Security and Environmental Change E-Book

Simon Dalby

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Dimensions of Security
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 360

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5847-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 13 pt Minion

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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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

AOSIS

Alliance of Small Island States

ENSO

El Niño Southern Oscillation

FAR

Fourth Assessment Report (of the IPCC, published in 2007)

GEO

Global Environmental Outlook

HESP

human and environmental security and peace

HUGE

human, gender, and environmental security

ICISS

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

IGBP

International Geosphere Biosphere Programme

IPCC

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

MA

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

MDG

Millennium Development Goals

NGO

non-governmental organization

RUSI

Royal United Services Institute

UNCHE

United Nations Conference on the Human Environment

UNDP

United Nations Development Program

WCED

World Commission on Environment and Development

Introduction: Change, Ecology, and Security

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.