Security

ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY: ECOLOGY OR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS?

By Simon Dalby, Carleton University Ottawa, Canada [email protected] www.carleton.ca/~sdalby

Paper for presentation at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March 2002.

Abstract The juxtaposition of security and environment raises more profound issues for international relations than many scholars and policy commentators have addressed in any detail. Analyses within IR have investigated the relationships between environmental change and violence and come to the conclusion that international conflict is unlikely as a result of environmental change. They have also used environmental agreements and negotiating processes as an analytical focus for research into the dynamics of international regimes. But in most of these analyses environment is a backdrop, independent variable to conventional social science concerns. The small critical literature suggests that environmental degradation is very substantially driven by the processes implicit in the normal operations of international politics; hence the analysis takes for granted precisely what it ought to investigate. This difficulty is especially clear in the discussion of environmental security, where it surfaces frequently in discussions of the necessity of rethinking security, whether in terms of common, comprehensive or human security. But much of this literature simply extends the dilemmas rather than shifting the analytical gaze to investigate the simultaneous causes of both insecurity and environmental change. Once this connection is directly addressed ecology then opens up the possibility of more drastically rethinking the scope and purposes of international relations and the centrality of the assumption that security is the overarching rationale for the endeavor in the first place.

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Environmental Security Since the late 1980s the discussion of environmental security has continued apace with conceptual arguments intersecting regularly with both empirical research and policy advice. While there is agreement in most of the literature that environmental changes are unlikely to directly cause inter-state warfare, there remains considerable discussion about the likely trajectories of environmental change causing state "failures" and the likely disruptions that might result. Likewise there is considerable discussion of the appropriate policies to anticipate such failures and the possibilities of aid packages as preventative interventions. Not surprisingly the main focus in many of these discussions is on states, their performance, interactions and capabilities. In so far as the conclusion that states are unlikely to go to war as a result of environmental scarcities or changes holds, the question then becomes in what way is this a matter for detailed attention by international relations scholars and especially those interested in security studies. Environmental security might more obviously be a matter for those interested in global political economy where power is understood as enmeshed in international production systems, although with a few notable and important exceptions, such connections have not been followed up in much detail.1 Perhaps most obviously, given that environment might lead to state collapse and internal violence within states, it would appear to be a matter better handled by those with a disciplinary training dealing with matters of rural sociology or specifically matters of resource use and development. The field of political ecology is especially germane given the recent critical attention given to Thomas Homer-Dixon's approach to environmentally driven conflicts in particular.2 Perhaps a few ecologists just might have something to say on these matters too? In a couple of recent essays Hugh Dyer has put this matter directly in suggesting that the literature in international relations dealing with these issues needs to confront the question of which contains what.3 Global environmental change is much more than international change and the suggestion is that it drives international responses, whether in terms of security, economy or other matters. "In some respects environmental change is the greatest challenge for international relations theory since this appears as a material externality to the international system rather than as an internal variable which can be addressed in terms of familiar political structures and their supporting social values. Thus environmental change may present security concerns which are qualitatively different from traditional security threats, and in itself present a material basis for a broad shift in social values."4 This directly raises the question of whether the environment to be understood as a matter of international politics, a matter of potential security concern and a matter for regulation in various international regimes or is international politics to be understood as a matter that happens 1 Matthew Paterson Understanding Global Environmental Politics London: Macmillan 2000; Dimitris Stevis and Valerie Assetto (eds) The International Political Economy of the Environment Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001. 2 Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. 3 See Hugh Dyer "Environmental Security and International Relations: The Case for Enclosure" Review of International Studies 27(3). 2001, pp. 441-450. 4 Hugh Dyer "Theoretical Aspects of Environmental Security" in Eileen Petzold-Bradley, Alexander Carius and Arpad Vincze (eds) Responsing to Environmental Conflicts: Implications for Theory and Practice Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001, p. 68.

