Security and Environmental Change

Simon Dalby

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745658476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Environmental Economics
• Index: Economics

In the early years of the new millennium, hurricanes lashed the Caribbean and flooded New Orleans as heat waves and floods seemed to alternate in Europe. Snows were disappearing on Mount Kilimanjaro while the ice caps on both poles retreated. The resulting disruption caused to many societies and the potential for destabilizing international migration has meant that the environment has become a political priority.The scale of environmental change caused by globalization is now so large that security has to be understood as an ecological process. A new geopolitics is long overdue.

In this book Simon Dalby provides an accessible and engaging account of the challenges we face in responding to security and environmental change. He traces the historical roots of current thinking about security and climate change to show the roots of the contemporary concern and goes on to outline modern thinking about securitization which uses the politics of invoking threats as a central part of the analysis. He argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world's population becomes vulnerable in new ways. In a clear and careful analysis, Dalby shows that theories of human security now require a much more nuanced geopolitical imagination if they are to grapple with these new vulnerabilities and influence how we build more resilient societies to cope with the coming disruptions.

This book will appeal to level students and scholars of geography, environmental studies, security studies and international politics, as well as to anyone concerned with contemporary globalization and its transformation of the biosphere.

	Environmental Fears: From Thomas Malthus to Ecological “Collapse”

Much environmental thinking doesn’t explicitly deal with matters of security, even in the early literature where technological dangers supposedly required emergency measures. Nonetheless it is important to think about how the whole notion of environment has developed and how conceptualizations of nature and resources have come to shape the debate now that security has been directly linked with “environment.” Most important are the practices of modern administration and their formulation of problems in such a way that they present us with an environment that needs to be controll ed, regulated, legislated, governed, and now apparently “secured” (Dalby 2002). This political history aff ects how we think about what needs to be done by whom in the face of apparent threats to many things. Once one looks at environment in these terms it quickly becomes apparent that threats and their representation are a crucial part of the discussion. Fears of all sorts of biological threats, poisons and pollution, terrorist actions, and invasions by foreigners are linked into anxieties about security that are especially prevalent in the era of the “war on terror” (Hartmann et al. 2005). This is part of complex cultural processes of fear and politics that only sometimes link environmental matters to security.

This chapter deals with only some parts of the history of environmental thinking, how threats needing international responses became part of political vocabulary, and how shifting interpretations of the importance of environment as a priority became part of governmental activities and core themes in the non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations, and foundations that form the broad and diverse movement that is often lumped together under the label of “the environmental movement.” (See O’Riordan 1976; Sandbach 1980; Luke 1997, 1999.) How all this feeds into the matter of security as such is discussed in more detail in chapter 2; environmental matters aren’t necessarily of concern to security specialists, or a matter of state priorities in terms of national security. Indeed, as will be made clear later in this book, there are some compelling arguments against invoking security discourses in dealing with environmental matters. But first, and all too briefly, some of the salient themes in environmental arguments need to be presented, and the current worries over climate change and large-scale dangers to the biosphere put in their historical context.

More specifically, this chapter deals with articulations of environmental matters and danger. Hence it starts with a brief discussion of Thomas Malthus, whose essay on population, penned two centuries ago, is usually understood as the key text in the modern debate about resources and scarcity and the supposed dangers of overpopulation. Many of these themes were discussed at length in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when “the population bomb” was linked to larger concerns about resources and environment. The debate about “the limits to growth” was accentuated when, in the aftermath of the October 1973 war between Syria, Egypt, and Israel, a number of oil embargos resulted and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) hiked prices (Yergin 1991). Shortages of fuel suggested the arrival of resource scarcity. In subsequent years as supplies were diversified prices once again declined and attention focused on other matters. The 1970s were also a decade marked in many industrial states by sustained efforts to reduce the most obvious and dangerous forms of pollution. Earlier alarms were partially addressed in legislation and by the apparent export of some of the dirtiest industries to poorer parts of the world economy.

