Security and Environmental Change

Security and Environmental Change

SIMON DALBY

polity

Copyright © Simon Dalby 2009

The right of Simon Dalby to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

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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

Acknowledgments

Over the last few years many students in my “Environmental Geopolitics” course at Carleton University have engaged with the themes in this volume, and my thanks go to all of them for help in clarifying my ideas. Some of the ideas in this volume have also been presented to the International Studies Association as conference papers in 2002 and 2004, and to other academic and professional audiences in Kingston, Kathmandu, Melbourne, Ottawa, Toronto, Singapore, Chandigarh, Bern, Hamburg, and Vancouver. The Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has supported my work over many years on a number of projects related to environment and security; I very much appreciate this institution’s continued support of my scholarly efforts.

Iqbal Shailo and Susan Tudin provided invaluable research assistance in finding sources and tracking down elusive information. Ottawa colleagues Fiona Mackenzie, Nancy Doubleday, Mike Brklacich, Mike Pisaric, Matthew Paterson, Chris Burn, David Long, Graham Smart, James Meadowcroft, Patricia Ballamingie, and John Stone, as well as graduate students Andrew Baldwin, Jamie Linton, and Dale Armstrong in particular, have been most useful sounding boards for my ideas. Thanks too to Hans Guenter Brauch and Ursula Oswald Spring, whose ongoing collaboration has been so stimulating to my thinking in the last few years. My thanks also to Rita Floyd, Melanie Heintz, and Rachna Mishra for careful readings of the first draft of this book, and especially to Cara Stewart for her comprehensive editing of the text, and her crucial support at moments of authorly angst. Finally, my thanks to the Carnegie Council for permission to reprint material from my article, “Ecological Intervention and Anthropocene Ethics,” which appeared as online exclusive in Ethics and International Affairs 21(3): 2007, and to all the staff at Polity for their careful work on this volume.

Abbreviations

In the early years of the new millennium hurricanes lashed the Caribbean and, in the most high-profile case of Hurricane Katrina, flooded New Orleans. Heatwaves and floods seemed to alternate in Europe. Thousands died in the hot summer of 2003 in Paris while fires raged periodically across Greece and Portugal. Hollywood captured some of this worry about climate change in the 2004 disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow ; Al Gore’s documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth (2006) subsequently popularized the scientific case for concern and shared a Nobel peace prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. Snows were disappearing on Mount Kilimanjaro while the ice caps on both poles retreated. The North West Passage from the Atlantic through the Arctic to the Pacific was ice free for the first time in recorded history in 2007. People were in motion in many places seeking relief from disruptions of one form or another and apparently upsetting social stabilities in many places. The humanitarian disaster and ongoing war in Darfur in the first decade of the twenty-first century too were linked to environmental change and specifically climate-change-induced drought. Numerous thinktanks reported on the issue, once again linking the matter to the dangers of conflict and the possible security implications for many states with many “disasters.” Charities and aid agencies also weighed in on the topic, concerned that climate change threatened the poor and marginal in new ways. Journalist Marq de Villiers summed up the doomsday tone of all this in his 2008 book simply titled Dangerous World .

Hanging over this discussion is an apocalyptic concern that humanity is destroying the biosphere, running amok on the only planet that is available for habitation. Pollution and the destruction of forests, looming shortages of petroleum and natural gas, of wheat and other essential grains, feed fears of the future and raise the specter of civilization as we know it disappearing altogether. Jared Diamond’s bestselling book of 2005 examined the fate of previous societies that had disappeared, apparently as a result of resource and environmental difficulties, and did so with a title that bluntly caught the mood by phrasing matters simply in terms of Collapse . James Lovelock, the famous inventor of the concept of a self-regulating biosphere, “the Gaia Hypothesis” (Lovelock 1979), has recently suggested that we are moving into a period of great danger where human misdeeds have led to a situation in which we face The Revenge of Gaia (Lovelock 2006). Australian Friends of the Earth (Spratt and Sutton 2008), building on Lovelock’s formulation, have invoked emergency medical terminology in declaring climate change a “code red” planetary emergency.