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within the environment, a matter of politics within natural circumstances which get priority in how matters are conceived and policy devised? This slightly reformulates the earlier questions in the environmental security discussion as to whether what is implicitly getting secured is the international order or the natural environment.5 What cannot be assumed is that there is a necessary congruity between these two. Indeed the whole premise of the parallel discussions of sustainable development in the last couple of decades is precisely that the conventional modes of economic activity practiced in most parts of the world were not sustainable.6 The major question raised here is what kind of shift in social values might come from taking environment seriously as a material necessity driving international politics. How might this qualitatively different understanding of security be imagined and what kind of contribution might international relations make to such an undertaking. Such speculative undertakings are fraught with intellectual dangers; indeed they might not be considered social science at all by many scholars trained in conventional research modes. But what the critics have been saying for some time now is that taking environment seriously requires thinking in unconventional ways. If Hugh Dyer is correct about the importance of global environmental change, and the following sections will suggest that he is, then conventional political structures and their supporting social values are not necessarily appropriate for thinking about environment. This being the case there is no good reason to assume that conventional international relations thinking will provide the necessary intellectual toolkit for addressing these new formulations of security. Neither, and this is the most important point, is there any good reason to think that ecological matters can be usefully understood in terms of security from some external threat at all. Environment and Global Change Environment is a catchall residual category which usually refers to the non-human material context of human activities. Premised on the extraordinary modern assumption that divisions between humanity and the rest of the biosphere are a useful ontological starting point the term environment has come to encompass the definition of the part of "nature" that provides the backdrop for human affairs. When it shows up in discussions of security it is frequently the changes in specific environments in terms of resource scarcity that are the focus of analytical attention. Other considerations of the disruptions caused by climate change and related matters also appear in the environmental security literature, although these are often speculative exercises in constructing plausible future scenarios, or extrapolating from contemporary events, rather than analyses based on the historical case studies that have become available recently in the environmental history literature.7 But the assumption of a stable backdrop that is being changed in some places is not now an adequate representation of what the scientific literature on global ecology has been describing 5 See Jyrki Kakonen (ed.) Green Security or Militarized Environment Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1994. 6 The classic statement is the so called Brundtland Commission report: World Commission on Environment and Development Our Common Future Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987 but the theme and the complex debates about terms and definitions continues in the lead up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002. See Felix Dodds (ed.) Earth Summit 2002: A New Deal London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2000. 7 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; H. H. Lamb, Climate, History, and the Modern World, 2d ed. London: Routledge, 1995.

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in increasing detail for the last few years or what environmental history has been investigating.8 In Hugh Dyer's terms the material context driving international politics is changing and that point has to be integrated into the conceptual frameworks that link environment to security, and especially so in terms of the discipline of international relations, where at least some of the change in political arrangements needed to address this changing context will have to be studied and analyzed. Whether what will result will be international relations as currently practiced is highly doubtful, but prior to discussing such matters the question of the changing material context needs more detailed study. What is now frequently simply called global change science has, in the last few decades, begun the task of synthesizing knowledge from many disciplines while extending the monitoring of numerous aspects of the planetary biosphere. It has also incorporated historical research into the planet's past and looked in detail at the crucial matters of atmospheric composition and climate change.9 A number of noteworthy conclusions have already been reached which affect our understanding of ecology in ways that matter in terms of what security might now mean. While the sheer scale of change is important, the most worrisome matter is the unpredictability of forthcoming changes. Three aspects of the contemporary literature on global change are especially salient. First is the importance of understanding the scale of anthropogenic disruptions of the atmosphere, and in particular the fact that humanity has altered the composition of the gases in the air to such a degree that there is no parallel in the last 400,000 years for which science now has a fairly comprehensive geologic record. That period has been recorded in the so called Vostok ice cores extracted from Antarctica and analyzed in detail in the last few decades.10 The conclusions from this analysis are quite clear in that climate is related to carbon dioxide concentrations through the last four glacial periods. Climate and carbon dioxide oscillated within a fairly stable range during that period, but we are now already outside that range of relative stability. In the words of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) authors we are living in a "no-analogue state", a situation where we are already beyond the bounds of the system that produced ice ages and "inter-glacials" in between.11 This alone ought to be reason for great concern, and it has been through the 1990s where scientists have repeatedly called for dramatic reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide from human activities in the hope that CO2 levels can be reduced to within the historic ranges that provided relative stability to the earth's climate in the past and provided the conditions for the emergence of human civilization. Second, is the recognition that it is not only the atmosphere that we have changed but other important natural systems too not least nitrogen and phosphorous cycles in the biosphere. The cumulative impact of these parallel disruptions of other material and energy cycles and maritime systems and terrestrial land uses suggests to the IGBP that the geological period known as the Holocene, the last 10,000 years since the most recent ice age, is now effectively over. They have coined the apt term the "Anthropocene" to denote the arrival of a new geological
8 J.

R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the TwentiethCentury World New York: Norton, 2000. 9 For the most recent overview by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes see James McCarthy et.al. (eds) Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 10 J.R.Petit et.al. "Climate and atmospheric history of the last 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica" Nature 399. June 1999, pp. 429-436. 11 "Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure" IGBP Science No. 4 2001.

