropolitan fossil
fuel consumers (McCall 2016). These practices, which are in some ways
a reinvention of plantation agricultural systems, have been popular as a mode
of supposedly “sinking” carbon dioxide emissions and hence making con-
sumption carbon neutral (Dehm 2021). They have also generated novel modes
of mapping and certifying the ecological services provided by these territories
(Lansing 2010). But if they are to work they require long term property and
payment arrangements, as well as growing conditions into the future that
ensure the trees continue to absorb carbon dioxide. Neither of these conditions
is a certainty in the face of climate disruptions to both economic and ecological
conditions. If they are to fulfil the related matter of protecting biodiversity
by providing habitat for numerous species, then monocultural plantations are
not suitable, especially if they are such things as eucalyptus plantations, with
their voracious appetite for water which deprives other parts of ecosystems of
hydrological resources.
How agriculture might be reformed and rethought so that the unsustainable
monocultural practices of large scale fossil fuel driven farming are replaced
by ones that simultaneously produce nutritious food while conserving water,
sequestering carbon, protecting species diversity and buffering ecosystems
from extreme weather is now a key question under the rubric of environmen-
tal security. Numerous ideas about regenerative practices have emerged in
recent years to go beyond conserving traditional resources and think about
how to make ecologically flourishing systems that also provide livelihoods
for local people (Rhodes 2017). This focus on producing fecund landscapes
goes beyond renewable resource supplies. Now ecosystem services need to be
added both to suck up carbon and to regenerate ecologies so they can buffer
humans from climate impacts, provide flood mitigation and enhance soil fer-
tility all simultaneously. More than sustainable development, this is literally
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 143

developing sustainability where modernity has undercut traditional modes of

ecology, but now adding ecological benefits too.
Permaculture experiments provide one key to how to remake rural land-
scapes (Krebs and Bach 2018). The monocultures of crop farming, where
planting and harvesting are an annual event and the soil is ploughed and treated
with pesticides and fertilizers annually, have become the taken for granted
mode of crop production, one which is hugely ecologically disruptive, and
involves the massive use of fossil fuels both directly in farm operations and
indirectly in terms of fertilizers and the global transportation system used in
industrial food processing systems. Initial land clearing is a major ecological
disruption because of habitat destruction and hence the loss of species from
those areas. It also leaves the land open to soil erosion, and downstream areas
vulnerable to flooding due to the lack of “sponge” functions soaking up rain-
fall and releasing it slowly. The use of fossil fuels to both run the machinery
and produce vast amounts of fertilizer contribute to climate change, as do the
nitrous oxides that fertilizers emit from fields. When crops are used to feed
cattle in feedlots in particular, there too methane and carbon dioxide is gener-
ated on a large scale.
All these aspects of industrial agriculture are extractivist processes that
simultaneously reduce ecological functions of their landscapes while generat-
ing greenhouse gases. While eating crops directly might be understood to be
beneficial by vegans, the larger ecological disruptions of monoculture indus-
trial agriculture has to be tackled both to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
directly and to reconstruct rural landscapes to provide multiple ecological
benefits. Hence the increasing interest in regenerative agriculture and the pos-
sibilities of permacultures where food is produced without the need to strip the
land each harvest season and start over, and its adoption by some marginalized
peoples struggling with food security too (Hernandez 2020). The question all
this raises is how to rebuild ecologies using traditional knowledge of ecosys-
tems in many places as well as innovations with crop mixes and innovations
with plant and animal combinations.
With these considerations go obvious matters of jurisdiction over land and
water, and the key question of how to move away from fortress conservation
thinking towards regimes that facilitate fecundity while being both socially
and ecologically adaptable too. As earlier chapters have emphasized, questions
of resource shortages and rural environmental “security” are tied into matters
of property and access to land and water as well as the fuel, fertilizer and other
inputs to agriculture. Ecological systems are only rarely coextensive with
jurisdictional systems of state and property boundaries, leading to complicated
arrangements and overlapping jurisdictions where water management and allo-
cations in particular are concerned. Numerous conservation areas, ecological
preservation reserves and wildlife management schemes crisscross property
144 Rethinking environmental security

and state boundaries, and as such provide complex legal arrangements for
thinking about the ecological innovations that are needed for both biodiversity
protection and climate change policies.
As though this wasn’t complicated enough, climate change in particular is
now upsetting the relatively stable ecological circumstances of the Holocene
period, and setting species in motion towards more conducive locations.
Ecological thinking now has to incorporate these larger transformations; pro-
tection of particular places and climate refugia in particular matters greatly, but
facilitating migration now also has to be part of the policy picture (Kareiva and
Fuller 2016). This upsets the implicitly stable cartographic arrangements of
traditional jurisdictions and as such adds an additional complexity to planning.
All of which suggests to John Head (2019) that novel notions of “ecostates”
designed to accommodate these changes are necessary to provide legal and
administrative arrangements appropriate for our new circumstances. The
stationarity assumption, where past meteorological patterns are used to predict
the range of future conditions, is no longer adequate for planning; neither are
the fixed boundaries of traditional conservation practices.
While sophisticated monitoring devices and artificial intelligence offer the
prospects of much more comprehensive ecological monitoring than has been
possible in the past, the question of whose interests are being served by these
innovations is unavoidable (Bakker and Ritts 2018). Peter Dauvergne (2021)
warns about the potential of technocratic environmentalism, allowing moni-
toring of ecological matters but also of environmental activists campaigning
against the further extension of extractivist projects. If artificial intelligence
simply extends the control of extractivist corporations and state projects then,
for all its scientific sophistication, it may further undercut ecological sustaina-
bility in favour of sustaining corporate power. In short, who decides what data
is needed and who controls the data that is produced matters in terms of how
the ecosphere is shaped in coming decades.
While renewable energy is key to futures that deal with climate change,
these technologies too involve complex rural ecological systems. Dams which
are used to generate electricity have long been touted as renewable energy
sources, but the disruptions to human communities “in the way” of the flood-
ing of valleys (Baviscar 2005), as well as the ecological problems of rotting
vegetation, the release of mercury and other substances from the flooded land-
scape, and fish migration disruptions, are very considerable.
Likewise with large scale windfarms, especially when they are imposed
on rural communities without their input or a share in the revenue streams. In
these circumstances rural resistance to what are seen as further colonial intru-
sions on traditional communities and their landscapes aggravate the politics of
sustainability (Dunlap 2017). Where local societies and their complex property
arrangements are taken into consideration, siting and traditional land use
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 145

arrangements respected, and revenue from windmills fed back to local commu-
nities, the possibilities for rural regeneration and linking high technology with
community economic initiatives open up. Doing this requires a reimagining
of what rural, or more particularly “wild”, spaces involve; there is a complex
cultural politics to this which is a key part of thinking about sustainability as
much more than a matter of technical fixes (Mackenzie 2013). That politics
will have to be part and parcel of any serious attempt to generate new admin-
istrative arrangements on the lines that Head (2019) suggests are necessary for
future ecostates.

ECOLOGICAL SECURITY

Rethinking what “wild” spaces entail has also led to experiments with “rewil-
ding” ecosystems in attempts to allow nature to regenerate in ways that might
not be obvious if deliberate efforts are made to rebuild spaces that have been
drastically altered by modern land clearance and resource extraction. In some
ways this is the reverse of fortress conservation, where instead of trying to
maintain an ecosystem and its animal inhabitants by eliminating poaching
and human intrusions while managing “wildlife”, rewilding excludes humans
altogether and allows “nature” to take its course (Lorimer 2015). Given the
limited ecological range for animals in what is effectively a large enclosure,
it isn’t surprising if there are population surges and then crashes, a matter that
generates political pressures to intervene to keep animals alive when they are
in danger of starvation. The crucial point here is that animals need to move as
environmental conditions fluctuate and small scale fenced arrangements pre-
clude this. Once again the geography matters, and ecological connections over
long distances have to be a key consideration in how “wilding” is practiced,
a matter clearly understood in proposals that half of the earth be given over to
wild processes from which humans are excluded (Wilson 2016).
If such efforts are to be attempted, a form of ecological geoengineering on
the large scale, then thinking about them in planetary terms is essential. This is
exactly what the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, launched
in 2021, is attempting to do with numerous efforts around the world to restore
degraded ecosystems (Greenfield 2021b). While this isn’t what is normally
understood as a matter of geoengineering, nonetheless replanting forests,
cleaning up waterways to allow for fish populations to recover, slowing the
profligate spread of plastic waste and numerous efforts to reestablish animals
in their previous habitats add up to deliberate efforts to shape the ecosphere at
a global level. Clearly they fall into the category of carbon dioxide removal,
the second major categorization conventionally used in discussing geoengi-
neering, but they encompass more than this too. As such this is a very different
mode of earth system modification, but one that clearly recognizes that a bio-
146 Rethinking environmental security

diverse flourishing ecosphere is what is needed to prevent the worst existential

threats to the future of humanity (Mitchell 2016). None of this is likely to work
without a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels and preventing the destruc-
tion of remaining relatively intact “natural” ecosystems to slow the extinction
of numerous species.
Crucial to this at the planetary scale is the recognition that the Stockholm
Environment Institute’s planetary boundaries have to be respected for a sus-
tainable future (Steffen, Richardson, Rockström et al. 2015). Numerous cal-
culations suggest that humanity either has already transcended some of these
boundaries or is in danger of transcending them soon. Key to thinking about
them effectively is recognizing that the initial specification of the boundaries
disaggregated them for analytical simplicity, but that the urgency of acting to
prevent their transcendence is emphasized when their dynamic interactions are
taken into account (Lade, Steffen, de Vries et al. 2020). Simultaneously the
political considerations of all this suggest that sustainability thinking needs to
work in the provision of the basic necessity for life for all humans as a lower
limit too; hence Kate Raworth’s (2017) reformulation of the iconic planetary
boundaries diagram as a doughnut, where the outside represents the planetary
boundaries and the innermost part of the ring the social safety net that human-
ity requires. Technocratic efforts that fail to grapple with the practical lives of
the poor are always in danger of undercutting their political legitimacy, hence
the importance of linking ecological sustainability to the provision of life’s
necessities for all.
Such considerations require refocusing on the subject of security and, in
Matt McDonald’s (2021) terms, focusing specifically on ecological security,
and hence on ecology, and in particular the resilience of ecosystems, as that
which is in need of securing. While at first blush this is very similar to classic
discussions of Our Common Future, and its notions of sustainable develop-
ment premised on appropriate long term resource management, this focus
shifts from environment as a source of materials and sustenance to ecological
resilience as the crucial factor. The shift away from how to perpetuate resource
supplies to one that focuses on keeping ecologies intact may in some cases be
subtle, but the focus on ecology rather than environment is key to rethinking
security once the larger natural context is focused on explicitly.
Drawing on ethical thinking, McDonald points to the importance of what
it is that is deemed necessary to secure in political practices, but also high-
lights responsibilities to vulnerable and marginal people and species. Here
the key point is that ecological resilience as a necessary condition for human
life comes to the fore, but raises the question of whose human life is being
secured, and simultaneously poses the matter of whether ecological systems
should be secured because they have intrinsic value, regardless of their utility
for humans. If security is about survival, then what is deemed worthy of being
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 147

made to survive is an unavoidable one, made complicated by humans’ embed-

dedness in multiple ecological systems.
But ecological systems adapt to changes all the time, and this needs to be
worked into thinking about security in ecological terms. In focusing on ecolog-
ical systems and their resilience McDonald (2021, 118) notes a contrast here
with earlier formulations from Dennis Pirages (2005) where the emphasis was
on balance and equilibrium. One of the key themes of the Anthropocene and
the focus on resilience is the importance of understanding ecological change
as key rather than operating on the assumption that security is in some sense
stasis. “Ecological security can be defined as a concern with the resilience
of ecosystems. Viewed through this lens, climate change constitutes a direct
security threat through undermining this resilience and functionality, in turn
creating harms for a multitude of living beings” (McDonald 2021, 121).
Facing this situation in current circumstances then raises the issues of
accountability and the responsibility to act. Clearly here too those with the
greatest capabilities to act have considerable responsibilities, even if they have
not been historically responsible for making the dangerous circumstances that
call for climate security policies.

A national security discourse remains dominant, a product (at least significantly)

of the nation state constituting our default answer to the question of whose security
matters in global politics. But, clearly, protecting or insulating powerful institutions
from manifestations of climate change, while accepting the exposure of the most
vulnerable to these same effects, is ethically indefensible by almost any standard.
(McDonald 2021, 191)

Those with the historic record of changing the climate clearly have the most
obvious ethical obligations even if the political leaders of the United States,
Australia and Canada have been especially tardy in living up to these responsi-
bilities. But given the scale of current fossil fuel use, these historical producers
of carbon dioxide alone cannot solve the problem. Thinking in terms of eco-
logical security, and the global connections that are so frequently elided by the
political geography of separate territorial states, requires efforts in numerous
places, and conceptual frameworks that work with humanity enmeshed in eco-
logical processes, not the traditional modern ones premised on a disconnection
between humans and the larger ecosphere.