Facing such collapse surely is a matter that should invoke discussions of security, if not immediate emergency measures to change things and head offimminent dangers. However, who should act and how, and whether traditional notions of security have any relevance in these new circumstances, turn out to be much more complex than simple cries of “danger, do something” suggest. Traditionally national security has been about protection from external military threats or from internal subversion of the political order. The irony of climate change is that the threat is self-imposed; we are the makers of our own misfortunes. Or at least those of us who live in the prosperous, automobile- and airplane-addicted consumer societies of the planet are. If the poor subsistence farmers of Africa die from drought or flood, or the dwellers on atolls in the Pacific are overwhelmed by rising oceans, clearly they are not responsible for the disruptions and hence their fate. These are indeed externally caused security threats to the poor people living in vulnerable peripheries in the world system, caused by the rest of us. For all of us who write and read textbooks about security in particular, it is precisely this growth of the global economy that makes us affluent that is also changing planetary systems. This economic expansion has caused dramatic disruptions of natural systems in the search for ever larger supplies of minerals, fiber, food, and fuel, and the increased methane, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases as a byproduct of transportation and industrial production. If these disruptions set the poor and marginal populations in the South in motion in search of food, shelter, jobs, and safety in the affluent North, then there is always the possibility that these people will be portrayed as a threat to Northern societies “requiring” security measures to prevent their immigration. Some hard thinking is very much in order here to address these issues, and this is what this book does.

Hence the title of this book can be read a number of ways. Most obviously it suggests that security is being threatened by changes in the natural environment. It is obvious because of the numerous popular discussions of climate change, international debates about the Kyoto Protocol and what comes after it, not to mention the intense scientific activity investigating numerous aspects of the earth system. The concern that drives all this activity and debate is precisely that climate change and related phenomena are threatening to many ways of life. Less obvious, but at least as important, is the opposite reading of the title, the suggestion that environmental change might cause us to rethink what we mean by security. This interpretation rests on the irony that the social and political systems that have supposedly rendered at least the relatively affluent urban dwellers in the “Northern” states secure have been based on the use of fossil fuels, which are now disrupting the environment that gave rise to urban civilization in the first place. In short, the question of which is securing what is not as simple as the title of this volume might at first suggest.

Neither, as the first few chapters below outline, is this a very new debate; scholars have been discussing all this under the heading of “environmental security” for a couple of decades, although many of the recent alarmist discussions of climate change causing conflict seem to have forgotten much of this discussion. The scholarly literature that suggests that environmental changes rarely cause conflict directly and only occasionally do so indirectly (Kahl 2006) doesn’t get as much attention in the media as the more alarmist claims about imminent crisis. But nonetheless there are many reasons to be greatly concerned about contemporary environmental changes and the potential they have to render many people in many places insecure. As the book makes clear, none of this has to lead to wars. Indeed thinking about security in new ways that are not part of the legacy of Cold War concerns about military preparation as security provision is an important part of what states, societies, scholars, students, and citizens now need to do.

Much of the rest of this book is therefore about how we now think about security and environment, both of which are changing in many ways. How we use both of these terms is also changing, and clarity on this point is notably absent from policy debates and media commentary. Neither security nor environment is anything like as obvious as they once seemed. This is not a matter of clever plays on the meaning of words (Broda-Bahm 1999). It is about the now unavoidable realization that neither security, as we have traditionally understood it, nor environment, as we have usually taken it for granted, can continue to be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways if either environmental change or security is to be thought about or made a political priority in useful ways for the majority of humanity or other species in coming decades (Barnett 2001). All this is so because humanity is changing what was once understood as an external environment, and in the process changing its circumstances of life in ways that make what is being secured increasingly artificial. Our thinking needs to catch up to this new reality.

Taking environmental change seriously requires us to rethink security quite dramatically. It might even mean that we should abandon it altogether; ecology, science, and history all point to the inevitability of change. Insofar as security is about making things, notably our consumer society, stay the same, it may in fact be part of the problem, rather than a way of thinking that is helpful in dealing with the future. Back in 1990 Daniel Deudney warned very clearly that military institutions in particular were frequently not the appropriate agencies for dealing with environmental issues. They are designed, equipped, and trained to break things and kill people, not nurture trees, breed fish, clean river beds, or install solar panels. Indeed the contemporary military use of fuels, chemicals, explosives, and radioactive substances makes them one of the most polluting of human institutions. Recently the 2007 United Nations Environment Program GEO4 report on the global environmental outlook examined a number of scenarios of the future related to environmental change, and concluded that prioritizing security was nearly the worst possible way to proceed. But as the latter parts of this book discuss, some of the most alarming discussions about climate change and its consequences, and hence the need to take appropriate preventive action, are now coming from military thinktanks.