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period where a dramatic new series of forces have been unloosed in the planetary biosphere changing the atmosphere as well as geomorphic processes and most natural cycles that involve a biomass of any substantial size. Literally we have entered a new geologic period in which humanity has become an agent in remaking some of the essential systems of the global biosphere. Third, is the fact that these changes interact and cascade through the earth's natural systems in ways that are hard to predict precisely because so many things are changing at once and interacting in ways that are impossible to comprehensively grasp and model. But they do so in ways that are not likely to give either immediate or linear responses. Lagged effects due to inertia, and non-linear responses due to the crossing of crucial thresholds of relative stability, are likely results in complex interconnected systems. Given that science does not know where the critical thresholds of many of these systems may be, or whether we have in fact already crossed some of them, thinking hard about ways of reducing the overall impact of human disruptions has become a pressing necessity if the long term survival of human civilization is taken seriously. In combination these three factors suggest that the assumption of the environment as the backdrop or context for human history is no longer an appropriate way of thinking. There is no longer a stable "environment" that can be "secured". Neither is there a predictable environment that might be said to threaten humanity in precise ways. Humanity is actively, albeit inadvertently, changing the overall conditions of its existence. No longer can nature be seen as something external to human designs. In the language of astronomy and space exploration we are already "terraforming" the earth, changing the overall patterns of basic life systems in the process of remaking our specific contexts, not least to supposedly secure our modes of life. This terraforming changes the basic assumption of human-nature relations. As aboriginal "environmental" activists in many places have long being trying to point out, the interconnectedness between people and other living things is unavoidable; global systems science is now saying the same thing, albeit in a slightly different vocabulary.12 International Relations The response to the emerging understanding of the scale, gravity and urgency of the global change crisis has been varied. In diplomatic circles numerous agreements have been negotiated on many environmental themes, although attempts to deal with climate change under the terms of the framework convention negotiated as part of the Earth Summit a decade ago have been, so far at least, singularly ineffective when measured either by diplomatic accomplishment or the need to drastically reduce, as opposed to just limit, emissions. While the problem may in many ways be "global", the appropriateness of these modes of tackling climate change must be called into question by a decade of less than impressive international efforts. The alternative perspective from international political economy implies that progress is more likely to be made by actively promoting the construction of economies that don't rely heavily on fossil fuels rather than trying to regulate their usage in ever more complex manners.13 International relations operates on the basic assumption that states, given sovereign recognition in common, are at least legally equivalent units in the international system. Granted some are more powerful than others, but their rights in terms of international legal personality 12 A point reiterated recently in Al Gedicks Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations Boston: South End, 2001. 13 Matthew Paterson "Climate Policy as Accumulation Strategy: The Failure of COP6 and Emerging Trends in Climate Politics" Global Environmental Politics 1(2). 2001, pp. 10-17.

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and their privileges granted in terms of sovereignty are assumed to make them the key actors in international politics. But shifting the focus to global changes suggests that this assumption is not necessarily a useful starting point for thinking about what is still inadequately understood in terms of environment. Clearly the trans-boundary "flows" of environmental politics have challenged the assumptions of sovereignty in many ways that require international cooperation on many themes. In this sense the "greening" of sovereignty is occurring and the importance of international cooperation made evident, but environmental themes also do point to the limits of thinking in terms of sovereignty in the first place.14 Global change suggests a more fundamental reorientation of thinking which decenters the assumptions of states as the crucial actors for dealing with contemporary difficulties. They may well be essential for administering agreements and enforcing laws, but innovation frequently comes from outside the structures of state bureaucracies and in spite of government planning. Ecological processes are not constrained by state frontiers. Environmental disruptions are frequently caused by economic activities that supply resources to distant markets, insurgency in Bougainville is caused by demands for metals far from the remote provinces of Papua New Guinea; vegetable purchasing preferences on the part of supermarket company produce buyers at Heathrow airport near London drive the practices of Kenyan farmers.15 Environmental security is not just about state policies and initiatives.16 The enormous differences between states in terms of capabilities and development levels also belies simple assumptions about them as the most effective agent of change in many places. The fundamental inequities between North and South stand in the way of progress on many things, although the recognition of this difficulty is finding its way into both international negotiations and efforts to think intelligently about such things as "sustainability science".17 But the most important point in thinking about states and international relations in the face of global change is the simple but compelling argument that states are precisely the agencies that, in the twentieth century, built the infrastructure that requires huge inputs of carbon fuels and other materials that disrupt biospheric systems. Only the most obvious facet of this is the active promotion by states of what is now called car culture.18 Building highways and roads was part and parcel of state functions in most parts of the world in the twentieth century, a trend that shows few signs of abating outside Europe. Just as states were active in facilitating the construction of railways in the nineteenth century they built road networks, ports and airports in the twentieth producing an economic mode that is literally driving climate change. A case, if there ever was, of foxes guarding chickens. Now that the atmospheric chickens are coming home to roost the appropriateness of the state fox is now very obviously in doubt. 14 Karen Litfin, ed., The Greening of Sovereignty in World Politics Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 15 Volker Boge, “Mining, Environmental Degradation, and War: The Bougainville Case,” in M. Suliman, ed., Ecology, Politics, and Violent Conflict London: Zed, 1999, 211–27; Hazel R. Barrett, Brian W. Illbery, Angela W. Browne, and Tony Binns, “Globalization and the Changing Networks of Food Supply: The Importation of Fresh Horticultural Produce from Kenya into the UK,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s., 24. 1999, 159–74. 16 Despite some assertions to the contrary, see Braden R. Allenby, “Environmental Security: Concept and Implementation,” International Political Science Review 21(1). 2000, pp. 5–21. 17 Robert W. Kates et.al. "Sustainability Science" Science 292. April 2001, pp. 641-642. 18 Matthew Paterson, “Car Culture and Global Environmental Politics” Review of International Studies 26(2). 2000, pp. 253-270.