ECO-SECURITY WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

Of particular interest here is that in China notions of eco-security have been

invoked in thinking about regional ecological matters, and whether particular
regions and cities are operating in a way that is sustainable, at least in terms of
local water, pollution and landscape ecological functions. This is now being
148 Rethinking environmental security

extended into a larger consideration of how to facilitate the production of an

ecological civilization which requires a more comprehensive environmental
management system (Zhang and Shao 2019). This eco-security framework
borrows its definition from Our Common Future, albeit sometimes without
attribution: “ecologically sustainable development that meets the environmen-
tal and ecological needs of the present generation without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own environmental and ecological
needs” (Lai and Xiao 2020, 24915). While the attempts to quantify the eco-
system connections with urban spaces and link these to the regional scale are
beyond the scope of the discussion here, the point that is significant is their
attempt to think through the practical implications of this thinking for how
cities and regions can be planned to fit the sustainability criteria.
The key question is whether these Chinese ideas about eco-security, mostly
focused on the footprints of cities and ecological capabilities of particular
regions, can be scaled up to consider eco-security at the planetary scale (Zhao,
Zou, Cheng et al. 2006). Much of this literature focuses on the urban and
regional indicators of the ecological impacts of urban and industrial activities,
and attempts assessments of whether these exceed the carrying capacities of
the relevant ecosystems. Lai and Xiao’s (2020) analysis warns of the brittle-
ness of the ecological underpinnings for the urban system and suggests that the
speed with which the COVID-19 virus spread emphasizes the importance of
focusing on this vulnerability. Scaling this framework up to think in terms of
an ecological civilization is far from easy, but clearly drawing on ecological
literature in various genres is now part of the discussion. In some formulations
ecological is interpreted as a condition where an ecosystem maintains its
integrity under external stress. Using this definition one attempt to think about
ecological security at the global scale comes to the alarming conclusion that
57 percent of the global land surface will be insecure by the end of the century
(Huang, Yu, Han et al. 2020).
To put this in the context of earlier points made in this book, if one takes
the nuclear realist position seriously (van Munster and Sylvest 2014, 2021)
and recognizes that security in the form of nuclear weapons is potentially
self-destructive, and then extends it into considerations of the other form of
firepower, in terms of the control and use of combustion to shape economies
and ecologies, then the corollary needs to be considered in terms of global
security. Constraining firepower, in both its forms, rather than worrying about
scarcities causing conflict, is key to making a sustainable ecosphere at the
planetary scale. This is the challenge involved in rethinking environmental
security, and developments in Chinese thinking, where the Mao era war with
nature thinking has long since been transcended by Xi thinking in terms of
harmony with nature, is a substantial step in the right direction.
 Whole earth security: an engineered world 149

The initial Chinese interventions at the United Nations Security Council

debates about climate security in 2007 were not supportive of this framing of
climate issues (Ku 2018). But much more favourable recent interpretations
suggest that climate security ideas may now effectively engage with the
eco-security discussion at smaller scales in China (Vuori forthcoming). How
this connects to larger matters of both economic policy in China and the larger
conceptualizations of ecological civilization matters greatly now on the global
stage given the massive industrial infrastructure that has been built there in the
last few decades. A rising China is clearly one that plays a key role in the future
configuration of the ecosphere.
The frequent insistence that China’s rise is a peaceful one, if taken seriously,
connects to the larger issues of international security, and how the future is
shaped by technological innovation and energy policy. But likewise the realist
concerns with rivalry and potential conflict keep intruding on the agenda,
as confrontations in the South China Sea and over other off shore territorial
claims suggest. Likewise concerns about trade rules, currency exchange
rates, capital movements, 5G networks, espionage, human rights in China, the
development strategies in Western China and the Uighur people in particular
suggest a troublesome relationship between the two superpowers, one that has
the potential to undermine climate initiatives, especially if China fears inter-
national energy blockades and sanctions from the United States (Boyd 2021).
Cooperating on climate while ignoring these other issues is a fraught matter,
but one that is key to peaceful and sustainable futures.
As this book has made clear repeatedly so far, humans now live in a system
that the rich and powerful have been changing dramatically for a long time.
There is no longer a stable given context to be protected, albeit key species and
ecosystems need to be maintained, as the sheer scale of human activity is now
shaping the future. Hence the importance of who gets to decide what gets made
and which landscapes are used for what purposes. Carbon dioxide removal by
regenerating landscapes and integrating agriculture with the construction of
biodiverse landscapes has very considerable promise. But if this is to be the
future of the ecosphere, then rapid policy and financial innovation is essential:
“To put it baldly: in the face of what is to come, we cannot continue to believe
in the old future if we want to have a future at all” (Latour 2017, 245).
This suggests the necessity to rethink many things, to come to terms with the
great reckoning with world security in Booth’s (2007) terms. All this amounts
to making ecological matters a macro-securitization issue, to borrow Buzan
and Wæver’s (2009) formulation, which need to be dealt with by mobilizing
multiple states for a common cause. Returning to Hedley Bull’s (1977) criti-
cism of Richard Falk (1971), discussed in Chapter 2, dealing with the urgency
of climate change requires working with whatever institutions are available
(Harris 2021), however inadequate they may be. Given the explicit invocation
150 Rethinking environmental security

of states as the key actors in the Paris Agreement, is a realist world of states the
only option in terms of governing climate (Lieven 2020), even if this actually
requires abandoning the core understanding of realism as undergirded by
modern industrial states relying on firepower? If so, then what role might inter-
national peacemaking and diplomacy play in constraining firepower if climate
change and biodiversity protection become the overarching macro-securitiza-
tion framework? These are the themes for Chapter 8 with its focus on peace
and peacemaking.
8. Environmental peacebuilding

ENVIRONMENTAL PEACE?

The logic of sustainable development requiring environmental security, and

sustainable development as a strategy to provide environmental security,
sketched out in Our Common Future remains a key to the discussions of
global governance thirty years later. The discussion about climate change and
potential conflict repeatedly reiterates these themes (Bretthauer 2017; Rothe
2016). Focused more explicitly on peacemaking and peacebuilding, the logic
is the same: warfare is antithetical to sustainable development (Busby 2018;
Ide 2018; Ide and Detges 2018). The additional question is how peacemaking
and peacebuilding might facilitate sustainable futures (Krampe 2017), because
there is no guarantee that once peace allows economic activity to happen it will
do so in sustainable ways or that development might not reignite prior conflict
dynamics. Thinking through how to work on peacemaking and sustainability
simultaneously is an emerging policy and academic discussion (Swain and
Öjendal 2018), part of the larger scholarly discussions about how to implement
the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; Dalby, Horton,
Mahon and Thomaz 2019).
Much of the environmental security discussion in the 1980s and 1990s
focused on fears of environmental scarcities causing conflict, and the detailed
empirical research on this concluded that while environmental difficulties
were in some cases related to conflict, matters of institutions, governance
and prior conflicts were key to understanding the dynamics around resources.
Where much of the early work on environmental security focused on the
dangers of change, possible conflicts over resource scarcity and, later on, the
possible role of climate change as a threat multiplier or catalyst for conflict,
another parallel set of arguments reversed the alarmist fears of conflict and
suggested that environmental change offered the prospects of promoting peace
(Conca and Dabelko 2002). Peace parks and demilitarized borders, in addition
to resource management cooperation across borders, offer possibilities for
building peace and removing border irritants that might escalate to conflict.
At least they could do if the worst excesses of militarized conservation (Duffy
2014, 2016) and tourist exploitation are avoided (Buscher 2013; Dunlap and
Fairhead 2014). More recently the converse has become a focus for policy and

151
152 Rethinking environmental security

research, suggesting that dealing with environmental matters may be a useful

way of resolving conflict.
In all this discussion it is helpful to note that the rising concerns are now
more about the conditions of life than matters of, in the social science jargon,
biopolitics, life itself (Dalby 2013a). Geopower in terms of the conditions of
life is key to the Anthropocene discussion, and the governmental strategies
invoked in campaigns to constrain climate change focus there rather than
only on traditional issues of politics focused on populations and their conduct
(Beuret 2021). But these considerations of geopower remain constrained by
the division of the world into territorial states, and hence the governmental
pathologies that come from competition and blame games, assigning responsi-
bilities and invoking threats as beyond “our borders, over there” (Harris 2021).
The legacy of colonization and the enclosure, privatization and designation
of exclusive sovereignty at various scales stymies efforts to think about the
earth as a single place (Deudney 2018), an entity that has to be secured as such
in terms of planetary boundaries rather than a hodgepodge of fiefdoms with
conflicting priorities (Dalby 2021).
This chapter turns first to the matters of territorial security and potential
water wars, and then to the matter of peacebuilding, much of which is related
to smaller scale rural disruptions and insurgencies and how these might be
resolved. Climate change has added an important dimension to this work, and
one of the key issues in this is the potential for climate adaptation measures
to backfire, mostly due to a failure to consider local conditions and apply
appropriate policies to specific places. But now, as climate change accelerates,
another parallel twist to this discussion has emerged focusing on the question
as to whether policies to deal with climate change, and especially those aimed
at dramatically reducing the use of fossil fuels, will generate conflict.

TERRITORIES, BORDERS, SECURITIES

In the case of putative water wars the historical research has suggested that
they simply didn’t happen; water simply wasn’t a casus belli. Much of the
historical research also suggested that in times of water stress, cooperation
was more likely than conflict (Wolf 1999). This is especially so where shared
waterways, dams, canals and other infrastructure need cooperation to be used
effectively. Even in situations of conflict both parties have a shared interest in
not destroying infrastructure that they both need; water treaties have tended
to be robust even in difficult political times (Dinar and Dinar 2017). The con-
verse may yet turn out to be the case, where upstream riparians use water as
they please and weaker downstream states are powerless to do much about the
disruptions to their historical sources. But at least so far fears of international
conflict over water are not borne out by the historical record. Making sure that
 Environmental peacebuilding 153

remains the case is a key matter for climate change diplomacy and ensuring
that peace reigns even when climate disruptions become severe.
This is not to say that water infrastructure isn’t a target in some conflicts;
English writers of Second World War histories frequently extoll the engi-
neering virtuosity of the Royal Air Force “dam buster” bombing operations
which destroyed a number of German dams in 1943 with considerable loss
of life downstream in the valleys of the Ruhr region. These were targeted as
a method of indirectly disrupting industrial production by removing hydro-
power supplies and flooding downstream areas. In the history of warfare such
things are relatively isolated, even if in recent years there have been threats
by Egypt to destroy the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam, and insistence
that negotiations should determine the water management regime of the dam.
Ethiopia has proceeded to start filling the dam as part of its efforts to extend its
infrastructural power and use the precipitation in the highlands for power and
irrigation (Verhoeven 2021). But this too is not a new issue; Gwyn Prins (see
Prins and Stamp 1991) used this case in the early 1990s in his documentary on
environmental security, Top Guns and Toxic Whales, speculating on Egyptian
military action to prevent dam construction as a likely future cause of war. His
scenario’s timing was off by at least fifteen years, but the conflict dynamics
implied by a downstream state worried about its water supplies coming from
an upstream state persist.
Thomas Homer-Dixon (1994) noted that in many such cases downstream
states were simply weaker than upstream states and as such didn’t have a mil-
itary option if they suffered from water shortages caused by upstream states.
The case of Iraq and the Turkish dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates as
well as the case of the Mexicans being powerless to do much about American
diversions of the Colorado waters are noteworthy. So too, the case of the
Mekong, where Chinese dams have disrupted the historical patterns of water
flow through Laos and Cambodia and in the process damaged both river
fishing and agriculture as well as enhanced salinization of the delta in Vietnam,
doesn’t lend itself to military response from downstream states. Likewise
waters running off the Himalayas, both in terms of India and Pakistan, are
rivers where the headwaters are in China (Huda and Ali 2018).
In circumstances of non-stationarity, where past patterns aren’t a reliable
indicator of things to come, protocols on existing agreements to agree in
advance on what happens in extreme circumstances are likely to be a useful
innovation to prevent future conflict. If the rules and procedures, agreed in
advance, are clear as to who gets which allocation of what water is available in
a drought, or how flood waters will be dealt with if they exceed normal flows,
then the potential for future conflict is minimized. The failure to anticipate and
provide new modes of sharing what water is available leads to dystopian night-
mares of conflict, displacement and enhanced inequalities as elites appropriate
154 Rethinking environmental security

what they can and leave the rest to fend for themselves in the new wild zones
of ecological scarcity, epitomized in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel about a possible
future Western United States, The Water Knife.
Focusing on national priorities and invoking territorial sovereignty in the
face of supposedly external threats highlights one of the interesting ironies
in the discussion of environmental and specifically climate security. While
the focus on globalization is frequently on how processes transcend national
boundaries, as noted in Chapter 4, many of the economic practices that con-
stitute globalization are about the construction of new borders and bounded
spaces that exclude traditional peoples and their occupations. The expansion
of industrial agriculture involves the construction of formal property arrange-
ments in many places where informal commercial or subsistence arrangements
have functioned. Production for export frequently involves the construction
of pre-clearance areas for trade goods, and numerous, often violent efforts to
secure the transport of commodities worldwide (Cowen 2014). The attempts
to patent seeds and traditional knowledge are another form of enclosure.
Economic trade zones and the enclaves the rich construct to separate them-
selves, both horizontally in gated communities and now sometimes vertically
in high-rise luxury buildings, are increasing separations and partitions of social
and economic spaces as part of the globalization process (Graham 2016).
These processes frequently emphasize the point that the global economy has
grown rapidly in recent decades but in many cases has done so by accentuating
inequalities both within states and between them (Piketty 2014). The SDGs
explicitly aim to reduce inequalities and poverty, and, particularly because of
the rapid transformation of China, some poverty reduction has been accom-
plished, but the larger question of how to transform economies so they can
deal with poverty while not transcending the planetary boundaries is now a key
theme at the heart of sustainability discussions. The COVID-19 pandemic,
and the complicated efforts to reboot the global economy following the initial
shutdowns, has emphasized the point that the neoliberal consensus on austerity
and inflation control has been scrapped by the new focus on central banks as
economic agents (Tooze 2021).
The pandemic has simultaneously exacerbated the inequalities in many soci-
eties, while rising concerns about climate change pose big questions of how
to invest in renewable energy while also thinking effectively about transition
strategies for labour. All this can’t avoid dealing with the need to think through
how to regulate the long commodity chains that link the global economy
together, which were seriously disrupted by the pandemic response, but in the
process require large amounts of fossil fuels to keep the whole system moving.
Territorial thinking and fortress mentalities (White 2014), whereby threats are
assumed to be of external origin, simply gets the geography all wrong when it
 Environmental peacebuilding 155

