Imagine that our immediate context and moment of existence and lives appear in entirely different form, light and taste. It would be as if we had reached a channel for a new sense – the sixth sense maybe. The world, the direct environmental surrounding, but also the geographic maps, the relationship between and towards the people living right now, the unborn and the dead would suddenly have another colour and value. Suddenly everything we know would be new and would reveal itself to have a different appearance, or an additional side. You would enter a new magical world that brings up new questions and would reveal new challenges and different obstacles, such as new pathways to follow.
This new world is shaped by the definition of the Anthropocene, the geological era of humans, coined in 2002 by the Nobel Laureate Pau Crutzen. It is the scientific acknowledgement that humanity has unconsciously taken over the steering wheel of planet Earth and left the usual range of ecological cycles. The human footprint on Earth has evolved into a major biophysical force that has induced irreversible changes in the Earth System. The so-called geology of mankind is characterized by human activity and by the fact that it has “no analogy” in Earth history (Dalby 2009). We are re-located from the Holocene into the newly distinguished era called the Anthropocene. The definition of the Anthropocene as our new living context is considered as a valid concept and has been adopted by the Earth System Sciences community, it is recognized among the epistemic community of global scientists (Crutzen 2006; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007) and enjoys an increasing acceptance, also outside scientific circles.
By this new definition of our existential context and moment, the pillars of our entire perception of the world and our being in it are shaken. In the new context and caught up in between unknown colours, our self-perception – our own image and definition within the world and Cosmos – are put into question. The re-figurations and -definitions are necessary in order to understand ourselves and this new world within which we are living. The who and how we are, how we are related in space and time, our capacities and our normative and moral value sets can be perceived in new terms. The major trigger that will accompany the process is that the grown-out assumption of the separation between the social and the natural world is proven wrong (Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemenne 2015a). There is no possibility to separate. It is only one world. This new scientific perception of Earth history and human history implies a philosophical crisis and the necessity for a paradigmatic change of society, politics and theory (McNeil 2010, 214) and also of the sciences and science as such.
Some scientists suppose that the consequences of the new vision of the Anthropocene will be comparable to the revolutionary discovery of re-defining the sun as the centre of our solar system. The philosophical, religious, scientific, intellectual, social and political avalanche that followed the declaration of Copernicus and Galileo lead to the age of the Enlightenment and of Modernity. The formulation of the Anthropocene is expected to initiate a second Enlightenment phase. In contrast to the pillars of modernity and the process of civilization, the new key pillar and pivot will be the inseparably bound and intertwined complex of humanity and nature.
Maybe we humans will be able to confront this challenge and adapt to this new interpretation of the here and there, the now, the past and the future that lies within the Anthropocene. We will certainly try to do the best out of it. Depending on the perspective, history of humanity can be interpreted as a process of adaptation to new circumstances and environments. Applying this narrative to this context would mean that we would turn into pioneers and enjoy the new richness of colours and tastes. A different interpretation of human history carries the narrative of violence, injustices and destruction. Independent from these interpretations, the Anthropocene context clearly is characterized by a darker and obscuring tone of colour at the horizon. The revelation of this new era is accompanied by the perception of a strong and bitter taste of threat and fear. The major fear proceeds from becoming aware of the fact that we are living on the edge of an unknown threshold of and in our socio-ecological nature. Stated in crude terms: the Anthropocene perspective holds the concern about the persistence/end of (human) life on the planet.
The scenario and fear of human extinction is a well-known discourse that has accompanied us, especially since the growing accumulation of scientific knowledge about the magnitude and destroying impact of global environmental change in the 1970s and throughout the 1990s. The new quality of the Anthropocene is that the scientific definition of a new geological era is formulated in relation to a specific dominant phenomenon and demarks a time period with a starting and, most importantly, an endpoint. This endpoint does not necessarily need to be human extinction and I do not want to imply this as a necessarily bad value judgement. However, the end point would at least hold a profound change of humans marking and shaping planet Earth. Therefore, I argue in this book that the Anthropocene carries a new quality and dimension of existential (and as a definition a) security threat. As a consequence I choose ecology and security as the major determinants and essential foci of the Anthropocene Studies and formulate the following questions: How can we conceptualize the environment and our relation such as our being in and part of it? What does it mean to be secure in the Anthropocene? What do we have to secure? And what can we do about the threatening perception of our living context and the societal development?
In the search for facing the threatening and overwhelming challenges of the Anthropocene and searching for answers and pathways, I turn to the literature of environment and security. The argument is that the nexus of environment and security seems to comply with the inherent characteristics of the ecological challenge, by conceptualizations of urgency, existential threat and the future of planet Earth and human species survival.