Environmental matters returned to the international agenda in the late 1980s, when the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, ozone holes, burning rainforests, and the hot summer of 1988 focused attention as the Cold War subsided. Then the links between security and broadly defined environmental matters were explicitly drawn with much greater scope than the earlier concerns with resource supplies in the mid-1970s (Dalby 2002). The larger discussions of sustainable development linked up with a discussion of new threats to security. This political concern fed into the huge United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 without much explicit attention to these matters in terms of environmental security. Eighteen months aft er the summit Robert Kaplan’s widely cited cover story on “The Coming Anarchy” in the February 2004 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine focused attention on the links once more.

In the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century these matters are now pressing priorities in political discussions. Many international reports, scientific studies, and policy analyses have focused attention on climate change in particular and related matters of biodiversity loss, the extinction of species, and once again concerns about peak oil and the exhaustion of supplies of cheap petroleum. Overarching this is a discussion of major disasters and the possibility of the end of contemporary civilization; the theme of Jared Diamond’s (2005) bestselling book Collapse. However, just as environmental changes are being caused by our current activities, we are also changing both our capabilities and the context in which we face these challenges. Humanity is increasingly in charge of its own fate.

Clearly the contemporary climate crisis in particular suggests we have much to learn, and need to learn it quickly. As will become clear in the rest of this book, not only is environmental change happening at an increasing pace, but how we understand the environment has also changed very substantially in the last few decades. We now know much more than we did in the early 1970s when alarm about environment was first on the political agenda. In the process, thinking has gradually shifted from environment as an external entity to be managed to a recognition of the affluent part of humanity as the maker of our collective fate.

That is not quite how things looked two centuries ago through the eyes of Thomas Malthus, however, and many of his concerns are remarkably persistent in arguments about how environment should be linked to security. As later sections of this book make clear, alarm about population, environmental scarcity, and threats that are caused by these things are frequently misleading when climate and other forms of environmental change are linked into security discussion. However, given the persistence of Malthusian formulations in contemporary thinking, his legacy needs to be briefly discussed first.

Thomas Malthus, Population Bombs, and the Limits to Growth

Thomas Malthus frequently gets most of the blame for tales of woe related to environmental matters. The country parson who became one of the first professional economists has given his name to a whole mode of thinking that continues to shape a substantial part of how we talk about what is now called environment. The term “Malthusian” is part of the English vocabulary in most parts of the world. In his lifetime Malthus’ (1970) most famous essay, “On the Principle of Population,” appeared in a number of editions (starting in 1798), and it changed as he refined his thinking and responded to his critics. But few people now go back to read what he had to say. Instead the central theme of scarcity as a limit on humanity’s potential has been adopted as part of modern political argument and economic reasoning (Xenos 1989), and Malthus’ name has been repeatedly attached to arguments about a stingy nature as the cause of much human misery and environmental conflict (Urdal 2005). Above all, Malthus’ argument is remembered as suggesting that we breed faster than we can expand our abilities to feed ourselves and so we ensure that misery persists. This propensity can be tackled, Malthus thought, through moral reform and sexual abstinence, or more recently, through the adoption of birth-control methods, on the part of those who previously supposedly bred too enthusiastically.

Malthus’ concerns were also within a larger geopolitical imagination of the world where breeding and population were understood as a threat to particular polities. Larry Lohmann (2005), in an essay tracing the history of the connections between fears of scarcity and geopolitics, opens his discussion reprinting a passage from the “Essay on the Principle of Population”: “clouds of Barbarians seemed to collect from all points of the northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy, and sunk the whole world in universal night. These tremendous effects . . . may be traced to the simple cause of the superior power of population to the means of subsistence” (Malthus 1970: 83). Fear of Asian hordes overrunning Europe, and of the lack of available “manpower” to protect Rome, or later the British empire, from external threats, is a persistent part of geopolitical discourse (Kearns 2009), and one that is reprised in discussions of Eurabia, Islam, and the threats to European civilization to this day. As Lohmann (2005) puts it, these Malthusian fears are not usually about us but about “them,” the poor and the foreign, who breed too profusely for “our” comfort.