comes to both climate and the economic consequences of the pandemic (Dalby
2022).
Failure to think these things through, and simultaneously a focus only on the
formal economy rather than the context within which it is structured, is likely
to lead to serious ecological disruptions. These disasters are increasingly artifi-
cial, and as such security policy is in part about dealing with them, a matter that
has been clear in the United States at least since the Katrina inundation of New
Orleans in 2005 (Dalby 2009b). But few remain within state borders, and the
causes of climate disruptions in particular are obviously beyond any particular
state, even if it is fairly obvious that the emissions from particular states are
crucially important in the history of the causes of climate disruptions. At the
largest scale globalization has produced a situation where planetary boundaries
loom as limits to the human endeavour, ones that at least some political elites
are apparently uninterested in respecting, presumably because they either think
that nothing can be done or think that they and their families can ride out the
disruptions due to their wealth and power (Katz-Rosene and Szwarc 2021).
Formulating the politics of climate in these terms, a climate apartheid
of drastic divisions of people into the rich who can somehow ride out the
apocalypse and the poor who must suffer the consequences is how numerous
politicians and activists in the Global South view matters (Chaturvedi and
Doyle 2015). Hence the endless appeals for climate justice and aid to deal
with the disruptions caused by the historical patterns of Northern fossil fuel
consumption. The actions of fossil fuel emitting states are a major security
threat to many poorer and Southern states. In the case of Tuvalu, its people
face imminent inundation because of this “warming war” (Pita 2007), and
their migration to some other higher altitude locations is a matter of physical
survival. They don’t have any security policy in the face of the imminent dis-
appearance of their territory. Preventing that is key to the survival of a national
entity, and that can only be done by rapidly decarbonizing the global economy.
Tuvalu doesn’t have any military options!
Another political division that is increasingly sharp in many parts of the
world is between climate change activists and the fossil fuel industry that
is willing to spend large quantities of cash to influence popular attempts to
legislate climate actions and convert the economy into a post fossil fuel one.
The divestment movement has focused attention on the particular corporations
who still, despite the consequences of their business model, persist in explor-
ing for yet more resources when it is clear that those that are already known
can’t all be burnt if the planet is to have a climate loosely analogous to that of
the last ten thousand years (Mangat, Dalby and Paterson 2018). Borders are
no protection to these hazards. For states dependent on petroleum production,
unless substantial rethinking is undertaken and new policies formulated,
national security involves the continuation of a fossil fueled economic strategy
156 Rethinking environmental security

despite the long term disasters that will ensue. For many poorer and low lying
states, Tuvalu included, disasters are already occurring as a result of climate
change, and their short term, never mind long term, security is already being
compromised.
While security threats have traditionally been seen in terms of cross bound-
ary violations, now the biggest threats are precisely as a result of the success of
capitalism in remaking the world. Hence the ambiguity relating globalization
and its enhanced connectivity across distance to questions of sustainability.
Globalization is about transformation and yet its functioning depends on not
transcending planetary boundaries (Steffen, Richardson, Rockström et al.
2015). The post political premises of most policies preclude grappling with
these new circumstances; actions are to be taken within the market economy,
and security is about preserving this mode of social life. Larger political
questions are frequently silenced in the policy discourse that focuses on incre-
mental change and minor adjustments and posing matters as “problems” to
which there are obvious scientific “solutions” (Cockerill, Armstrong, Richter
and Okie 2017). But these are not what is needed in the face of rapid climate
change and the other disruptions of the latest phase of globalization. In these
circumstances sustainability now requires securing the ability to adapt effec-
tively to rapid change, a very different formulation of security from that which
has dominated global politics for the last few decades.
The difficulty here is that the spatial language of contemporary politics
doesn’t help in linking global and local issues effectively, and defensive for-
mulations which so frequently operate in environmental politics to privilege
particular places link poorly with global transformations that the earth system
research makes clear has to be the context for thinking about politics in the
Anthropocene. Robyn Eckersley (2017) nuances these matters in her call to
think about geopolitan democracy rather than cosmopolitan politics, precisely
because the larger geological context has to be part of the engagement with
the conditions of life that the Anthropocene demands. This geopower isn’t
a matter of either local control or global governance; both have to be articulated
somehow to prevent the dangers of a global technocratic elite trying to enforce
rules and regulations by decree. “Therefore we cannot simply substitute the
political fantasy of rational Earth systems steering led by scientific elites with
a political fantasy of local or national self-rule led by political forces which are
ignorant of their vulnerability to (and roles in producing) the life-threatening
changes to Earth systems processes that are underway” (Eckersley 2017,
995–996). But things have to work in reverse too: “The minimization of world
risks depends on a local understanding of how local practices are inserted
into, and bear upon, larger Earth systems processes and vice versa” (Eckersley
2017, 995–996).
 Environmental peacebuilding 157

This is obviously a tall order in the face of global crisis, but these are
the challenges of rethinking security in the novel circumstances of the
Anthropocene; formulations of isolated states in competition and potentially
threatening each other may offer historical solace to confused social scientists,
but they do not form the ontological framework that is needed for grasping the
dilemmas of governance in a rapidly changing world. Yes, this is partly about
how to rethink notions of development and progress in the sense of increased
capacities for human flourishing, but as Chapter 7 has indicated, these now
have to follow new models, not those of fossil fueled industrialization and
urbanization that set the great acceleration in motion in the twentieth century,
nor the neat separate spaces of the world political map that fail to provide an
appropriate framework for governance (Harris 2021). The possibilities for
cities and their governing structures to innovate rapidly may be one source
of hope (Bernstein and Hoffman 2018), but in so far as urban centres lead on
climate innovation, they further challenge the traditional international relations
focus on states as the providers of security.
The security dilemmas of the twenty first century require thinking about
material production in conjunction with threats to use force while considering
these in terms of a dynamic earth system destabilized by previous efforts to
secure various things. Simultaneously it is necessary to recognize that glo-
balization is mostly about topological connections however much governance
efforts may try to grapple with these using topographically based reasoning
(Dalby 2021). Traditional notions of national security, and power understood
in terms of industrial capabilities and military firepower, are anathema to
ecological security in a world where climate change and species extinctions
are accelerating.

ENVIRONMENTAL PEACEBUILDING
While, as noted in Chapter 5, much of the discussion of climate and security
focuses on potential social disruptions caused by environmental change and
extreme events, the other side of the discussion is getting much more attention
of late. If environmental change is a stressor, or threat multiplier, then thinking
through how to prevent conflict, or perhaps better still make peace by using
environmental cooperation as a tool, would seem to be a promising way to
think about constructive policy. At least it can potentially do so if regenerating
ecological systems, rather than extending extractive activities, is understood as
the key task of ecological security (McDonald 2021), one made increasingly
difficult by global earth system scale changes that impact on local ecologies.
Resilience now has to be about building back better after local disruptions,
rather than reverting to a status quo ante (Dalby 2020c).
158 Rethinking environmental security

This discussion however is mostly conducted outside the mainstream

international relations journals, which have been slow to make links between
environmental matters and peace research (Kelly 2021). As with mainstream
international relations, which has been mostly uninterested in the rapidly chang-
ing planetary context and the Anthropocene debate in particular (Simangan
2020), discussions of peace and environment draw from both practitioner per-
spectives and disciplinary representatives from diverse sources. Development
studies, geography, environmental studies and other social sciences focus on
these themes. Perhaps this is an appropriate division of academic labour, but
given the importance of conflict prevention as a theme in security studies,
further developments of this field might reasonably be expected in the leading
journals in the field in coming years (Ide, Bruch, Carius et al. 2021).
Environmental peacebuilding has to confront both cross border difficulties
and situations of internal conflict within notional nation states. But as much of
this book has emphasized, the dramatic expansion of European imperialism
and the subsequent spread of globalization has been far from peaceful. The
processes of extractivism are also those of dislocation and displacement, and
much of the violence on the resource frontiers of modernity have been about
attempts to remove indigenous peoples, or previous generations of settlers,
to make way for new mines, plantations and infrastructure (Menton and Le
Billon 2021). Local communities, “the people in the way”, frequently resist,
and as international human rights workers continue to document, assassination
squads and killing is part of these processes; Chico Mendes, the Brazilian
rubber tapper activist murdered in 1988, was only one (Hecht and Cockburn
1990), albeit especially high profile, case of a longstanding problem. His case
is especially interesting however because the rubber tappers were struggling
to maintain the intact ecosystems on which their livelihood depended in the
face of encroaching agricultural interests and forest destruction to facilitate
monocultural production.
Where people resist external impositions, low grade warfare and the use of
“security” forces to extend “development” is part of the problem of peace. The
ongoing violence in Colombia is related to these processes too, albeit in com-
plicated ways that are challenging the attempts to finally resolve the lengthy
civil war in that country. Indeed the post settlement arrangements after the
peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC) has seen larger violent displacements of numerous local
people and has led to some of the most uneven land distribution arrangements
in the continent (Koopman 2020). Sometimes these processes of “slow vio-
lence”, in Rob Nixon’s (2011) terms, involve very fast violence in the form of
the deliberate killing of activists.
When, as is frequently the case, resistance to these kinds of “development”
is linked to international human rights campaigns, then here too governments
 Environmental peacebuilding 159

can invoke “national security” as a mode of justifying repression and violence.

External influences are apparently at work, and local people that connect their
struggles to international organizations can easily be portrayed as traitors
providing aid to sinister foreign forces (Matejova, Parker and Dauvergne
2018). Thus the complicated geographies of local opposition to developments
designed to feed international markets continue the long term patterns of
colonial dispossession. Nonetheless it is also clear that by now integration of
most parts of humanity into the global economy is a fait accompli. What now
matters, given the scale of the transformations that have already occurred, is
what comes next and how these dislocations can be dealt with in ways that are
deemed legitimate by rural populations facing simultaneous climate and envi-
ronmental disruptions, as well as novel health dangers and related economic
uncertainties linked to pandemics and the periodic convulsions of the global
economy. Making the slow violence involved in these processes of dislocation
visible is part of the scholarly task of tackling climate politics (O’Lear 2021).
Many states are simply unable to provide the necessities for much of their
population and modern assumptions of the responsibility to protect require
development assistance, not to mention climate adaptation funding too,
a matter where getting states that have long histories of extensive greenhouse
gas emissions to live up to their commitments has been a source of seemingly
endless frustration at annual COPs. In linking these things up the broadly
construed practices of environmental peacebuilding are coming to the fore,
encompassing at least five themes (Ide 2020): efforts to prevent or mediate
environment related conflicts; efforts to deal with resource management issues
in post conflict situations; efforts focusing on resilient livelihoods as a mode
of coping with climate change; disaster risk reduction strategies related to
community cohesion associated with environmental change; and finally,
environmental peacebuilding where joint problem solving facilitates improved
intergroup relations.
Peacebuilding focuses on solutions, inverting the conflict focus of much of
the earlier work.

As a concept, it illustrates the deep intertwinement of environmental change and

security in the Anthropocene …. At the same time, environmental peacebuilding
challenges the conflict-centred ontologies and determinist connotations shared by
parts of the environmental (and now climate) conflict discourse for quite some time
…. It does so by highlighting that the scarcity (or abundance) of natural resources
is often produced by specific political ecologies, and that environmental change
can also catalyse peaceful adaptation and increased solidarity rather than facilitate
violence. (Ide 2020, 2)

How these landscapes, their property relations and access to land, water and
other resources are changed in the peacebuilding processes shapes future
160 Rethinking environmental security

political possibilities. Key literature on climate adaptation as well as peace-

building operations links these contextual matters quite directly together.
While reworking landscapes in ways that are both ecologically sustainable
and likely to promote peace is the overall goal of peacebuilding projects, they
may not succeed if they follow some of the traditional modes of development.
But efforts to facilitate cooperation are not without their potential pitfalls,
and these reprise some of the themes highlighted earlier in this volume about
how the contexts within which climate change in particular plays out are con-
structed by prior human occupation, the modification of environments and the
property arrangements that shape adaptation possibilities.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ADAPTATION