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The crucial question is in part whether states can reinvent themselves to construct new infrastructures that do not depend on ever larger throughputs of resources, or whether states are an intrinsic part of the problem. Municipalities and corporations, sensitive to the need to improve the practical living conditions of their residents and aware of the consequences of their raw material extractions and production systems may be better placed to take the necessary initiatives to reduce environmental impacts while simultaneously promoting poverty alleviation in the South by selectively importing commodities that are sustainably produced there.19 Thinking in these terms, and specifically of the flows of materials and energy through economic systems regardless of the location of international boundaries, is an ecological approach in stark contrast to the cartography of state security. Given the nearly complete monopoly of state centered thinking in contemporary political discussions, and especially in security matters, with the concomitant assumptions that politics is about state agreements and their administration and enforcement, such thinking points in very different directions. The conventional political assumptions in state thinking, that environment is an external entity to be controlled, patrolled, surveyed, monitored, catalogued and administered is not new. Rather such environmental practices, what Tim Luke might call "environmentality" is a longstanding mode of rule that can be directly traced to colonial arrangements in many places over the last few centuries.20 Tracing matters to the long term history of imperial ecological arrangements suggests once again the inadequacy of contemporary institutional arrangements for grappling with the scale and scope of contemporary transformations. The modern state system is of recent origin; in many parts of the world it post-dates the emergence of the technological systems literally driving climate change. Assuming that this administrative framework is necessarily adequate because of the contemporary attribution of sovereignty to states is an obvious response to environmental difficulties, but not one that reassures those who look to the long term political ecology of the planet.21 The processes in motion predate states in many places and in many ways call into question the basic functions of contemporary states that are so frequently better understood as development agencies. The infrastructure they provide is in many ways the source of contemporary ecological disruptions, hence the assumptions that these agencies are necessarily the solution is not one that can be taken for granted.22 Global Security The arguments about environmental security are extensive and beyond the scope of this paper to recapitulate, but the key point that recent critics have emphasized concerns the question of what exactly is being secured.23 Traditional security analyses which lead to discussions that 19 See for instance the innovative suggestions in W. Sachs, R. Loske, and Manfred Linz, Greening the North: A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity London: Zed, 1998. 20 Tim W. Luke, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departing from Marx Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999. On colonialism see Richard Grove, Ecology, Climate, and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940 Cambridge, England: White Horse, 1997. 21 Part of the argument in Simon Dalby Environmental Security Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming fall 2002. 22 Ken Conca "Environmental Cooperation and International Peace" in Paul F. Diehl and Nils Petter Gleditsch (eds) Environmental Conflict Boulder: Westview, 2001 pp. 225-247. 23 Peter Stoett, Human and Global Security: An Exploration of Terms Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999; Jon Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental Security: Ecological Politics