There is another aspect to Malthus too: the economist and mathematician concerned to apply policies that would solve all sorts of social problems, but who usually took the operation of the market society and the institutions of that society for granted, as something beyond discussion, rather than as the source of many of the problems which he wished to address. He was most concerned about the ability of society to feed itself, a matter of the limited, as he saw it, ability to expand production fast enough to feed a growing population. His critics, from the nineteenth-century political economists, only most famously Karl Marx, to more recent writers, have long focused on the economic sources of poverty rather than the supposed natural limits to subsistence (Eric B. Ross 1998).

While many of the original arguments about the ability of societies to feed themselves were demolished by the end of the nineteenth century, and the dramatic changes that the industrial revolution wrought suggested that humanity was capable of extraordinary expansion, the fear of living beyond the capabilities of environmental resources has remained a powerful theme in political discourse and was especially so in the 1970s (Harvey 1974). Demography, even before it became a science of that name, was a persistent theme in discussions of colonial administration in the British empire in particular, where questions of managing populations in the colonies were never far from administrators’ minds (Grove 1995, 1997). Here the natives were frequently understood as a threat to the imperial order or at least to its administration in a manner that ensured essential commodities were produced and exported in an orderly manner. Where Malthusian arguments operate to suggest that marginal and poor people are the source of difficulties for the rest of us, they frequently obscure matters of wealth distribution (G. Williams 1995). Likewise the supposed irrationalities of the poor and marginal, when judged through the lenses of colonialism, or more recently state development discourses, frequently occlude what might be sensible strategies if viewed through the lenses of the poor and marginal.

Extended into discussions of resources other than food, in various forms of neo-Malthusianism, the argument reiterates concerns about the limits of human capabilities. If the world is running out of copper, iron, or, perhaps most ominously for contemporary car drivers (Urry 2008), petroleum, then the limits to industrial growth and the potential for expansion of consumer societies once again loom. Given how widespread plastics and petroleum-based materials are in contemporary civilization, petroleum is especially relevant to this discussion. Much less reflected upon in most neo-Malthusian arguments is the necessity of using specific resources for certain modes of living. In a society not addicted to the private automobile and with heating systems and machinery fueled in other ways, scarcity of petroleum isn’t a threat. Resources are tied into particular ways of life; flint isn’t in short supply these days because no one “needs” it to make arrow heads.

In the 1960s as rapid population growth occurred round the world, Thomas Malthus was dusted off in a discussion of how all these new mouths would be fed. Paul Ehrlich (1968) published a small popular book simply called The Population Bomb . Extrapolating into the future, he suggested that famine was inevitable as the growing numbers of poor people in particular were unlikely to be fed. Shortages of land, fertilizers, and other inputs suggested that the planet could not feed the growing numbers in the future. However, many alarmist arguments were in part countered by technological innovations and the adoption of new food crops of the so-called green revolution. Hybrid varieties of wheat and rice emerged from research programs where science met agriculture and productivity increased. Mechanized farming, fertilizers, and technological innovations expanded food supplies, and while many people did starve, in Africa in particular, in subsequent decades the numbers of humans continued to expand, albeit at slower rates than the alarmist accounts of the 1960s suggested were likely.

Shortly after The Population Bomb was published, early computer scenarios of the future began to be generated, in particular by a project commissioned by the Club of Rome on the predicament of humankind. Titled The Limits to Growth , the report, first published in 1972, left little doubt about its findings. It extended concerns with food and population to the larger context of humanity’s future. The project built a formal mathematical model of the world “to investigate five major trends of global concern – accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment” (Meadows et al. 1974: 21). While recognizing the limits of the model and suggesting that future improvements would be necessary as better data on the world’s attributes became available, the project nonetheless suggested that the model was robust enough and the analysis important enough to bring it out of the computer lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and publish it for a general audience.

The three key findings of The Limits to Growth report were clear about the choices facing humanity, and the ominous fate awaiting us if then current trends were not changed:

1. If present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.

3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success. (Meadows et al. 1974: 23–4)

While the authors didn’t use the phrase “sustainable development,” it’s clear that the second finding here is one that is loosely similar to what has subsequently been adopted under this rubric.