In attempting to respond to these new circumstances and the rising impacts

of climate change there have been increasing efforts to address climate adap-
tation. Many of these are national efforts but linked to attempts by states to
extract funds from novel green financing arrangements. While the adage that
mitigation is global and adaptation is local effectively summarizes the situa-
tion, in that local environments are impacted in specific ways, nonetheless it is
notable that there is relatively little international coordination of these efforts.
National efforts are frequently linked directly to existing development strate-
gies, and funding channelled through international aid programs. The dangers
here are that these perpetuate existing patterns of ecological transformation
without clearly distancing themselves from the ecologically unsustainable
practices of the past.
In particular Sovacool and Linner (2016) use a political economy frame-
work to itemize four common problems with climate adaptation projects that
prevent their being sustainable. Summarized in terms of four “E”s, enclosure,
exclusion, encroachment and entrenchment, they argue that implementing
adaptation projects, especially when engineering is the main focus, leads to
numerous failures to think through the social and economic impacts. While
ostensibly climate adaptation is supposed to help those most vulnerable to
climate change, in many cases the projects aggravate inequities and promote
social change that benefits the better off, the socially well-connected, donor
agencies, political elites in capital cities and the corporate agendas of those
who get the engineering contracts.
More specifically enclosures involve economic aspects of adaptation where
resources are transferred from public domains into private hands. Exclusion
relates to the political marginalization of stakeholders where adaptation
decisions are taken without considering local conditions and subsistence
and peasant economies. Damage to ecosystems and biodiversity comes from
encroachment on landscapes and interference with ecosystem services, while
 Environmental peacebuilding 161

the entrenchment suggests that adaptation can have the perverse effect of
increasing inequality, and disempowering women and minorities. Avoiding
these outcomes requires thinking carefully about both the ecology and
economy of areas where adaptation projects are being considered, but also
about political inclusion, something that is especially difficult in fractured or
divided societies. Failure to do these things may well aggravate the problems
of “maldevelopment” to use Baechler’s (1998) term from some of the 1990s
studies of the environmental sources of conflict.
Tobias Ide (2020) offers a similar list of cautionary tales, in this case specif-
ically focusing less on adaptation than on things that may cause environmental
peacebuilding efforts to fail. Given that efforts at peacebuilding are increas-
ingly likely to have to take matters of climate adaptation into account if they
are to be successful, it is worth noting the parallels between these two studies.
Emphasizing the important point that resources and environmental matters
are frequently part and parcel of ongoing political and economic cleavages in
most societies, Ide suggests that environmental peacebuilding efforts need to
be carefully crafted to avoid six difficulties that may derail their initiatives.
In many cases the transformations undertaken in peacebuilding efforts have
winners and losers, and costs may lead to resentments and conflict among
those who are disadvantaged. “(E)xternally derived, ‘one size fits all’ solutions
are likely to facilitate depoliticization, conflicts (between locals as well as
between locals and externals) and state delegitimization” (Ide 2020, 7).
More specifically Ide’s (2020) six “D”s are depoliticization, displacement,
discrimination, deterioration into conflict, delegitimization of the state and
degradation of the environment. Depoliticization refers to the frequent prefer-
ence for focusing on technical and scientific matters at the expense of dealing
with the political causes of conflict. Focusing on increasing water supplies
from dams, or novel seeds to deal with drought, may well exclude dealing with
issues of grievances and poverty which are frequently the underlying causes of
vulnerability. Large scale engineering projects such as dams involve displac-
ing people, often on the large scale, and failure to think through how they are to
be adequately relocated and compensated leads to political difficulties. Peace
parks that remove residents are an especially contradictory mode of activity. If
these practices work along existing ethnic schisms in a society they may add
to the discrimination experienced by marginal peoples, making the potential
for conflict greater.
Likewise thinking through the specifically gendered aspects of develop-
ment is needed to ensure greater inequities on those grounds don’t increase
vulnerability. Failure to deal with such issues may lead to social deterioration
and conflict, especially when large projects designed to enhance development
don’t consider the needs of local inhabitants. Where projects are contracted out
and run into opposition, the absence of effective government oversight may
162 Rethinking environmental security

delegitimize the state, further weakening social cohesion. Finally short term
thinking and enhanced resource extraction as a method of development may
lead to long term degradation of environments and such things as the overex-
ploitation of groundwater leading to further agricultural difficulties when the
wells run dry.
If what is being secured here is the extension of conventional development
projects and the further colonization of vulnerable landscapes, then peace-
building might be much less than environmentally oriented. All these things
are even more difficult in places where lengthy conflicts have endured and
social fractures, histories of violence and injustice, as well as claims that past
crimes must be accounted for in peaceful settlements, are involved (Kleinfeld
2018). But in terms of Wallensteen’s (2015) insistence that a “quality peace”
has to ensure that the conditions that generated conflict in the first place are
removed in post conflict settlements, environmental peacebuilding has to
think through these issues. Where uneven access to land, water and commons
is involved, complex issues of property, redistribution and equity also have to
be considered.
As earlier chapters in this volume have emphasized, the processes of devel-
opment, and the extension of settler and commercial farming arrangements
into numerous landscapes, are frequently fraught affairs. It is no surprise
if attempts at low carbon development too generate security problems. As
noted in Chapter 7, windfarms in particular have frequently been opposed by
local communities, not least because of the failure of local consultations and
the imposition of these facilities without their benefiting from the revenue
generated by the windmills (Dunlap 2017). Much of this is a matter of failure
to consider local conditions, and failures to understand that inadequate govern-
ance mechanisms to ameliorate social stresses are more frequently to blame
for resulting conflicts linked to changing environmental conditions than those
conditions themselves (Mirumachi, Sawas and Workman 2020).

BACKDRAFTS AND BOOMERANGS

In terms of security the more worrisome point is that, while trying to initi-
ate policies to address climate change at the global scale, failures to think
through the local context and changing ecological circumstances will in fact
“boomerang” back on the state trying to provide climate adaptation, making
conflict worse rather than better, a matter of the unintended consequences
of ill-considered policies, ones that ignore the particularities of local context
and in particular land use issues (Swatuk and Wirkus 2018). “Thus, before
state-initiated, biosphere-oriented climate actions are taken, policy makers
must be able to answer the following question: what will be the impacts of
these actions at the point of intervention?” (Swatuk, Thomas, Wirkus et al.
 Environmental peacebuilding 163

2021, 61). Given the complex local property arrangements, resource attributes
of particular places, and local histories which are often effectively unknown
in state capitals, never mind in the offices of global development agencies,
this practical geography of climate adaptation is tricky at best. As the saying
in climate change circles frequently has it, mitigation is global but adaptation
is local.
The dangers of these problems, termed “backdrafts” in the Wilson Center
Environmental Change and Security Program (Dabelko, Herzer, Null et al.
2013), add another complicated dimension to thinking about the relationships
of peace and conflict related to climate in that where they occur they both make
matters worse and in the process discredit efforts to tackle climate change. In
so far as climate mitigation on the global scale is, as outlined in Chapter 7,
likely to need fairly drastic rural change in many places to regenerate land-
scapes, including introducing agroecologies and polycultures as well as other
ecological innovations to simultaneously buffer the worst effects of climate
change while hopefully sequestering carbon and facilitating species migration,
then peacebuilding thinking clearly has to avoid simple technical fixes while
working sensitively with local contexts.
Dealing with these matters effectively is a complex matter, but at least
three key elements for success seem to be clear. First, contacts across social
and political divides to build clarity and trust are important, as, second, are
transnational norms of good governance in the resource sector. Third is the
necessity of having effective state action to address the instrumental needs of
communities, which in the process can build trust and improve the legitimacy
of the local state (Krampe, Hegazi and VanDeveer 2021). But this does involve
local on the ground efforts and state action designed for the long term pacifi-
cation of troubled regions. Failure to involve local actors, and the assumptions
that international organizations, including projects run by the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), should have ownership of these initiatives
and can impose good governance and peace in the aftermath of conflict, simply
replicates the problems of top down projects imposed from a distance with
local input rendered less important than the international policies (Krampe
2021).
All of which is now aggravated by the increasing vulnerabilities of many
landscapes to extreme events; the non-stationarity condition is now what
societies have to live with for the foreseeable future. Climate change may be
making peacebuilding all the more difficult, as has been suggested in the case
of Mali, where ongoing conflict isn’t helped by climatic fluctuations that add
pressures to the already fraught relationships between and within agricultural
communities in many rural areas (Hegazi, Krampe and Smith 2021). The
likelihood of increased rural stresses of this kind in coming years makes peace-
making efforts urgent as Anthropocene changes accelerate.
164 Rethinking environmental security

How this is all to be turned into arrangements that provide what Head
(2019) calls ecostates, and how the provision of sustainable extraction finance
arrangements is to be organized, are major policy issues raised by environ-
mental peacemaking. While peacebuilding efforts are fraught with difficulties,
the larger point about environmental peace is simply that, while there may be
numerous small scale conflicts over resource issues, mostly the world is a rel-
atively peaceful place. As Barnett (2019) cogently argues, if climate was to
cause wars, or large scale conflicts, then the last few decades, when the world
has noticeably warmed, weather is getting less predictable and population
continues to grow, should have seen a noticeable increase in conflicts related
to these matters. But headlines from Syria, Yemen, Iraq and various parts of
Africa notwithstanding, while there has been an increase in hostilities, and
international arms sales figures climbed in the second decade of this century,
there has not been a large increase in hostilities in line with the determinist
assumptions that frequently drive the more alarmist versions of the climate
security narrative. The impetus for peacemaking projects is precisely to make
sure this condition prevails in coming decades.
What are increasing are extreme events, and human vulnerabilities have yet
to be comprehensively addressed by governments and the corporations that
shape policy agendas. This results in widespread vulnerabilities (Mobjörk,
Smith and Rüttinger 2016), and as such insecurity for numerous populations,
but it hasn’t generated warfare. Insecurity is widespread, but it is in forms
that are mostly not amenable to military action, even if in some cases it is in
fact a threat multiplier, and in many cases emergency aid by armed forces
is needed in disaster situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has had perverse
consequences in many places, reinforcing state controls through the use of
lockdowns and migration controls, while also undermining their legitimacy in
places where they have patently failed to protect vulnerable populations. But
as of the time of writing for this volume, late in 2021, its far from clear as to
whether this will connect up with climate disaster responses or the continued
dramatic disruptions of economic change in ways that generate overt conflict
and further state fragility, or will lead to political reforms more conducive to
thinking about ecostates and novel modes of ecological security.
Fragile states clearly need help in terms of climate adaptation, and in doing
these things avoiding the pitfalls that Ide (2020) and Sovacool and Linner
(2016) identify. Resilience is important, albeit this has to be interpreted as
much more than facilitating the ability to bound back after disruptions, and is
a crucial consideration at the global scale (Dalby 2020c). The ability to cope
with enhanced dangers and rapidly changing circumstances is now key to secu-
rity broadly understood; this isn’t about rival powers, but about vulnerabilities
built into the landscapes and infrastructures that feed and supply most human
needs. These are changing and dealing with rapid transitions is what preparing
 Environmental peacebuilding 165

to live in the Anthropocene now implies for all planners, but most importantly
those dealing with ecological change and landscape management (Kareiva and
Fuller 2016).
The really difficult question in all this discussion is whether peace can be
linked to regenerative agriculture and other ecological restoration practices
such as widespread tree planting and the reconstruction of traditional water
conservation measures which can help buffer ecologies and human supply
systems from the worst extremes of climate change. As Chapter 7 has sug-
gested, rethinking rural political economy is essential as part of serious efforts
to tackle climate change and buffer ecosystems from more extreme weather
while regenerating capabilities to feed a still growing human population. The
continued destruction of the Amazon rainforest by extractivist agriculture
and fears of similar damage being done by proposed petroleum extraction in
Central Africa, highlighted by Greta Thunberg and other climate activists in
2021, likewise suggest things will get worse before rural political economy
moves in sustainable directions. The political economy of extractivism has to
be challenged as part of efforts to use environmental matters as a peacemaking
project, if, that is, long term sustainability is the goal and notions of justice are
applicable to these policies (Stoett 2019).

TRANSITION STRATEGIES AND CONFLICT

An additional key consideration in environmental security discussions at the

global scale is whether the necessary rapid transitions off fossil fuels will
trigger conflict (Vakulchuk, Overland and Scholten 2020). Will states that
fail to think through effective transition strategies be vulnerable to collapse,
or, fearing eclipse by those that have moved ahead in the new post fossil fuel
economies, be tempted to resort to military action to thwart rivals while they
still have the capabilities? Fears in particular focus on the Middle East and the
possible demise of petro states there once the revenue streams from petroleum
and natural gas dry up (Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy
Transformation 2019). The impetus to pump as much oil as possible prior to
reductions in global demand also perpetuates dependence on petroleum reve-
nues in the short term. If these are used to facilitate a transition to renewable
sources and novel economic activities the outcome is likely to be peaceful
(Rabinowitz 2020). But the fear is that failure to anticipate the transition may
leave states with severe fiscal crises and in danger of political turmoil once
state support for economic activities is removed. Given the sheer complexity
of energy and its key role in contemporary societies, transition strategies are
clearly needed (Newell 2021). Environmental peacemaking as large scale pre-
ventative diplomacy would seem to fit the bill to grapple with the geopolitical
dimensions of transition.
166 Rethinking environmental security