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environmental matters might cause warfare have not produced many plausible scenarios of immediate concern.24 The argument that environmental degradation might lead fairly directly to interstate conflict has by now been rejected by most researchers in the field. Water wars are not very likely although there are a few important exceptions where conflict might yet ensue. What is becoming clear is that in many places in the periphery of the global economy struggles over resources are prevalent. But these are often traditional land wars on the fringes of agricultural settlement or struggles to control the revenue streams earned by the export of resources, whether strictly "environmental" or not. Minerals, timber, diamonds and oil are struggled and fought over in many parts of the world although their connection with environmental change and degradation is frequently not in a manner that makes conflict simply a result of "environmental" change.25 The assumptions that warfare is likely as a result of environmental change do not exhaust the range of concern. The initial focus of policy concern in the late 1980s where the argument was less that environmental change will cause warfare than that environmental disruptions threaten people in many ways that might be said to render them insecure. Phrasing matters of environmental concern in terms of security as a strategy to gain political attention has turned out to be a dubious rhetorical device.26 But the matter of various forms of endangerment as a result of environmental themes and the priorities that might be afforded these continue to raise the possibility of understanding such matters in terms of securing the environment. Several matters of global scope fit within such thinking. Barnett and Dovers itemize three; biodiversity, climate change and nuclear hazards as being of a sufficient spatial and temporal scale, and so difficult to reverse, as to qualify as matters of global security.27 Given the analyses now appearing from the international science community and especially discussions of the scale of human impacts in terms of "no-analogue states" and the beginning of the "Anthropocene" it is clear that the relatively stable biospheric conditions of the last ten millennia cannot be taken for granted in even the near term future. The rapid collapse of biodiversity is reversing the geological trend to increased variety of species, a matter of long term concern well beyond the alarm on the part of pharmaceutical advocates concerned that medicinal plants are being extirpated. The potential for further Chernobyl style disasters cannot be ruled out, despite technological innovation in the nuclear industry and the global reach of nuclear fallout is now common knowledge. As the IGBP analyses discussed above make clear the most important point about global change is not any one of these themes, be it climate, biodiversity, radiological pollution or even ozone depletion, nitrogen or phosphorus cycle disruptions, but rather the fact that all these matters are occurring simultaneously and cascading and Policy in the New Security Era London: Zed, 2001. 24 Paul F. Diehl and Nils Petter Gleditsch (eds) Environmental Conflict Boulder: Westview, 2001. 25 David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper 320,1998; Mats Berdal and David M. Malone eds. Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000; Philippe le Billon "The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts" Political Geography 20(5). 2001, pp. 561-584. 26 Daniel Deudney, “Environmental Security: A Critique,” in Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew, eds., Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 187–219. 27 Jon Barnett and Stephen Dovers "Environmental Security, Sustainability and Policy" Pacifica Review 13(2). 2001, 157-169

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through the biosphere in unpredictable interactive manners. Phrased in these terms it is not difficult to render such matters extraordinary and beyond the normal operation of politics and human activity. But whether such threats to human welfare can be usefully designated as security is doubtful and it is also clear that the poor and the marginal populations in the South are likely to be much less likely to adapt to changes than the rich in the Northern metropoles who can use their wealth to avoid the consequences of local environmental changes. As Dovers and Barnett suggest climate change, biodiversity loss and some nuclear technologies clearly fit the criteria of what ought to be rendered as a global security threat, but the failure of many to respond to such threats suggest that their designation in these terms is not any more effective than the use of other vocabularies. Skeptical realists will at this point no doubt reassert the inevitability of faction, the unavoidability of short term parochial interest and the impossibility of global efforts. But the dangers remain as concerned ecologists never tire of reminding the few people who bother to listen. Part of the difficulty follows from the fact that the specification of security still relies on tropes of interiority and exteriority, an intact entity in need of protection from external, in this case environmental sources of danger. But the point about global security is precisely that the source of the dangers is internal, not a matter of keeping the bad guys out, but rather a matter of rethinking what it is that we who are insecure do to stop rendering ourselves so. The technological specifications of security, the assumptions of the technical fix rather than a more fundamental reorganization of our consumption lifestyles and the global economy that fuels and feeds them are part of the problem; so too is the assumption of the environment as external to humanity. At its most basic the problematic of global environmental security challenges the taken for granted identities of modernity, the consumer citizens of the Northern metropoles, as that which are in need of securing. The political vocabularies on offer presenting an alternative are not promising, but such rethinking seems a pressing necessity once one starts investigating the literature of ecology. Political Ecology The assumptions that the endangered humans are within the environment that supposedly endangers them is one of the basic premises in the contemporary literature on political ecology. Challenging the Malthusian premises of much of the 1990s discussion of environmental security, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Homer-Dixon in particular, this literature suggests that most of the environments in which violence occurs are ones that are better understood in terms of complex political struggles within cultural patters of ownership, control and responsibility for environments.28 Viewed in these terms, rather than in economic terms that presuppose scarcity as a general human condition, much of the contemporary violence is over access to wealth and the distribution of the benefits and costs of "development" rather than squabbles over increasingly 28 See Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987); Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1996); Raymond Bryant and Sinead Bailey, Third World Political Ecology (London: Routledge, 1997); Roger Keil, David V. J. Bell, Peter Penz, and Leesa Fawcett, eds., Political Ecology: Global and Local (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Philip Stott and Sian Sullivan, eds., Political Ecology: Science, Myth, and Power (London: Arnold, 2000), and specifically in response to Thomas Homer-Dixon and neoMalthusian interpretations of environment and violence, Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (eds) Violent Environments Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