Critics were quick to pounce on some of the limits of the model. An edited volume from authors based at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex challenged such Models of Doom and the assumptions of both social and technical change that underlay the pessimism of The Limits to Growth ’s first conclusion (Cole et al. 1973). The first chapter in this volume is appropriately titled “Malthus with a Computer.” As the growing concern over climate change suggests, the authors turned out to be right about at least one limit, that of the atmosphere to absorb one particular kind of pollution: carbon dioxide. Interestingly, the volume ends with a discussion of the basic views of humanity that drive such exercises, contrasting a “Western” perspective, wherein humanity’s intellect allows for progress and the exploitation of the whole planet for humanity’s wants, with an “Eastern” perspective, wherein humanity is part of an intricate web of life within which we exist. In short, the criticisms focus on the political assumptions that drive such thinking and raise the possibilities of thinking beyond the Western instrumental view of things. This criticism has now ironically been reinforced by Western science and the use of huge new climate computer models, much more sophisticated than their precursors in the 1970s, which are making it ever clearer that we live within a system which our “instrumentalism” is now fundamentally changing.

In 1972 too the United Nations organized the first international conference on environment in Stockholm. Formally called the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), it drew few heads of state to the meetings, was boycotted by Soviet bloc states, but did raise numerous important questions about the future and human institutions. The background volume written for the conference by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (1972) and published as Only One Earth used the theme of “the care and maintenance of a small planet” as its subtitle. Looking back, it is interesting to note that there are discussions of problems of “coexistence in the technosphere” and “strategies for survival” but few invocations of either a global problem or managerial approaches to the issues. Editors of the Ecologist (Goldsmith et al. 1972), then a new magazine in Britain, caught the mood of the times and issued A Blueprint for Survival incorporating scientific arguments that were broadly similar to those of The Limits to Growth . They also suggested that smaller-scale communities relying on local resources were much more likely to be sustainable and humane than large-scale industrial metropoles with their huge resource consumption.

Sustainable Development and Environmental Security

In many parts of the Third World, oil-price hikes in the 1970s in the aftermath of the October 1973 war between Syria, Egypt, and Israel, which triggered oil embargos by a number of oil-producing states, had damaging effects on development, and the debts rapidly accumulated as economies that had just begun to become dependent on oil imports suddenly had to pay much higher prices. When these factors linked up with Northern discussions of the limits to growth and the claims of a need for conservation and limits on production, many Third World politicians interpreted this as an attempt on the part of affluent Northern governments to keep the advantages they had gained over previous centuries of imperial rule for themselves and to restrict Southern development. Not surprisingly such suggestions were vehemently opposed, notably at the 1972 Stockholm UNCHE meeting, but also later in numerous international meetings where politicians in the South were much more concerned that Northern states live up to their commitments to aid in Southern development, or, where they agreed to forgo technologies such as chlorofluorocarbons, that Northern states provide financial compensation to facilitate producing alternatives (Kjellen 2008).

Perhaps nowhere was this more so than in Brazil, where politicians, and the military rulers during the period of their dictatorship in particular, eyed the Amazon region as a huge, untapped reservoir of resources that would allow Brazil to develop in a manner analogous to the United States by opening up the interior to farming and mining. Environmentalists from around the world did not seem to understand why the Brazilian government repeatedly invoked claims of sovereignty and portrayed environmentalists, who went to the Amazon to “save” it from Brazilians, as a threat to national security (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007). Claiming the national territory of another state as a matter of a common heritage of humanity looks very like earlier imperial claims on resources and territories in the name of empire, civilization, or Christianity.

The most notable effort in the 1980s to deal with all these issues was the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987), which worked to find compromise positions on these con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Change, Ecology, and Security
• 1 Environmental Fears: From Thomas Malthus to Ecological “Collapse”
• 2 Securing Precisely What? Global, Environmental, and Human Security
• 3 Environmental History: Conquest, Colonization, Famines, and El Niño
• 4 Global Change and Earth-System Science
• 5 Glurbanization and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene
• 6 Geopolitics and Ecological Security
• Conclusion: Anthropocene Security
• References
• Index