These academic discussions are related to the growing policy discussions of

these matters. Concerns about fragile states and how to facilitate a “climate of
peace” were complemented by European discussions of green new deals and
recovery strategies from the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting a shift in eco-
nomic thinking away from the austerity narratives that dominated Europe after
the 2008 financial crisis. Security conferences in Bonn and Berlin as well as
initiatives by the Netherlands and Sweden to move discussions of environment
and peace forward have highlighted the links between climate, environmental
change and the possibilities of peace actions. The European Union and the
UNEP weighed in with projects that focus on climate security. The American
Center for Climate Security has highlighted these issues and, in anticipation
of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockholm conference, the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute launched a project on “Environment of
Peace”. Issues of peacebuilding are clearly getting attention.
Other security concerns have been raised about shortages and disruptions
of energy supplies, especially where grids are interconnected across national
borders. Likewise concerns about shortages of key minerals needed for batter-
ies and windmills have been expressed, reprising the Malthusian fears related
to gas and petroleum supplies. What clearly is of concern is the conditions
under which many of these substances are mined. Many of the worst working
conditions in the global economy are in extractivist sectors and in mining in
particular. The indentured labour arrangements and practical dangers as well
as chemical hazards from mining operations mean that human insecurity is
a major problem, but one that usually gets short shrift in considerations of
global energy systems (Bales and Sovacool 2021).
The most obvious point in all this is precisely that renewable energy
systems, with the notable exception of some biomass combustion generation
facilities, which despite the rhetoric are far from renewable, don’t involve fuel.
Energy security has long been understood to be a matter of a reliable supply
of fuel at a reasonable price, but in the case of renewable energy systems, the
fuel component of this is absent. Reliability is a matter of grid performance and
storage facilities, not a matter of tankers, pipelines and potential international
disruptions every time political tensions rise in the Middle East. Many rare
earth elements, which are used in small quantities in electronic devices, are
widespread in geological formations, and while difficult to mine, not some-
thing that is in any way physically analogous to the constant supply of fuels
involved in combustion technology (Overland 2019). Firepower needs fuel;
renewable electricity doesn’t; and the physics in all this is very different, hence
fear of supply shortages don’t transfer well from fossil fuels to novel energy
systems.
While much of the discussion of renewable energy suggests that a transition
off fossil fuels and into an electric future is occurring, at least up until 2021,
 Environmental peacebuilding 167

and in the economic rebound after the worst disruptions of the COVID-19 pan-
demic, it is clear that renewables have mostly added so far to the energy mix,
rather than replacing fossil fuels. Energy systems in the past have been shaped
by political decisions, and usually by commercial ones too, that enhance the
power of certain sectors (Daggett 2021). In the case of the industrial revolution
in England, the use of steam engines, and their appetite for coal, was driven to
a very substantial extent by the desire of industrialists to increase their control
over the labour force in the cotton textiles business (Malm 2016), rather than
by any inevitable expansion of the economy of fuel use. Myths of inevitable
growth of energy use in modern societies frequently obscure these political
decisions, a matter that is of great importance in considering responses to
climate change and how novel energy systems may be created while fossil fuel
use is drastically curtailed, or not.
An additional consideration in terms of energy transitions relates to the
pattern of violence in the Middle East over much of the latter part of the
twentieth century. There has been a clear correlation between low oil prices
and warfare in the region, a matter which suggests a complicated relationship
between differential accumulation within global capitalism and the relative
performance of logistics companies, arms merchants and oil companies
(Bichler and Nitzan 2004). While the relationship is complex, the pattern of
shifting investments in logistics from weapons to petroleum and back again
clearly links the violent politics of the region to the patterns of wealth gained
from the extraction of oil and the rivalries of numerous state actors, both local
and those at a distance. The intriguing question here is whether an overall
reduction in the importance of petroleum exports in the region will be related
to a reduction in weapons sales, and in activities by logistics companies, or
whether price collapses and further volatility in the region will feed conflict
dynamics.
As the early chapters in this book suggest, national security for the great
powers has long been about the search for ever more military capabilities.
Fossil fuels dramatically altered these dynamics in the nineteenth century as
trains and ships powered by steam engines changed geopolitical calculations.
Drahos (2021, 2) is blunt in linking this also to matters of state power: “Price
didn’t entrench coal and oil as fuels. States entrenched these fuels because
they increased their military capabilities.” In so far as states and capitalism are
so closely intertwined in the current world order (Nitzan and Bichler 2009),
these dynamics are perpetuated and shape how the political future will unfold.
In Susan Strange’s (1999) classic formulation, this Westfailure system, the
combination of capitalism and states, has failed to handle both global finances
and ecological problems, or generate some balance between rich and poor, and
as such is failing global civil society too. But climate change and its dangers
are adding novel elements to this discussion, with the prospects of increasing
168 Rethinking environmental security

insecurities demanding a reduction in the use of the key fuels that have driven
the strategies of domination that this combination of states and capitalism has
generated. To prevent further dramatic climate disruption large parts of the
existing inventory of fossil fuel reserves simply have to remain in the ground
(Welsby, Price, Pye and Ekins 2021). They can’t be burnt if atmospheric levels
of carbon dioxide are to remain low enough to prevent accelerating climate
disruptions.
Which is why the future of China, the largest state using fossil fuels, has
become a key consideration in geopolitics, not in terms of the ongoing rivalry
with the United States, which gets so much policy attention in security circles,
but in terms of how the future climate is shaped by technological and political
innovation there too (Drahos 2021), and whether the economy will draw on
those fossil fuel reserves or transition to novel energy systems to power the
growing urban civilization along ecological lines. The global consequences of
the future investment strategies of the Chinese state, the forms of urbanization
that appear and whether they take the eco-security framework seriously in
their planning, will be a key to the future shape of the ecosphere, and with it
the fate of peoples in numerous places (Taylor, O’Brien and O’Keefe 2020).
Will the eco-security framework invoked in urban and regional planning there
shape future considerations of an ecological civilization, recognizing that
sustainability has to function at a global level too within planetary boundaries?
Or does it become merely a rhetorical device cloaking the operation of brute
power (Goron 2018)?
The planetary boundary framework is premised on the idea that only in the
Holocene have conditions been such that humanity could thrive in complex
civilizations (Steffen, Richardson, Rockström et al. 2015). There is always
a danger here that this slides into a determinist argument that the Holocene
produced civilization, and that a hothouse world will necessarily lead to its
end, presumably violently. But a more nuanced possibilist argument focusing
on necessary conditions suggests that relatively stable climate conditions are
necessary for organized agriculture that is needed to feed urban populations.
While small scale farming is key to food security in numerous places, and it
can be flexible in the face of disruptions, and large scale commercial farming
can, by moving food internationally, offer food security up to a point too, what
the limits to this current system, in terms of climate variations intersecting with
the existing corporate structure, are is not clear (Clapp 2020). They of course
relate to what kinds of food production become common in coming decades
and whether polycultures, agroecology and regenerative agricultural practices
become widely adopted to buffer landscapes and infrastructure from the worst
extreme events that a climate disrupted world will present.
One other key point in these prognostications for the future relates to the
need to anticipate where climate will most severely impact human populations.
 Environmental peacebuilding 169

While forecasts of rising sea levels can suggest fairly clearly which coastal
areas are in immediate danger of inundation, and hence where evacuation and
migration will be essential, it’s not so easy in terms of temperature. While
climate models can predict where temperatures will rise, and the likelihood
of extreme droughts and other disturbances, human responses will be very
varied. It is simply not possible to read human response in a simple determinist
fashion from climate projections. Responses depend on numerous factors, and
the resilience of particular peoples in specific places will be a complex matter
of political economy and cultural adaptation, not a simple matter of moving
when it gets too hot (Horton, de Sherbinin, Wrathall and Oppenheimer 2021).
If, as seems likely, the weather systems and larger trajectory of climate
changes make agriculture, as has been practiced since the fertilizer and green
revolution innovations of the twentieth century, increasingly difficult, and
food prices repeatedly but unpredictably spike dramatically as they did in
2008 and 2010, then can the global trading system and the political regimes
that regulate it in particular places maintain control (Homer-Dixon, Walker,
Biggs et al. 2015)? Or will the shocks to the system be on such a scale that
conflict breaks out? Might nuclear war lead to temporary cooling, a nuclear
winter that will simply pause warming until the dust, soot and smoke dissi-
pate, and then, with elevated carbon dioxide levels and a discontinuation of
possible geoengineering efforts due to the war, to an additional “termination”
shock to the climate system, making the hothouse even more volatile? Such
speculations quickly lead to discussions of human extinction, and pessimistic
prognostications about the human fate epitomized by David Wallace-Wells’
2017 New York Magazine article, discussed in Chapter 6. Avoiding such dis-
astrous outcomes has to be the primary concern of any serious policies related
to environmental security.
Tying these considerations to old fashioned notions of national security
is not helpful. If security is understood as maintaining the status quo and
mobilizing against external threats, then in these circumstances it seems
highly unlikely that anything except exacerbated conflict will result. Daniel
Deudney’s (1990) warning about this remains entirely apposite. In a world
armed with nuclear weapons, and presumably facing rising uncertainties about
the efficacy or effects of geoengineering experiments, mistrust and conflict
seem ever more likely in the absence of concerted efforts to cooperate on tran-
sition strategies. Is there a role for scaling up the peacebuilding processes to
facilitate the reform of the global economy and its political systems to ensure
a peaceful progression into a policy regime designed to avoid a future hothouse
world? This is a tall order, but this is the kind of question that is now looming
on the horizon in the discussion of environmental security, and a matter for
serious engagement in the discipline of international relations.
170 Rethinking environmental security

On the other hand, in so far as the leaders of the Soviet Union can be under-
stood to have come to their senses in the 1980s and realized that their notion of
security in terms of military preparations was simply too dangerous, the possi-
bilities of drastic rethinking of the larger context for global security does have
a precedent, albeit one that is usually dismissed when viewed through Western
ideological lenses. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union means that
this key moment has been forgotten, lost in tales of American victory and the
triumphalism of the 1990s. The security ontology that matters in the next phase
of the Anthropocene is of a functional global biosphere, one that is partly but
judiciously enmeshed with a coevolving technosphere. Strategies to enhance
adaptability while quickly reducing fossil fuel use and facilitating ecological
regeneration have to be at the heart of environmental security understood
as a global priority. This is starkly at odds with the colonizing premises of
modernity and the long term trajectory of increased firepower in human
affairs. Focusing on elites as major climate change agents likewise shifts the
focus from the poor and marginal as potential destabilizing triggers of conflict
to the key driving forces of the global economy that shape the technosphere;
environmental security is a problem of investment, not of marginal agricultural
scarcity.
Clearly if human institutions are carefully crafted with these insights in
mind then disastrous or self-imposed existential threats are a fate that it is pos-
sible to avoid. But this seems unlikely without some fairly drastic rethinking of
how security is formulated, and societies restructured to be both more flexible
and more just, so that legitimacy is widespread and reinforced by practical
capabilities to ensure human thriving, even in the face of a much more volatile
climate system. But to do these things will also require a recognition of the
human condition that is at odds with some of the fondest held assumptions
of modernity. Ecological thinking challenges modernity’s presumption of the
virtues of autonomy, the social necessity of property, and the widespread use
of fossil fuels. In the Anthropocene this is no longer the social order that should
be “secured”; it’s increasingly the source of contemporary security problems.
Conclusion

Security after firepower?

ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY REVISITED

Discussions about peaceful transitions to a sustainable society are driven by

an often implicit understanding that humanity ought to live in a planetary
system that is at least broadly similar to the geological circumstances of the
last ten thousand years. It provided the ecological conditions that facilitated
the emergence of human civilization (Lewis and Maslin 2018). Now recent
research into the earth system, and a growing recognition of the sheer scale of
human transformation of many environments, suggests that the assumption of
a relatively stable geological context for humanity is at best misleading, and at
worst a dangerous failure to think carefully about the new context that human-
ity is creating for itself in this new epoch of the Anthropocene. Failure to take
this recontextualization seriously is likely to lead to rapid disruptive changes in
the earth system, which if not addressed could lead to runaway climate change
and a planet with surface conditions not seen on earth since the Cretaceous
period when there were no icecaps and the climate was very much hotter than
humanity has known.
Now as Asian economies grow relative to the rest of the world, and China in
particular has boosted production of renewable energy sources, although not,
at least yet, substantially constrained its use of coal powered electricity gen-
eration, the geopolitics of energy is changing. Nonetheless there are already
substantial climate changes underway as tropical storms, increasing wildfires
and rapid melting of Arctic environments emphasize. Sustainability now
requires taking this dynamic situation as its benchmark condition and working
from there; we live in a world where “non-stationarity” is now the background
condition for planning. Slowing down climate change is key to making adap-
tation easier. Preventing runaway climate change, and a hothouse earth future,
is key to the long term survival of a global civilization capable of feeding
and housing more than seven billion humans. How to do this is now a major
question for global governance, even if the leaders of some states still seem
more or less fixated on their own national priorities regardless of the larger
171
172 Rethinking environmental security

consequences. Rethinking environmental security requires rethinking both the

stationarity and territorial assumptions in contemporary governance thinking
and practice. This is a tall order, but present circumstances require nothing less
if the future survival of human civilization is to be assured.
As the first draft of this chapter was being keyboarded in February 2021,
the United Nations was hosting a virtual Security Council session on climate
security. The newly installed Biden administration in Washington was making
statements about foreign policy strategies, considering the fragility of many
states and linking them to the issues of climate change and the political dangers
that result from climate disruptions. While such statements have been made
since the end of the cold war, now they are done with a renewed urgency.
Perhaps finally this new contextualization for security will become the over-
arching concern for international security? The following May a statement
from the G7 coincided with a major change of direction by the International
Energy Authority, which issued a report stating that investments in fossil fuel
infrastructure had to be stopped more or less forthwith if there was any chance
of keeping average global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, the aspira-
tional target established at the 2015 Paris meetings that formalized the Paris
Agreement on Climate Change. In September of 2021 President Xi of China
announced to the United Nations General Assembly that it would no longer
finance the building of coal powered electricity generation plants abroad and
would instead support renewable energy projects.
In Glasgow, at the COP 26 conference in November 2021, further state-
ments were forthcoming on limitations of future fossil fuel subsidies, or at
least those specified as inefficient. For the first time fossil fuels were explicitly
mentioned as part of the problem of climate change, and following last minute
squabbles about wording, the final conference declaration agreed to a phase
down of coal usage. Loss and damage also emerged as a topic for consider-
ation, although funding from developed countries for climate adaptation still
fell short of previous promises. Methane too finally made it onto the agenda
as a problem, and further rules for international carbon markets and forest
protection initiatives were discussed. As to whether this constitutes definitive
evidence that the world has reached a policy tipping point, and will transition
rapidly to a post fossil fueled world, as Rockström and Gaffney (2021) hope,
it is too soon to tell. Although it would be conveniently timely in the lead up
to the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockholm conference, it is clearly too soon to
confirm that the world had reached a social tipping point on the climate issue
(Otto, Donges, Cremades et al. 2020).
While expressions of concern have clearly grown in volume and urgency,
nonetheless the global use of fossil fuels has not shrunk, apart from a small
decrease due to the pandemic caused economic disruptions in 2020. Emissions
of greenhouse gases need to be rapidly reduced and eliminated in coming
 Conclusion 173

decades if the dangers of firepower are to be effectively tackled. This is the

challenge of climate security and a topic that needs urgent attention from all
sectors of government and corporate policy making. Key to this is the direction
of investment funds; further expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, locking in
future fossil fuel consumption, only makes the dangers of firepower worse.