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scarce resources. The intrusion of commercial arrangements into landscapes long operated in terms of moral economies and traditional informal tenure systems is frequently the cause of much of the violence. External disruptions and internal politics play in complex ways in the mobilization of identities by local political leaders.29 Among the most important themes in the political ecology literature is the recognition of the complexity of the modes of economy in rural areas. Important too is the point that population density is not simply related to environmental destruction; in many places increases in rural population coincide with more intensive cultivation and a diversification of planting and harvesting strategies. Increased biodiversity in a region is not incompatible with a rising rural population if the local political economy of land ownership allows people to respond in these ways to the need for increased food production. Population pressure need not necessarily lead to environmental destruction; it can frequently lead to innovations in land use and animal husbandry that increases resilience of both economy and ecology. 30 Neither does deforestation necessarily result from population increases, despite the alarmist assumptions that it does in the much cited writings of journalist Robert Kaplan.31 But to think in these terms requires seeing people as part of ecology rather than as an external imposition on a supposedly pristine nature. This latter specification is an urban managerial assumption which dates most obviously from the European colonial experience and the construction of "empty" parks as game reserves and "conservation" areas. But it is not a mode of thinking that is especially sensitive to either ecological context or human history. Given the diversity of human cultures and the variety of ecological circumstances that humanity has existed within a mode of analysis that privileges universal patterns over specific contexts is always in danger of inappropriate generalizations. Nonetheless the generalizations that do seem to hold are those that relate to the incorporation of peoples into the modern economy as it has spread in the last couple of centuries. Environmental History The arguments about humans embedded in landscapes and the struggles over "environment" as a long term pattern rather than something new needs to be complemented by a consideration of the history of "environmental" disruptions and their intersection with changing economic circumstances.32 In particular the consequences of the incorporation of many parts of the world into the global grain market in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, when coupled with the droughts and climate disruptions of a series of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, suggests that the complexities of the relationships between environment and politics cannot be understood without a clear understanding of the impact of the world market on local disasters. 29 These are sometimes discussed in terms of core-periphery conflicts: see Gunther Baechler, “Why Environmental Transformation Causes Violence: A Synthesis,” Environmental Change and Security Project Report 4 (1998): 24–44; 30 Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds., The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment Oxford: James Currey, 1996. 31 Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War New York: Random House, 2000; Melissa Leach and James Fairhead “Challenging Neo-Malthusian Deforestation Analyses in West Africa’s Dynamic Forest Landscapes” Population and Development Review 26(1). 2000, 17–43. 32 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1800 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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Famine and finance became intimately interconnected as carboniferous capitalism provided the technologies of steam ships and railways that linked the world together in novel and destabilizing ways. "Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival."33 The already weakened societies in many places, with their survival mechanisms disrupted by the impact of new price mechanisms which responded to shortage by raising prices and so making food unavailable to millions, were unable to resist another spate of European imperialism which extended the colonial reach to most of the rest of Africa and Asia. It is here in the interconnections between famine, finance and imperial adventures of the nineteenth century that so many of the seeds of the emergence of the "third world" and subsequently the "South" were sown. In Karl Polanyi's phrase "the Great Transformation" from subsistence to market economies brought with it huge social disruptions as whole modes of life were rapidly, and frequently disastrously, disrupted.34 The impoverished South and the rich North are the product of dramatic changes in the organization of the world economy in the nineteenth century. The manifestations of the disruptions of the growing global trade in the form of famine were increasingly blamed on the weather just as meteorological data was starting to suggest the importance of large scale weather fluctuations in what would much later become understood in terms of ENSO. Prior explanations in terms of the disruptions of colonial companies or the misplaced policies of imperial administrators were eclipsed by accounts of climatological causes for human misery. The importance of this history for understanding contemporary discussions of environmental security is very considerable, not least because it emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity of traditional and indigenous social systems and their inherent resilience in terms of risk aversion agricultural strategies and moral economies of survival. In contrast the commercial systems that replaced them emphasized maximization of production and the efficacy of market forces to supposedly alleviate shortages. But the lack of purchasing power on the part of numerous marginalized farmers and their families belied the efficacy of market solutions to empire wide famines. But at the same time famines were effectively eradicated as a source of hazard to European populations; the tragic loss of life in Ireland in the 1840s in the so called Great Famine was not to be repeated in Western Europe, whatever about further East in the political turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century. The parallels with the twentieth century can easily be drawn, where famine stalks poverty stricken populations in many places, but the global economies of agribusiness ensure that food supplies are not an issue for the urban populations of the Western metropoles. The attribution of shortage to natural events in the nineteenth century generated much discussion of sun spots and climatological phenomena as the causes of tragedy but also extended discussions to suggest that the "market" was also a natural phenomena thus evading questions of the specific institutional contexts in which the fluctuations of grain production and prices were turned into human tragedy. Environmental determinism has a complex history intimately linked to the moral legitimization of empire in the latter years of the nineteenth century; twenty first century scholars need to remember the complex political history of invoking natural phenomena to explain social events, especially so when arguments concerning global change structure the discussions and 33 Mike Davis Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World London: Verso, 2001, p. 12. 34 Karl Polanyi The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time Boston: Beacon 1957.