To think seriously about change and security it is necessary to consider history and the lessons that might be learnt from previous episodes of environmental disruption to societies (Diamond 2005; Linden 2007). If enough evidence exists concerning how they coped with disruptions then those are lessons that might have much to teach us. Whether the kind of violence and disruption that we now think about in terms of security were evident in earlier episodes, and if so where and when, these too might teach us very useful lessons. Many of the societies that became extinct have left few records from which it is possible to interpret how their debates went, whether the threats to the society were interpreted in ways that mirror our own concerns, and whether political strategies were tried and failed. But some archaeological reconstructions at least offer interesting hints. Large-scale disasters, short of complete destruction, offer more promising possibilities, especially where societies were literate and written accounts survive. Piecing together what evidence survives is a fascinating exercise in science, history, and archaeology, an exercise that may have some policy implications for our own societies in the present.

However, as this book suggests, these lessons are limited precisely because we have so dramatically changed human circumstances in the last few centuries, and especially in recent decades. As Jared Diamond (2005) observes, we can learn from earlier cases. More specifically, we might be able to learn useful lessons from the social traps that some earlier societies apparently were unable to evade as crisis and decline set in (Homer-Dixon 2006). But as chapter 3 shows, the most useful environmental history puts these changes into the appropriate context so that we understand the circumstances we have made, and hence how current vulnerabilities are now constituted.

Despite all the attention to climate change in recent years, focusing on it alone is insufficient. While atmospheric change and the increasingly rapid rise in global temperatures are very important, it is clear that these factors alone are not the whole story of the dramatic transformation of the earth’s living systems that industrial civilization has set in motion. The rapid deforestation of the last few centuries, loss of many species, reduction in fish populations, conversion of huge areas to asphalt-covered cities, mining, farming, damming rivers, and numerous other activities are all happening at the same time. They are all having effects on how the biosphere behaves (Smil 2003). These factors need to be kept in mind when talking about environmental change, even if it’s not always clear exactly how the different bits of the earth system fit together and how they may change as a result of human activities.

This discussion of earth-system science and the changing nature of the biosphere raises a crucial point that frequently reappears in the pages that follow. The sheer scale of the changes that have been set in motion now means that the conventional assumptions about environment as something out there, the given context for human affairs, is no longer a very useful way of thinking about present priorities. Precisely because of the disruptions set in motion by human activities, the distinction between culture and nature, human and environment, that has structured so much of the environmental discourse of the last century is becoming untenable. At the global scale we live in what might now more accurately be called a “social nature” (Castree and Braun 2001). Protecting nature, and seeing human actions as part of what has to be stopped to preserve nature, the logic of parks and conservation, is now no longer understood as either the only or the obvious way of proceeding. While “stopping the bulldozers” and declaring particular chunks of the biosphere “protected areas” are still important in many places, the larger questions of environmental change now suggest that such limited approaches to preservation are not anything like enough to deal with contemporary transformations.

The scientific recognition that environment as something external in need of protection is no longer an adequate formulation is now complemented by research in history and by political campaigns in the global South that have also repeatedly run up against the limits of this mode of thinking (Peluso and Watts 2001). The assumption of administrative areas that states should control to “protect” from people is a mode of thinking that runs back through the history of European state-making and the history of imperial administration (Scott 1998). Where parks were designated as royal hunting lands back in European history, the local residents who lived there suddenly became poachers and outlaws. Not surprisingly they resisted; the legend of Robin Hood tells an English version of the much larger story.

As European empires expanded in recent centuries, parks have frequently required the removal of local populations in the expansion of concerns with conservation areas and the maintenance of game reserves for the elites to hunt. Not surprisingly, people in the South react badly to Northern initiatives to set up international biosphere reserves and limit the use of land by indigenous residents; especially so when the “protected” wildlife threatens their lands and fields in ways that park administrators had mostly ignored until the last few decades (Adams and McShane 1992). Even then eco-tourism as a development strategy frequently trumps local subsistence activities. Only recently have many Northern environmentalists begun to understand this history and draw on the wider critical themes in earlier social thinking (Luke 1997) to rethink such projects as attempting to gain international sovereignty over the Brazilian rainforest to “save” it from, well, Brazilians (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007).

But just as environment can no longer be taken for granted in discussions of environmental security, neither can security (Croft and Terriff 2000). During the Cold War national security relied on a fairly simple geography of protecting domestic spaces from external threats. In the aftermath of the Cold War this geopolitics is no longer useful; the cartography of danger changed (Shapiro 1997). Even the re-imposition of border controls and the discussions of “homeland security” in the “war on terror” are tied to a discussion of globalization as the source of terrorist threats. Security is not just about threats, armies, and government policies dealing with conflict. It now encompasses broader concerns with security, health, drugs, political violence, livelihoods, and infrastructure.