REALISM’S NEW CONTEXT

But, at least by 2020, there was little evidence that such matters were penetrat-
ing to the heart of the international relations discipline (Simangan 2021). Is it
once again going to be bypassed by events, committed to a set of assumptions
about continuation and stability in the international order that is changing
far more rapidly than its assumptions allow it to engage (Albert 2020)?
Simultaneously the numerous novel investigations that critical international
relations in its various forms engage are frequently in danger of distracting
attention away from the core concerns that animated the security studies in the
first few decades of the cold war. Survival was then a matter of constraining
firepower, of limiting the potential use of nuclear weapons, and invoking
restraint on the part of those who possessed the ability to launch the missiles.
Now too once again, constraining firepower in terms of what combustion
facilitates has to be the key focus.
In Daniel Deudney’s (2007) terms a negarchy, a series of enforced restric-
tions, governed international relations among the superpowers throughout the
cold war period and since. Attempts to use firepower to impose human will on
antagonists came up against the potential for self-destruction, thus necessitat-
ing the need for more circumspect actions. The attempts to use firepower to
coerce external antagonists reached its limits in mutually assured destruction,
but firepower in terms of fossil fuel combustion is still clearly being used on
the large scale to remake the ecosphere, forcing it to do the will of corporations
and governments, despite the obvious future consequences; the environmental
security dilemma is being enhanced not ameliorated by continued investments
in fossil fuels and spin off industries.
The extensive use of firepower in its various forms is precisely the problem
that is causing insecurity. This is the case because the products of combustion
are the greenhouse gases causing the earth to heat and disrupting the climate
system. Once again external forces are pushing back against the overuse of
firepower, only most obviously by the increasing incidence of wildfires, not
only in the lands with Mediterranean style climates, but in other forested areas,
not least the boreal forests of the sub-Arctic. Summers in Siberia recently
have been marked by massive wildfires and anomalous heat waves. While
climate change increasingly disrupts the stable geographical circumstances
of the Holocene, the politics of self-imposed vulnerabilities are beginning to
174 Rethinking environmental security

challenge the mode of economic life that has dominated for the last few cen-
turies. In the process the overarching formulations of modernity, postulating
a separation of humanity and environment, nature and culture, are collapsing.
The shift from security as protection to a focus on making new worlds, from
environmental protection to ecological production, is encapsulated in the dis-
cussion of the Anthropocene.
The ontological shift that the Anthropocene formulation implies, a matter of
carefully inhabiting a small planet rather than carelessly expropriating mate-
rials from a big one, requires nothing less than a fundamental reformulation
of global politics if a stabilized earth system is to be the world of the future
(Rockström and Klum 2015). Without the emergence of modes of governance
actively making flourishing ecosystems at all scales, the prospects for human
civilization in the long run are bleak. This change of focus towards inhabiting
a small vulnerable planet requires overcoming at least the worst aspects of
the autistic geopolitics of the present, the protectionism, xenophobia and
assumptions of autonomy and “firepower” as the premise of security provi-
sion. Extending notions of mutual restraint, a negarchy relating in particular
to fossil fuels, and to related extractivist activities for key ecological services,
will probably have to be complemented with production coordination well
beyond existing trading and environmental agreements. Simply banning the
mining and burning of coal would be a good start, and a treaty to that effect
is clearly in order (Burke and Fishel 2020). But beyond this a clear focus on
eliminating the use of fossil fuels tout court is key; much of the discussion of
net zero emissions by 2050 is more about net rather than zero, allowing much
wriggle room and arguments about offsets, carbon removal technologies and
related matters (Buck 2021).
While these policy issues are fairly obvious, the future of international
relations as an intellectual concern, and as a scholarly agenda, is very much
in doubt. The formulations of security at the heart of Carr’s (1939) and
Morgenthau’s (1948) notions of power are premised on a world without an
overarching authority, a matter technically of anarchy. But if the climate crisis
and the other dimensions of the planetary inhabitability dilemma are to be
solved, then this premise, of the inevitability of faction, the perpetuation of
territorially circumscribed entities as those primarily in need of security, has to
be challenged by scholarly researchers as well as activists. While Thucydides
may have been historically accurate in the Melian dialogue, where, to roughly
paraphrase, he suggested that the powerful do what they want and the weak
suffer what they must, the question this implies is how to change this order of
things now that the scale of human activities clearly endangers civilizational
continuity in the long run?
Carr (1939) and Morgenthau (1948) may have been skeptical about interna-
tional institutions and notions of law without global enforcement, but nuclear
 Conclusion 175

weapons, ecological disruption and the dangers of technology pose the ques-
tion once again now in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in especially
pressing terms. While classical realists might assume that states rise and fall,
strive for primacy and are defeated in the great game of power, they were able
to assume that the setting for the game would persist. That, as the discussion of
the findings of earth system science in this volume shows, is no longer a valid
assumption. As Reynolds (2019a) argues, Morgenthau’s response to hydrogen
bombs was to insist that in these new circumstances states had to cooperate on
key issues of common interest, and in terms of climate change such a realist
response now requires cooperative system preservation, and as such, ambitious
efforts at low carbon innovation.
Rethinking environmental security thus requires rethinking many other
things, and crucially shifting the primary formulation of ontological security
to the planet itself, rather than territorially bounded entities with a supposedly
common identity. This isn’t a matter of reworking idealism and invoking some
universal humanity; now it’s simply recognizing the novel ecological context
for powers, great and small. Playing the great game of power requires a func-
tional earth system in which to operate. But that is now in danger precisely
because of the current modes of playing the game, and the multiple forms of
power that operate to stymie innovation and perpetuate dangerous modes of
fossil fuel powered modernity (Stoddard, Anderson, Capstick et al. 2021).
This is not just the issue of nuclear weapons and the destructive capabilities
of firepower in military mode, but is also the issue of the destructive capabil-
ities of firepower in civilian mode too; mass consumption societies based on
fossil fuels, with built in obsolescence in its products, are calling into question
a functional earth system.
One of the most difficult parts of the discussion about environmental secu-
rity lies precisely here in the need to reconsider key elements of the identities
of Western consumers (Gough 2017) and their construction in terms of status
consumption and freedom represented in terms of the “right” to an affluent
lifestyle premised on using vast quantities of energy and frequently discarding
numerous “disposable” or “single use” products. But in terms of foreign policy
and climate change these will need to be addressed by many state leaders if
security in any meaningful sense is to be provided in the novel circumstances
of the Anthropocene. As much of this book suggests, technology alone will not
provide security from what is coming, and the identities that security discourse
engages need to be rearticulated to consider citizenships in new ecological
ways too.
International relations has mostly addressed these issues by focusing on
the construction of regimes and institutions that ostensibly govern global
environmental matters. But Radoslav Dimitrov’s (2020) argument about
empty and decoy institutions points to the limits of this as an effective mode of
176 Rethinking environmental security

governance and poses the question of what else international relations scholars
ought to investigate if they are to take seriously the premises of planetary
social thought. Such recontextualizations suggest clearly that modes of inquiry
inherited from the past in academic institutions need an update, and quickly.
In so far as international relations is an Anglo-American academic preoccu-
pation, it is not unreasonable to argue that effectively this mode of thought
has functioned as the conceptual infrastructure of American hegemony. As
that hegemony erodes, not least with the rise of China beginning to challenge
world order, it may also be the case that new modes of intellectual engagement
are now timely. If international relations cannot encompass the challenge of
the Anthropocene (Burke, Fishel, Mitchell et al. 2016), then it may well be
that novel interpretations from outside its canon are what will replace it. It is
especially noteworthy that Clark and Szerszynski’s (2021) engagement with
planetary social thought doesn’t cite any international relations scholarship.
The mutual silence, where international relations ignores the Anthropocene
discussion (Kelly 2021) and planetary thinking ignores international relations,
works both ways apparently!
The overarching argument in this book is one that shifts the focus from secu-
rity as protection, with its implicit geographical formulations of “our” spaces
as threatened from “outside”, to security as production, on literally what kind
of world is being made by human actions. Hence the need to focus on how
financial investments are directed to make specific things. Economic security
isn’t just a matter of ensuring supplies and access to markets any more; now it
has to be about taking the larger questions of an increasingly artificial world
into consideration and thinking about how economic activity is shaping the
ecosphere so that it can continue to function as a habitat for humans in the
long run. Failure to do so raises all the prospects of conflict and the nightmare
scenarios of war over access to food, water and other materials.
A crucial question hanging over all this discussion is whether lessons
from small scale peacebuilding efforts can be scaled up. If premodern states
frequently disintegrated as a result of natural catastrophes, as some of the
discussion in Chapter 4 suggested, the worrisome thing is that hothouse world
transitions might lead to the same kind of disintegration of the global system
(Homer-Dixon, Walker, Biggs et al. 2015), and the resort to force as things
fall apart in attempts by elites to maintain control over at least some parts of
the earth. In a world of nuclear arsenals, artificial intelligence and genetic
engineering, clearly the lessons of environmental peacemaking on the small
scale have to be scaled up to the international system. And in the longer run
Deudney’s (2020) warning about interplanetary warfare may have to be con-
sidered too as the reverse side of the space colonization argument. While col-
onization suggests existential risks have to be tackled by humanity becoming
a spacefaring civilization with multiple planetary homes, Deudney warns that
 Conclusion 177

the long term potential for conflict among them, with earth at a serious disad-
vantage because of its relatively large gravity well, needs consideration too.
More so than this however is the large question of changes in world order
in contemporary times, and whether the end of the American world order can
be comprehended in international affairs as an opportunity to rethink at least
some of the cultural premises of intrinsic rivalry that structure so much of
global security thinking (Acharya 2014). One wonders if the Chinese notions
of ecocities and ecoregions can be scaled up to the global reconsideration of
environmental security (Yanarella and Levine 2021) while simultaneously
accelerating the reduction of the use of coal in particular in its energy mix.
While the Biden administration’s accession to the White House promised
a new beginning in international politics, what was on offer was clearly in
many ways a return to the past when the United States as a superpower ran
an international order very much to its benefit. In Andrew Bacevich’s (2010)
pithy formulation it was a return to Washington Rules, although one encour-
aging development from the Glasgow COP in 2021 was an announcement that
China and the United States would cooperate on international climate change
issues regardless of their other disagreements.
A more nuanced foreign policy, one that doesn’t assume zero sum games on
so many themes, might be welcomed, but the response to the oddly inconsist-
ent Trump administration has in many ways been an attempt to return to the
status quo ante, albeit with somewhat more coherence on the theme of climate,
if not energy (Selby 2019b). Whether this is understood as nostalgia or stub-
bornness is much less important than recognizing that the novel circumstances
of climate change and related disruptions require a more fundamental shake up
of global politics to deal with shared dangers. But to do so will need a rethink
of security, in particular where assumptions of great power rivalries as the
name of the game are challenged by a more comprehensive reevaluation of the
sources of American insecurity. The long term existential threat to much of the
Western world isn’t a rising China; it’s a destabilized climate system and the
nightmare of a runaway series of positive feedback loops in that system that
leads down the path to a radically destabilized hothouse earth.
An American fixation on China as a geopolitical rival precludes a more
comprehensive engagement with the novel ecological circumstances that now
present both immediate threats of local disasters and longer term possibilities
of major disruptions. But this is clearly what any political doctrine worthy of
the name realism now requires (Dalby 2013b). Likewise, where much of the
discussion about catastrophic disruptions from climate change and biodiversity
loss, as well as pollution, ozone depletion and other earth system disruptions,
links up with speculations about civilizational collapse, it is fairly obvious that
some key facets of modernity will collapse, one way or another. Most obvi-
ously this relates to fossil fuels and the energy system that powers much con-
178 Rethinking environmental security

temporary human life. The activists pushing the divestment movement in the
West in recent years are quite clear about the fact that the fossil fuel industry
presents an existential threat, one that needs to be countered directly precisely
to prevent future accelerating disruptions that endanger one and all (Mangat,
Dalby and Paterson 2018). In so far as environmental security is concerned, the
collapse of the fossil fuel industry is to be welcomed, assuming that it can be
done peacefully to minimize the harm done in the process.
While the much cited Joseph Tainter (1988) formulation of societies col-
lapsing when they lose complexity suggests that security should be about
maintaining that complexity and preserving the existing social order, in the
case of environmental security, endangered not by resource shortages but
by the indirect consequences of greenhouse gas pollution, this formulation
would not seem to fit present circumstances. Ever greater complexity appears
more likely to make societies more brittle in the face of this challenge. Larger
resource throughputs make supply chains ever more vulnerable to disruptions,
as the pandemic response confusion in the global economy in 2020 demon-
strated. The blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021 when the Ever Given container
ship ran aground emphasized the simple fact that this level of complexity may
be unsustainable, especially when pressures compound as ecological disrup-
tions become more severe.
Once again, what needs to be secured is the ability to adapt, and overly
complex systems, while efficacious for some purposes, are vulnerable to dis-
ruptions precisely because so many things have to work correctly for the whole
system to function. Likewise the COVID-19 pandemic has shown clearly
that the tradeoff between efficiency and resilience leaves societies vulnerable
(Dalby 2022). Just in time deliveries revealed the absence of robustness, and
a complete lack of “just in case” security planning. Security can no longer
be about perpetuating past practices; non-stationarity requires flexibility and
robust institutions not reliant on firepower.