The term environmental security first emerged at the United Nations Conference of Human Environment in 1972 (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 71), but in spite of early writings, it is not possible to assign a certain event, report or specific author to the creation or definition of the concept. It includes a variety of topics and proves to have a high degree of complexity, range of issues and thoughts and it is a very rich and valuable field. As a result the associated issues in the literature on environmental security vary from economic, geopolitical dimensions, sustainable development, environmental protection, from nuclear to renewable energy, human well-being and human rights, environmental agreements, technological progress, military waste and the environmental dimensions of violent conflicts, to mention only a few. The different associated topics, discussions and research questions are valued here as theoretical wealth. It has to be highlighted, however that the field results extremely broad due to the diffuse and intensively discussed literature. Furthermore, the environmental security nexus is also confronted with heavy criticism, accompanied by warnings of harmful consequences of implementing the concept.
The references to the nexus between environment, climate change and security in the political arena have increased especially since the year 2007 in connection to the publication of the fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As a consequence the trend towards the securitization of ecological issues (especially of climate change) has also reached the highest level of international politics: several debates about the nexus between climate change and security took place in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It is in this context that the representative of the Netherlands described climate change as “the most important security threat of the century” (Reetenar 2015, 2). The Anthropocene in its narrative of human societal collapse, however, has received relatively little attention from the UNSC so far.
Some specific implemented projects also run under the title of environment and security. Among others, the European Union, several international organizations, state representatives, earth system scientists and several think tanks refer to the link of environment and security. The Environment and Security Initiative (ENVSEC) is of special interest as an actor and functions as the major case study of the empirical analysis in this book. Surprisingly ENVSEC has gained very little academic attention, yet, in spite of the fact that it is led by the most important international organizations in the areas of environment, development and security, namely: the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Regional Environmental Centre (REC). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with the special status of associated partner, withdrew from the initiative in 2015. ENVSEC has been active since the year 2002. Today it carries out projects in the crisis regions of Central-Asia, Southern-Caucasus, South and East Europe and presents itself under the Leitmotiv: “Transforming risk into cooperation”. Assembling these important organizations under the umbrella of environmental security shows the importance and the shared agreement over the necessity to act. The ENVSEC approach is therefore of major interest as it raises the question whether it could inform the theory and the search for normative guidelines in the context of the Anthropocene.
The goals and tasks of this book
The presented work here followed several goals and research interests. The overall goal (if not to say mission of research) was to inform the emerging Anthropocene Studies with environmental security and reveal the potential of the conceptual link of environment and security in terms of providing guidance and orientation in the overwhelming and threatening apocalyptic context of the Anthropocene. Therefore, the book follows the first important step of providing an improved and critical understanding of environmental security, for both its theoretical interpretations by scholars and institutions and for its application within international politics.
Another major task lies in confronting the theoretical body of environmental security with the paradigmatic change of the Anthropocene. In addition to the theoretical insights, which have to be seen as vice versa informing, another goal is to learn from the activities, which are referred to as environment and security in international politics.
The major contribution is the definition of a heuristic guide of the study field and the presentation of a new conceptualization of environmental security as alternative approaches to the dominant trends of environmental-conflict thesis, state security and human security. Also environmental security is framed as a critical framework for analysis, titled Critical Environmental Security Studies (CESS), for which a major constituent consists in a conceptual approach called the normative concept of environmental security. This conceptual approach is clearly set aside from the dominant approach of human security in the literature.
The major practice-theory gap is bridged through a detailed analysis of approaches to environment and security in international politics. Through the critical analysis on the basis of CESS, important new insights, implications and theoretical contributions to the implementation of environmental security are developed and new lacunae pointed at.
Where this book comes from: study fields and essential concepts
Before outlining the path this book follows, I will present the most important informing study fields and essential concepts, from which this research starts. The work is based on ontological and epistemological inputs provided by several critical and post-positivist approaches in the disciplines and study fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Green Theory and the emerging Anthropocene Studies.
Critical, political, normative
International Relations is thereby one of the major theoretical frames, as it is dedicated to the empirical and systematic analysis of international society, structures, power distribution and actors, which, in their totality, shape the contemporary world. Until very recently International Relations (IR) as a discipline remained at the edge of the phenomena of the Anthropocene (see Harrington 2016).1 In spite of some approaches to establish Green International Relations Theory, the theoretical work on the Anthropocene in IR stands in contrast to the theoretical and practical challenges, as the threatening characteristics and the importance of the problems posed by the ecological challenge cannot be ignored any further. In the words of Burke et al. (2016, 520) IR stands at it’s very end “… because the dominant intellectual and institutional architecture of international society fails both to see the Anthropocene as the reality and threat that it is, and fails to address its ecological, moral, and industrial challenges in any way adequately”.
This work is informed by the Critical International Relations Theories (CIRT), embracing Critical Theory, such as Poststructuralism, Political Economy, P...