Most of these themes are part of what became known as “human security” in the 1990s United Nations Development Program formulation (UNDP 1994), when threats to people became the focus, and inter-state wars were assumed to be much less of a concern than in the Cold War period. More recently, and of particular importance for the themes of this book, when human security is put at the heart of the analysis and linked to both the science of earth systems and the historical lessons about how people die in disasters, then a different set of security priorities becomes apparent (Brauch 2005a, 2005b). But whether these formulations will shape policy, or whether older formulations of security predicated on protecting the existing social order against disruptions win out, is a crucial matter of geopolitics in the coming decades.

This in turn once again raises questions of who security is for, and what circumstances are designated as a threat to that security. It makes unavoidable the question of what social order is being secured for the future (Dalby 2002). Security has been invoked frequently in the past as a response to numerous threats of many kinds in many circumstances. Alarms about population and resources are not new either; Thomas Malthus’ (1798/1970) Essay on the Principle of Population has been read for two centuries, while human population and its mode of subsistence have expanded in ways that were inconceivable to the author writing at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The modes of thinking from earlier episodes may have useful lessons to teach about how we now think about security; but unless they are appropriately put into context they may simply be misleading.

The irony of considering security as threatened by change is also worth considering. After all, our whole society seems to be run on new and better things. Diseases that killed our grandparents are now curable. Air pollution in big cities in many parts of the world is reduced, although Chinese cities in particular still face many problems of air quality. The dangers of war between states, the classic problem of security studies, are supposedly now reduced to a matter of peripheral states in the world system, not a matter for metropolitan societies. In everyday life things are much improved, and for all the concern expressed in the media about technological threats of various kinds, the practical innovations of technology seem to have improved our lives considerably. CDs long ago replaced records, and are now being replaced by downloadable files, MP3 players and iPods. HDTV promises digital experiences that mere television could never offer. Cars have ever more sophisticated technologies and old-fashioned maps are now being replaced by GPS. We live longer than our parents’ and much longer than our grandparents’ generation did on average. Big homes, miraculous communication technologies, hygiene and medical improvements have all opened up numerous new possibilities. Growth is apparently a good thing in at least most matters; scarcity has been effectively banished for many of the rising middle classes in developing countries, only most obviously China and India. Huge numbers of people now travel round the world each day in airplanes, a technology that is only a century old. Hasn’t change made many people much more secure in many senses in the last while, as Bjorn Lomborg (2001), in particular, has repeatedly argued? Globalization may bring uncertainty, but it also brings vacations in exotic spots, foods and music from round the world into our lives in ways that supposedly makes us much more fulfilled as human beings than earlier generations. So why might change, even environmental change, then be a problem for security?

Clarity and careful analysis are needed here too to make sense of what it is that is endangered, and how such threats are invoked in the very political language of security. The climate-change debate has come to dominate these discussions in the last few years; 2007 may well turn out to be a turning point, as environmentalist Nick Mabey (2007) suggests in his sobering analysis published by a British military thinktank. Alarm about climate change and related disasters is certainly not in short supply, as numerous recent popular books attest (Flannery 2006; Monbiot 2006; de Villiers 2008; Weaver 2008). But putting all this into the appropriate context needs a focus on the conceptualizations of both security and environment, and attention also to history and to science, as well as some careful reflection on the geography of all this in terms of who lives where and is hence vulnerable to what forms of insecurity.

To make sense of all these matters the rest of the volume is divided into six substantive chapters and a brief conclusion.

Chapter 1 looks back to past thinking about fears related to environmental matters, starting with Thomas Malthus, who usually gets all the blame for scarcity narratives, and deals next with the 1970s limitsto-growth debate. Many of the themes from the 1970s are back in the current debate, and reminding ourselves of these earlier discussions is important so that lessons can be learned and unfounded claims to novelty rejected. Later sections show how some of the Malthusian themes reappeared in the 1990s discussion about environmental security that was especially prominent in Robert Kaplan’s (1994) much-cited dystopian essay “The Coming Anarchy.” The doom and disaster that Kaplan portrays is topped only by the literature that suggests the imminent end of civilization as a result of climate change.

Which leads to a second chapter, on the larger questions of how security should and might be reformulated since the nuclear standoff between the superpowers ended. Who is insecure how and where are key to this discussion, but the conceptualizations of security remain a matter of political order and state power even when pressing priorities of disease, water supplies, and environment appear to be more immediately endangering people in many places. The human-security agenda is important in changing the focus from states, borders, and national security and in challenging simple assumptions that environmental change causes violence. But concepts of danger and nature are part of the cultures that are apparently threatened, and the politics of invoking security is an important part of this whole discussion.