FUTURE GEOPOLITICS

At the largest of geopolitical scales too there is a need to think through ques-
tions of global order and the possibilities of an Eastphalia as China, India and
other growing states try to shape what will hopefully be a new peaceful global
order (Uesugi and Richmond 2021). A rising China and dramatic changes else-
where in Asia pose the question of how the larger future order may be shaped.
While historically the Western nations have been responsible for setting
climate change in motion, and the wealthy among their populations for using
the majority of fossil fuels, now as China rapidly urbanizes, and uses vast
amounts of concrete in the process, in addition to coal powered electricity, the
future is increasingly a matter of Asian actions. How the future of the global
 Conclusion 179

energy economy is shaped is increasingly being driven by Chinese decisions

about urbanization (Taylor, O’Brien and O’Keefe 2020). In the lead up to the
2021 COP in Scotland, President Xi of China did announce an end to foreign
investments in coal electricity generation projects, a move welcomed by
climate activists, but the larger trajectory of Chinese energy futures remained
murky despite their announcements that fossil fuel use would peak in coming
decades. Building the promised ecocities would seem to be essential both to
make them resilient to extreme weather and to reduce fossil fuel use to power
them.
These decisions about energy futures are in part also being shaped by fears
of geopolitical confrontation with the United States, and the need for energy
security in the face of possible sanctions or possible coercive trade restriction
attempts by a declining American hegemon (Boyd 2021). This in turn raises
the largest questions of the future of global order, and whether Western notions
of an international peace architecture are likely to hold in coming decades or
whether the traditional Westphalian schemes may be transcended by novel
Asian initiatives to provide global leadership in the absence of transition
initiatives from elsewhere in the system. There are few indications that this
will be forthcoming in the near future. Nonetheless it is clearly the case that
if the continued relative rise of Chinese economic capabilities persists, this
is key to the future configuration of geopolitics, something that now has to
be understood as both changing the relative importance of political actors on
the playing field of international relations and, simultaneously, dramatically
altering that field itself.
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2012) end their overview volume on the
history of global capitalism by focusing on the possibilities of remaking
international financial architecture to organize the global economy in a much
more sustainable mode. As the financial crisis of 2008 suggested, and the
extraordinary interventions by central banks in response to the shutdown of
large parts of the global economy in early 2020 in response to the COVID-19
pandemic confirmed, there are all sorts of financial possibilities available once
the prevailing neoliberal assumptions about the limited role of central banks
in constraining inflation are abandoned and shaping financial arrangements
becomes the priority instead (Tooze 2021). While this new role for central
banks mostly played to the advantage of large corporations and the wealthy
during the pandemic, the point is that such measures could be reoriented to link
money supply to climate related matters, and to the reduction of carbon fuels
and the making of ecologically fecund landscapes.
Major financial institutions are key to the large scale investments that create
future political orders, and as such, now in the Anthropocene, are shaping
much more than just a political economy that combines states and capital-
ism (Nitzan and Bichler 2009). But that said, central banks and investment
180 Rethinking environmental security

institutions have been slow to concern themselves with the largest matters of
planetary sustainability and tackle ecological changes as more than tangential
risks in investment calculations. Likewise climate change discussions have
frequently been dominated by the fossil fuels part of the energy industry,
as the large delegations to the COP in Glasgow in late 2021 illustrated once
again, and their dominance in the policy debates has to be challenged directly
in attempts to rethink environmental security. The gap between the amount
of fossil fuels being produced and what is needed to constrain rapid climate
change remains very large (Stockholm Environment Institute 2021). Survival
of resilient ecosystems now has to be the prize, not the mastery over either
nature or putative political rivals.
Hanging over all of this discussion of environmental security is the question
of how to build economies that allow humans to live well without burning stuff
to do so. Security is now about the ability to adapt to changing circumstances
and to simultaneously shape economic activity to focus on human needs within
planetary boundaries (Raworth 2017), not about the ever larger appropriation
of firepower to dominate external environments. In terms of the scholarly study
of international relations, where earlier generations of realists worried about
the firepower of nuclear arsenals, the current generation now has to worry
about the consequences of the unrestricted use of firepower in its other sense,
as lithic fire and extensive burning of fossil fuels. Environmental security now
requires engaging with firepower in all its manifestations; human survival
depends on coming to terms with the consequences of partially domesticating
combustion, a key geophysical force in the planetary system, and dramatically
reducing its future use in the novel circumstances it has recently wrought.
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Index
accidental nuclear war 27 Baechler, G. 96
adaptation, political economy 160–2 Barnes, J. 113
Agenda 21 45 Barnett, J. 41, 164
agricultural innovations 96, 98–9 beavers 65
agro-ecological zones 100 behaviour in cyberspace 138
agroecology 133 Bendell, D. 111, 113
air and water quality, U.S. 38 Bengal famine in India 37
albedo modification 132, 135 Berlin conference 79
Albert, M. 112 Bhopal chemical leak 47–8
Allison, G. 127–8 Bichler, S. 97–8
Alvarez, A. 107 biodiversity 4
American encroachment 16 climate change and global 8, 89
American military planners 22–3 loss 40, 80
American national security 22 and pandemics 84
American style consumer societies 22 biological threats 119
American violence 16 biophysical transformation and
Anarchical Society, The 43 sustainability thinking 46–7
Anglosphere 2 biosphere 5
Anthropocene 2, 4, 55, 58, 89, 108, 114, biosphere-oriented climate actions 162–3
133, 156 Black Death in Europe 119
earth security 131–2 BlackRock Corporation 123
environmental security 76–7 blue marble 35
security analysts 108 Blueprint for Survival 41
anti-Vietnam war movement 41 Booth, K. 149
anxiety 9 Brazilian Landless Workers Movement
Archer, A. 27 142
arms control 27 Breaking Boundaries 33
artificial ecosphere 61 Bretton Woods system 22
artificial intelligence 119 –120 brick making 82
artificial risks 118 Brundtland, G.H. 50
Ashworth, L. 3–4, 36–7 Brundtland report 35
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current Bull, H. 43, 149
(AMOC) 62–3, 115 Busby, J. 101
Atlantic Monthly 95–6 Buzan, B. 21, 31, 66, 149
atmospheric carbon dioxide 59
Atomic Weapons Research Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament 24
Establishment 24 Camp of the Saints, The 107
autonomy 46 Canadian economies 22
capital accumulation 76
Bacigalupi, P. 154 capitalism 22, 109
backdrafts and boomerangs 162–5 capitalist world economy 109

203
204 Rethinking environmental security

Capitalocene 76 climate change 3, 5, 8, 60, 121, 127,

carbon dioxide 171–2
climate disruptions 126 and biodiversity 112
levels 76–7 and conflict 90
removal 135–6, 149 “climate of peace” 166
Carney, M. 126 climate security 7, 11, 93, 95, 102–5,
Carr, E.H. 13, 174–5 116, 147, 166
cascade disruptions 115–16 cloud seeding techniques 139
catastrophe coercion 63–4
climate risks 120–4 Collapse 113, 127
collapse or reform 127–30 colonial plantation 84–5
cultural framing 126–7 colonization
existential threats 111–14 Eurocene 76–8
extinctions and mere catastrophes imperial legacies 72–3
114–18 and industrialization 67–8
natural, anthropogenic and future pandemics, diseases, ecology 83–5
risks 118–20 post colonial world 86–8
time 126 slow violence 73–6
catastrophic violence 92 territories, sovereignties,
catastrophism 59–64 jurisdictions 78–83
century industrialization 4 war and cities 88–9
Challenge of Man’s Future 37 combustion and firepower 64–8
Chaturvedi, S. 106 Coming Plague, The 83
cheap labour 86 commercial agriculture 95
Chernobyl reactor explosion 26, 47 commercial property arrangements 81
Chinese civilization 34, 129 communication 27
chlorofluorocarbons 3, 63 community economic initiatives 145
Churchill, W. 68 Conferences of the Parties of the United
civilization 34, 111, 129 Nations Framework Convention
civilizational collapse 177–8 on Climate Change (UNFCCC
clear-cut deforestation 82 COPs) 78
climate conflict 8
catastrophe 92 catalyst of 103
change 3, 5, 8, 60, 90, 112 -centred ontologies 159
and conflict 93–5, 101 and climate 93–5, 101
crisis 58 and climate change 90
destabilization 7 environmental peacebuilding
disasters 113 165–70
disruptions 7, 122, 155 environmental scarcities and 96
and geomorphological forces 46 environment/environmental and
insecurities 102 90–3, 95–8
instability 5 resolution 21
migrants 92 contingency planning 128
modelling 23, 94 continuationism 112, 125
risks 120–4 conventional archaeology 88
security 7, 95 Convention on Biological Diversity
stability 4–5 (CBD) 45
terror 78, 106 COP 26 conference 172
wars 98–102 coral reefs 64
climate adaptation 81, 160 counter-geoengineering 138
 Index 205

COVID-19 pandemic 83, 85, 91, 119–20, Earth Summit 8

148 earth system science 33, 56
critics of globalization 46 Eastern Syria, Arab Spring 93
Cronon, W. 79 Eckersley, R. 156
cryosphere 5 eco-criticism grappling 92
cultural framing 126–7 Ecologist, The 41
cultural innovation 41 ecology/ecological
cultural myopia 56 civilization 148–9, 167
crisis 7
dam buster bombing operations 153 geoengineering 145
dangers categorization 118 and geophysics 61
Dasmann, R.F. 38 monitoring 144
Dauvergne, P. 44–5, 144 niches 73
Day After, The 92 preservation reserves 143–4
Day After Tomorrow 63 production 174
decolonization 37 regeneration 133
deep adaptation 111 restoration 96, 165
defensive parochialism 128 security 145–50, 157
Delta, M. 106 sustainability 146
depoliticization 161 systems 143–4
Deudney, D. 96, 112, 134, 169, 173, transformations 72–3
176–7 economic boom 37
de Wilde, J. 31 economic expansion 22
Diamond, J. 17, 113, 128 economic exploitation 53
dichotomies of humanity and nature 33 economic growth 6
digital governance 120 economic misadventures 34
digitized financial capital 84–5 economic transformation 34
Dillon, M. 28 ecopolitics and international relations
Dimitrov, R. 175–6 ecomodernism 44–5
disaster exponential growth and complacent
planning 102 assumptions 42
preparedness and resilience 102 global innovations 43
discourse modes 108 human societies 43
dispossession processes 80 war and peace 44
dividing nature, geostory 54–6 eco-security 132, 147–50
Doyle, T. 106 ecosphere 5, 61
Drahos, P. 167 ecostates 144–5, 164
Dreadnought class battleships 20 ecosystem
Dream of Scipio, The 99 engineering 141–5
droughts and agricultural disruptions 107 regeneration efforts 141
Dyer, G. 137–8 services 81
ecotone boundaries 96–7
earth security ecoviolence 82
Anthropocene 131–2 Ecuador 87–8
ecological security 145–50 Einstein, A. 25–6
ecosystem engineering 141–5 El Nino/La Nina cycles 91
environmentalism redux 132–4 empire 15, 21, 24, 35, 37, 72, 79, 86
geoengineering 134–41 employment modes 82
earth’s ozone layer 57–8 endangered, entangled, extractivist
108–10
206 Rethinking environmental security

endangered humanity 4 Ethiopian Grand Renaissance Dam 153

energy supplies and nuclear power ethnocentrism 31
controversies 7–8 Eurocene 76–8, 117
enhanced weathering 141 European colonization 73–4
environmental alarmism 54–5 European imperialism 45, 77
environmental colonialism 39–40 European Nuclear Disarmament
environmental conflict 90–3 movement 27
environmental degradation 118 existential risks 1, 3, 7, 110, 118, 129
environmental disasters 120 see also catastrophe
environmental disruptions 138 existential threats 111–14
environmental history research 74 extinction
environmental insecurities 120–1 global event 81
environmentalism human 114, 116
redux 132–4 and mere catastrophes 114–18
of rich 45 species 127–8
environmentalist political pressures Extinction Rebellion movement in
103–4 Britain 5, 111
Environmental Modification Techniques extractivism 52, 79, 109, 134, 158, 165
(“ENMOD” Treaty) 139
environmental peace 151–2 Falk, R. 41–3, 86–7, 149
environmental peacebuilding 157–60 famines and disruption 99
adaptation, political economy 160–2 farming and artificial fertilizers 91
backdrafts and boomerangs 162–5 Fate of the Earth, The 116
environmental peace 151–2 Finger, M. 96
environmental peacebuilding fire age 19, 131
157–60 firepower 70, 76, 135, 173
territories, borders, securities 152–7 climate change 17–18
transition strategies and conflict COVID-19 pandemic 18
165–70 environmental security 17
environmental peacemaking 165 failure 18
environmental scarcities 96, 151 human appropriation 19
environmental security 1, 41, 171–3 ice ages and fire age 19
aspirational discourse 9 flooding events and climate fluctuations
in global politics 35 61
environmental (in)security 1, 8, 35, 46 force 12, 16, 19–24, 27–9, 36, 46
ecological security 49–50 fossil fuel/fueled 135
environmental insecurities 50 civilization 114
environmentalism 51 economic activity 8–9
environmental resources 50 globalization 1–2
environmental security 49 industrial systems 2
landscapes and ecosystems 51 over-consumption 51
nuclear warfare 48–9 frames security thinking 7
nuclear winter 49 Fridays for Future 5
regenerative ecological activities 51
urban consumers 51 Gaffney, O. 172
environment and conflict 95–8 Gaia Hypothesis 60
Epicenters of Climate and Security 104 Gandhi, I. 39, 45, 48
Erhlich, P. 38 Garrett, L. 83
Essay on the Principle of Population 99 geoengineering
ethical thinking 146
 Index 207