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invoke universal claims to a common human condition.35 Ecology Thinking about matters in terms of ecology suggests the importance of challenging the dominant binary structure of the debate in Anglo-American thinking between the anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric formulations of ecologism. Ecology also suggests a vocabulary of connections that is not necessarily obvious in Anglo-American environmentalist thought, not least because of its romantic roots and its frequently unreflective incorporation of colonial categories with their implicit and explicit assumptions of empty natures and pristine wilderness on the one hand, and the necessity of administration of these spaces in terms of resources on the other.36 In the apt words of Arturo Escobar: Although ecologists and ecodevelopmentalists recognize environmental limits to production, a large number do not perceive the cultural character of the commercialization of nature and life integral to the Western economy, nor do they seriously account for the cultural limits which many societies have set on unchecked production. It is not surprisingly that their policies are restricted to promoting the “rational” management of resources. Environmentalists who accept this presupposition also accept imperatives for capital accumulation, material growth, and the disciplining of labor and nature. In doing so they extrapolate the occidental economic culture to the entire universe.37 The bifurcations between deep and shallow, or managerial and philosophical approaches to environmental thinking is not a structuring principle in much French Green theory.38 As such it may provide a vocabulary that avoids some of the traps of Anglo-American thinking and the categories that frequently limit how environment can be thought. A detailed engagement with French thinking is beyond the terms of this paper but a couple of themes are worthy of brief mention. Specifically Felix Guattari understands the need to respond to ecological crisis in terms of three overlapping ecologies, or an ecosophy of three ecological registers; the environment, social relations and human subjectivity.39 Its precisely the interconnections of the three themes that he emphasizes as the key point for a political response to the contemporary crisis. In slightly different synthetic terms Bruno Latour suggests the importance of hybrids in the current context, phenomena that deny easy classification as either natural or artificial due to their complex histories in a world being changed by humans.40 Stretching the point of this a little, in light of the 35 See Ronnie Lipschutz, “Environmental Conflict and Environmental Determinism: The Relative Importance of Social and Natural Factors,” in N. P. Gleditsch, ed., Conflict and the Environment Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997, 35–50. 36 Not all environmental thinking is obviously trapped in these categories. More radical formulations of green politics run loosely in parallel with the ecological science emphasised in this paper. See Eric Laferrière and Peter J. Stoett, International Relations Theory and Ecological Thought (London: Routledge, 1999) 37 Arturo Escobar “Constructing Nature: Elements of a Post-Structural Political Ecology” in Richard Peet and Michael Watts eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 53. 38 Kerry H. Whiteside Divided Natures: French Contributions to Political Ecology Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2001 39 Felix Guattari The Three Ecologies London: Athlone, 2000. 40 Bruno Latour We Have Never Been Modern Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