Third, precisely because environmental change is caused by human action it is important to engage the literature on environmental history, which has explored the collapse of earlier civilizations and the important disruptions of earlier empires and the environmental contexts that made them possible. There may be all sorts of lessons to be learned, but few of the historians who write on this matter engage concepts of security very directly, so lessons need to be extracted carefully. However, historians have been hard at work of late linking matters of economic change with environment and resource extractions. Building on work by Alfred Crosby, in particular in his 1986 book Ecological Imperialism , the connections between human activity and environmental change are now clearly understood as intricately interwoven. Indeed the relationships between science and disaster, and in particular blaming nature for disasters that are at least partly a matter of human actions, are also tied up with the disruptions wrought by the dramatic expansion of the global economy in the last couple of centuries. Imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century is related to the huge famines that swept Asia and Africa in particular. Variable rainfall, being measured by the new science of meteorology, suggested a stingy and capricious nature was to blame for famine, rather than imperial political economy. Linking famines to the global political and economic system is essential to put this all into the appropriate ecological context.

The fourth chapter deals in more detail with ecological science, and in particular the current earth-system science investigations, which are making it clear that humanity is changing its habitat in unpredictable ways that need to be thought about carefully if the future is to be part of a recrafted conceptual and policy agenda. Getting the science right has been a major problem in the literature on environmental security for the last two decades (Sullivan 2000) and this science on the big scale makes it both more difficult and more important. Recent overviews of ecological and climate matters do make the picture much clearer. Arguments about climate change are now emerging as the dominant theme in these discussions, and ones that apparently might have dramatic security implications. In particular it is important to look at how complex systems change, and how human and ecological systems are interconnected. The sheer scale of human activities means that we are living in increasingly artificial circumstances in a biosphere that we are changing. This is in effect a new geological period called, following Paul Crutzen’s (2002) suggestion, “the Anthropocene,” shaped in novel ways by the human factor in planetary matters.

It is precisely the perturbations in the earth system that are induced by human actions that compose the global urbanized economic conditions of humanity, which are the most likely cause of environmental harm that will affect both human and national security in the foreseeable future. This theme is covered in chapter 5. Now that we are living in the Anthropocene, human actions are a part of the biosphere; environment is no longer an external agent in human affairs. The implications of this are profound, not least in that we have to think about the mundane details of everyday life in the global economy as shaping the future of the planet. Not the kind of thing that most scholars or students are used to doing, or what security analysts usually do! But the rise in the number of casualties from disasters round the world, and the failure of emergency systems to deal with many aspects of Hurricane Katrina in particular, make it clear that human vulnerability especially to storms, heatwaves, droughts, and hurricanes has to be part of the security agenda now. But how security is invoked, and precisely what is designated as the threat, is an unavoidably political exercise, as this chapter shows in a discussion of New Orleans and a major rainstorm that struck the Indian city of Mumbai a month before Katrina.

Sixth, in light of these discussions of history, science, and vulnerability we need to think again about the possibilities of human security, and preparations to deal with environmental disruptions, when they occur, as a constructive initiative in global security that can promote cooperation rather than conflict in the face of disaster, while simultaneously reducing the total impact of human activity on the biosphere. To do so requires us to challenge the view from the metropoles, the imperial administrator’s view of the world where Northern forces might need to intervene in the South to deal with environmental emergencies, because on the biggest scale of climate change it is now clear that alarm about this issue is finally making military institutions pay serious attention to global order and the unsustainable global economy. Climate change is also beginning to shift the geopolitical sensibilities from matters of protecting borders to thinking about global interconnections and the fact that affluence is making the poor and marginal insecure. The good news is that some ideas about sustainable security are on the policy agenda and possibilities for rethinking security are being canvassed now that the failures of the policies of the “war on terror” are becoming unavoidable.

The book’s conclusion then suggests that earlier concerns about scarcity are of much less relevance than the need to think and plan for security in ecological terms in the Anthropocene. Looking at the larger intellectual context within which security is situated suggests that the conceptual categories that we use to think about both environment and security need some fundamental overhauls; matters environmental activists and military thinkers are both addressing in parallel. All of which makes the debates about human security much more interesting as they engage the contemporary literature on earth-system science rather than traditional environmental literature about parks, wilderness, and “protecting nature.”

Taking ecological thinking seriously suggests the possibilities for reducing vulnerabilities while simultaneously rethinking how security is understood. What a sustainable security policy might look like in the face of environmental change on the largest scale is very difficult to specify in detail, but the general outlines of what needs to be done, and how security should be rethought in these circumstances, is becoming much clearer as a result of the debates of the last few decades. The book concludes with some reflections on this agenda for the future.

	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).