earth security 134–41 Head, J. 164

ecological 145 Herz, J. 32
solar 131–2, 135–6 historical analogies 58
geological context, geostory 56–9 Hobbes, T. 20
geophysical phenomenon 61–2 Ho Chi Minh trail 139
geopolitical landscape 102–4 Hoffman, S. 15
geopolitical leverage 120 Holocene 73
geopolitics 68–71, 99, 178–80 Homer-Dixon, T. 51, 82, 95–6, 153
geopower 152 human
geostory 53 calamities 56
combustion and firepower 64–8 civilization 2–4
dividing nature 54–6 colonization 91
geological context 56–9 dominance 46
geopolitics 68–71 environment 6, 35, 110, 118
uniformitarianism and catastrophism extinction 114, 116
59–64 insecurity 83
Ghosh, A. 68, 91–2 and natural world, interconnection
Gindin, S. 22, 179 130
Glacken, C. 36, 72 niches, globalization 83
Glasgow Conference of the Parties psychology and power 37
(COP) 3, 78 vulnerability 120
Glikson, A. 113 humanity 8–9, 26, 55, 83, 86, 114–15
global biodiversity 8 cultural actions, agriculture and
global capitalism 25, 55, 167, 179 modes of life 36
global change 58 emergency international grain
global economic inequalities 36 shipments 39
Global Ecopolitics 43 human cultures 36
global environmental insecurity 2 hydroelectricity 38
global extinction event 81 loss of biodiversity 40–1
global geopolitics 26 machine civilization 37
global governance 8 and nature 36–42
globalization 156 pesticides 38
global security 90–110, 115, 134, 170, poverty 39–40
177 survival of 25
Global South 78 hurricane damage 122
global vulnerability 40 hydrosphere 5
Gorbachev, M. 49–50
gravity well of earth 58 ice ages 19
greenhouse gases 4, 125–6 Ide, T. 161
Greenland ice melting 62–3 imperial histories 76
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 6, 122–3 imperial legacies 72–3
Gross National Product (GNP) 6 industrial/industrialization
Grove, J. 77 agriculture aspects 143
growth 6 in Europe 35
Guardian newspaper 123 farming techniques 100
Guenter, H. 44 revolution 66
Gulf Stream in North Atlantic 62 instabilities and distress 103
Institute of International and Strategic
Hamilton, C. 109–10 Studies 14
Harris, P. 78 intellectual engagements 33
208 Rethinking environmental security

interconnected cyberspace 119 –120 Jungle, The 80

interconnections 2
intercontinental ballistic missiles 23 Kahl, C. 97
intercontinental missiles and submarine Kaplan, R. 95–6
24–5 Keen, S. 124
intercontinental ranges 20 Kennan, G. 14–15
interdependence and cooperation 3 Keohane, R. 58–9
inter-generational equity 49–50 Kolbert, E. 133
inter-glacial fluctuations 62 Kroger, M. 88
inter-glacial warming periods 60–1 Kyoto Protocol 3
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) reports 92 Lai, X. 148
Intergovernmental Science-Policy land
Platform on Biodiversity and based cannons 67
Ecosystem Services (IPBES) clearing 143
workshop 84 grabbing 81, 142
internal combustion engines 67 privatization 80
international climate policy 98–9 landscape
International Energy Agency 124 disruptions 83
international human rights campaigns transformation 73–4
158–9 Latour, B. 55
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 22, Lee, H. 100
122 Lewis, S. 76–7
international relations 2–3, 13–17, 32–3 Limits to Growth 6, 8, 35, 40–1, 113, 125
American security thinking 16 Linner, B.-O. 160, 164
fate of humanity 13 lithosphere 5
firepower, overabundance 14 Lövbrand, E. 108–9, 131
Gulf war, military capabilities 16 Lovelock, J. 60
hegemony 15 Lovins, A. 41–2, 134–5
humanity 15–16
intellectual history 13–14
nuclear weapons 14 Mackinder, H. 134
scholars 4 Madison, J. 58–9
Soviet Union 14 maldevelopment 96–7
thinking 3–4 Malthus, T. 34–5, 99
international thinking 4 “Man and the Biosphere” program 38
international treaties 5 Margulis, L. 60
inter-state warfare 97 Marsh, G.P. 72, 74
intra-generational equity 47 Maslin, M. 76–7
intra-state violence 97 mass annihilation 38
investment 46, 85, 88, 122–3, 126, 131, mass breeding 85
167, 176 McDonald, M. 133, 146–7
isomorphic replication 27 McNeill, J.R. 128–9
Isthmus of Panama 60–2 Mediterranean climate zones 70
Italian territory 72 Mediterranean style climates 173–4
meteorological disruptions 4
methane 63
Jacobs, J. 89, 127 migration 83–4
Janeiro, Rio de 8 migration patterns 106–7
Jasanoff, S. 140 Milankovich cycles 62, 131
Jenkins, P. 91
 Index 209

military antagonists 24 nuclear weapons 23, 27, 113–14, 116–17,

military power and ecological 134
transformation 66 Nyman, J. 135
mink in Denmark 85
Mobjörk, M. 108–9, 131 O’Brien, G. 88–9
modernity 34, 38, 43, 54, 56, 67, 70, 175 ocean acidification 59, 64, 110
monocultures 141 O’Keefe, P. 88–9
agricultural spaces 70 Only One Earth 6, 41
industrial agriculture 134 ontological security 34–6
plantations 142 ontology 31–2
monumental damage and injustice 109 Oomen, J. 135
Moore, J. 76 Orbis hypothesis 77
Morgenthau, H. 13, 174–5 orbital satellites for military 23
Moss, R.H. 51 Ord, T. 118–19
Mother of Storms 113 Organization of Petroleum Exporting
mRNA technologies 119 Countries (OPEC) 6, 36
Mumford, L. 25–6 Our Common Future 1–2, 8, 35, 41–2,
46, 69, 95–6, 118, 146, 148, 151
National Research Council (2015) 135 oxymoron 133
national security 7, 159 ozone depletion 47–8
dangers to 87
discourse 147 Palme Commission 28
national sovereignty 87 pandemics, diseases, ecology 83–5
national technical means of surveillance Panitch, L. 22, 179
27 Paris Agreement 3, 64, 66, 122, 150
natural systems 85 Parker, G. 99–100
negarchy 173–4 peace 25
neo-Europes 79 peacebuilding 157–60
neoliberalism 42 see also environmental
neo-Malthusian concerns 97 peacebuilding
New Context for International Relations, Peace Council 21
The 43 peacemaking 165
Newfoundland 117 peace parks and demilitarized borders
new geopolitical landscape 102–4 151
New International Economic Order 7–8 Peloponnesian war 20
New York Magazine article 17 permacultures and agroecology 132
nitrous oxide 63 petro dollar weapon dollar 98
Nitzan, J. 97–8 petroleum-powered economic
Nixon, R. 73–4 globalization 109
non-violent resistance 88 Pinatubo effect 57, 135
Nordhaus, W. 124 Pirages, D. 43
Northern Hemisphere landmasses 63 planetary orbits 60
nuclear anxiety 24 Planetary Social Thought 33
nuclear arsenals 26 planetary system 1–2, 4, 11–12, 44,
nuclear deterrence 16 55–6, 62, 120, 134
nuclear explosives 23 plantation agriculture 81
nuclear realism 24–7 plate-tectonics 59
nuclear technology 69 Pleistocene 60–1, 70
nuclear war 4, 8, 16, 24, 33, 92, 116 Plutocene 113–14
nuclear warfare 7–8, 36
210 Rethinking environmental security

political anxiety 7–8 Schatzing, F. 113

political economy and cultural adaptation Schell, J. 116
169 Schumacher, F. 41–2
Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for scorched earth 65
Power and Peace 13 Second World War 21–2, 37
politics and administrative arrangement 4 securitization 31–2
Population Bomb 38 security 105–7
post colonial world 86–8 cold war 22–3
poverty 47 concept 29
precious-woods logging 82 espionage and interference 20–1
prevention 112 extending 27–30
property 11, 29, 39, 81, 142–4, 163 and its dilemmas 19–24
protectionism 174 ontology 105
public sector spending reductions 7–8 realist scholarship 20
Pyne, S. 64–5, 70, 131 technical innovation 20
pyric transition 66 territorial sovereignty 21
Pyrocene 19, 70, 131 thinking 134
Security Council 21
quality peace 162 self-identity 31
self-preservation strategies 122
racial purity and spatial boundaries 107 Siberian traps 57
rainfall statistics 101 Silent Spring 38
Raspail, J. 107 slave labor 82
Raworth, K. 146 slaves 82
realism 173–8 slow violence 73–6
recontextualization of security 7 smallholder farming 85
regenerative agriculture 165 snow ball world 59–60
regional climate vulnerabilities 117 social and economic change 111
resilience 164 social and policy innovations 5
resilient ecosystems 180 social instability 101
resources social mobilization 51
capture and violent dispossession 97 social science literature 111–12
and cheap labour 86 socio-ecological catastrophes 100
management 54 Soder, R. 108–9, 131
scarcities 90 Solar Energy Research Institute 42
shortages 114 solar geoengineering 131–2, 135–6
Revolutionary Armed Forces of solar radiation management 135, 139–40
Colombia (FARC) 158 Sovacool, B.K. 160, 164
rewilding ecosystems 145 Soviet New Thinking 25–6
Reynolds, J.L. 175 soviet thinking 25
Rifkin, J. 134 Soviet Union 22–3, 112
Rio conference 45 species
Road to Survival, The 37 diversity and buffering ecosystems
Rockström, J. 172 142
rural disruptions and insurgencies 152 extinction 127–8
rural regeneration 145 starvation 57
Russell, B. 25–6 Stockholm conference 35, 39, 41, 166,
172
Stockholm Declaration 41
Sassen, S. 109
 Index 211

Stockholm International Peace Research trading 89

Institute (SIPRI) 51–2 traditional liberalism 29
storms and droughts 78 traditional security thinking 108
Strange, S. 167 transition strategies and conflict,
stratosphere 137 environmental peacebuilding
Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation 165–70
Experiment (SCoPEx) programs Treaty of Westphalia 77, 100
139–40 tree planting initiatives 141
strength and nuclear deterrence 14–15 Trek, S. 57
stressor, environmental change 157 Twenty Years’ Crisis, The 13
strip mining 82
structural economic transition 124 Ullman, R. 28
substantial rethinking 132–3 uniformitarianism and catastrophism
supernova type stellar explosion 57–8 59–64
superpowers 7–8 United Nations Conference on
confrontation 6 Environment and Development
nuclear arsenals 38 (UNCED) 8, 45
survival 4, 31–2 United Nations Conference on the
Survival (journal) 14 Human Environment (UNCHE) 6,
sustainable development 1–2, 35, 45–8, 35, 110, 118
132 United Nations Decade of Ecosystem
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Restoration 145
8, 36 United Nations Educational, Scientific
Swarm, The 113 and Cultural Organization
Sylvest, C. 116 (UNESCO) 38
Syria, climate and conflict in 93–5 United Nations Environment Programme
Syrian civil war 95 (UNEP) 35, 102, 163
United Nations Framework Convention
Tainter, J.A. 127–8, 178 on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 3,
Taylor, Z. 88–9 40, 45, 102
technical innovation and social learning United Nations General Assembly 172
128 United Nations Security Council 149
technocratic environmentalism 144 United Nations Sustainable Development
technological innovation 41–2, 127 Goals 151
technosphere 5–6, 61 urbanization 89
termination shock 137 urban systems 5
territories US Army War College 103
borders and securities 152–7
sovereignties and jurisdictions van Munster, R. 116
78–83 Vietnam Syndrome 16
thinking and fortress mentalities Vietnam war 6
154–5 violence 87
This Endangered Planet 41 volcanos 57, 62
Thompson, E. 27, 69 vulnerabilities 164
threat multiplier, environmental change
157 Wæver, O. 21, 31, 149
Thucydides 20, 174 Wallace-Wells, D. 17, 111, 113
Thunberg, G. 5, 165 Wallensteen, P. 162
Timoshenko, A. 49–50 war and cities 88–9
Top Guns and Toxic Whales 153
212 Rethinking environmental security

warfare 151 World Bank 22

warming war 155 World Commission on Environment and
Watts, M. 97 Development 8
Western alliance 14 World Economic Forum 122
Western Europe 26 The world in 2022 48–51
Western security thinking 7
Westfailure system 167 xenophobia 174
white nationalist movements 107 Xiao, Z. 148
white supremacy 107
wildlife management 133 Yergin, D. 68
Wilson Center Environmental Change
and Security Program 163
zoonotic disease emergence 84