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formulation of contemporary geological times in terms of the Anthropocene, it is now plausible to argue that the planetary biosphere itself is in some important ways a hybrid entity, no longer a "natural" context but increasingly an artificial habitat.41 This is especially germane in light of the analyses from earth systems sciences and the rethought contextualizations of environmental history on the large scale and political ecology on the small scale. While this has the political result of undercutting simple appeals to the necessities of preserving "nature" it does focus attention on the global consequences of particular actions. In this sense at least environment can be said to be over. The artificial ecologies of the future are, to an increasingly large extent, being decided by the production decisions of contemporary consumers and the industrial systems that shape their choices, even if the consequences of these actions are not clear to those same consumers. Especially so as the North American love affair with Sports Utility Vehicles shows little signs of abating despite their obvious implications of increasing urban air pollution and dependence on Mid East oil supplies not to mention causing atmospheric change on the largest of scales. Understanding ourselves and our relations to others as directly implicated in the construction of a biosphere is not congruent with most contemporary urban dwellers sense of who they are. But the scale of anthropogenic changes in the biosphere suggests that this is precisely what is happening; its time the categories in which "environmental security" is discussed were updated to take this context seriously. Most specifically the analyses from the environmental history of the late nineteenth century suggest a complex geography of interconnection as the necessary starting point for analysis. Human vulnerability on the large scale is about social and economic connections much more so than it is about strictly environmental matters. As social scientists who study these things have long understood, famines are about poverty and the failure of economic systems much more than strictly about droughts.42 While meterological specifications of famine hazard allowed the dramatic disruptions caused by imperialism to be discounted as a cause of misery in the nineteenth century capitals of Europe, so too the neo-Malthusian specifications of environmental causes of environmental insecurity allow the attribution of contemporary disruptions to external phenomena. But the literature of global change science with its emphasis on the importance of interconnections and the complex interaction of natural systems that human activity is disrupting, now make such assumptions completely untenable as the premise for "environmental security" discussions. Ecology, Security and Subjectivity There are a number of important points to be drawn from such an analysis. Integrating diverse disciplinary perspectives is rarely easy. But the more important point is that the categories through which contemporary matters of "environmental security" can be understood are not nearly as obvious as they have frequently appeared to either environmentalists or security scholars. The juxtaposition of ecology and security challenges the categories of international relations in terms of what might be understood as a threat, and ecology in terms of the limited 1993. 41 Simon Dalby “Environmental Geopolitics: Nature, Culture, Urbanity” in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography London: Sage, forthcoming. 42 A. Sen, Poverty and Famines Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. See also Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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possibilities of innovative policy within current international institutions and the global political economy. While international relations thinking has relevance to understanding environmental matters and while there are sometimes compelling reasons for thinking about environmental dangers in terms of security, neither term necessarily implies the appropriate scope or scale on which these matters need to be addressed. Nor is the environment something stable that can be secured even if the term now refers to natural processes whose operations humans might prudently treat with much greater respect. The Anthropocene promises to be a bumpy ride for humanity although following from the analyses in recent scholarship on environmental history, as well as ecological science, it is clear that the complexities of contemporary human vulnerability cannot be reduced simply to natural causes. The agencies and actors that are predominantly understood to be of prime importance in international relations may not be the appropriate institutional foci for innovative change. Diplomatic accomplishment and international agreements may be a necessary part of the process but at least so far the scope of these has not been up to the task of thinking about how to keep the total scale of human activity within reasonable bounds. Neither do they often work on long enough time scales to grapple with the complexities of climate change, although, that said it is clear that the international negotiations about climate change are understood as an ongoing process rather than a once and for all arrangement. Complex matters of cultural change are crucial; in Hugh Dyer's terms political values cannot be ignored. Ecology may yet provide some valuable terms to rethink contemporary subjectivities, not least because of the importance of connections and the irrelevance of simple distinctions between inside and outside. The importance of understanding the historical discussion of climate and famine may soon be emphasized if climatological instability becomes more marked as a result of atmospheric change and "global warming". If the Anthropocene turns out to be a period of very intense ENSO events, or one where the deep ocean convection system is disrupted as a result of thermo-haline changes in the North Atlantic, then the famines of a century ago may end up being repeated in holocausts yet to be imagined. While "food aid" may prevent a repetition of at least the worst disasters of the late nineteenth century the possibilities for misery are clear. Quite what is rendering who insecure is not nearly as obvious as people who attempt to enlarge the security agendas of the industrial democracies would like one to believe. Finally, ecological science is obviously key to the new understandings of planetary systems we are remaking, and while, as Karen Litfin notes, it is beginning to emerge as the basis of political legitimacy in many arenas, not least in climate negotiations it is far from clear that this is anything like enough to engender the more drastic shifts in human subjectivity that at least the French political ecologists argue is necessary to respond to the current crisis.43 Science is not the answer in global political terms despite its suggestions of various new vocabularies. Nonetheless such terms as the Anthropocene and no-analogue states may yet be useful in making people stop and think about their own place in the processes that are now remaking planetary processes.

43 See Karen T.Litfin "Environment, Wealth and Authority: Global Climate Change and Emerging Modes of Legitimation" International Studies Review 2(2) 2000. pp. 119-148.