Environmental Security

An Introduction

Peter Hough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134696109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

This student-friendly textbook offers a survey of the competing conceptions and applications of the increasingly prominent notion of environmental security.

The book is divided into three sections. In the first, the key theoretical and practical arguments for and against bringing together environmental and security issues are set out. The book then goes on to present how and why environmental issues have come to be framed in some quarters as 'national security' concerns in the context of the effects of overpopulation, resource depletion, climate change and the role of the military as both a cause and a solution to problems of pollution and natural disasters. Finally, the third section explores the case for treating the key issues of environmental change as matters of human security. Overall, the book will provide a clear, systematic and thorough overview of all dimensions of an area of great academic and 'real-world' political interest but one that has rarely been set out in an accessible textbook format hitherto.

This book will be essential reading for students of environmental studies, critical and human security, global governance, development studies, and IR in general.

Part1

The environment and security

1 The politicization of the environment

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.

Mahatma Gandhi (Krech & McNeill 2004: 571)

Green shoots: The rise of the science of ecology and the politics of conservation

The environment – or non-human world – is comparatively ‘new’ to politics and, as an alternative to human interests, has only been on the agenda of international relations since the late 1960s. That is not to say, however, that problems of environmental change are in any way new. The extinction of certain animal species due to human recklessness and the decline of woodland areas through over-exploitation are centuries-old phenomena. The dodo, moa, and Steller's sea cow, for example, were hunted to extinction before the 20th century. Other notable changes to the natural environment have occurred entirely independently of human action. The ‘Cretaceous/Tertiary Impact’, caused by either a comet or an asteroid, created the 250 km wide Chicxulub crater in the Gulf of Mexico, widely held to be responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs and other life forms long before the dawn of humanity. In addition, the temperature of the Earth has periodically naturally warmed and cooled throughout human and pre-human history, with various effects on the natural environment.

The science of understanding such matters of environmental change emerged in the 19th century and was given the name ecology by the German biologist Haeckel (Haeckel 1866). The science of ecology brought recognition of natural systemic phenomena linking disparate life forms such as food chains, the carbon cycle and evolution, and an understanding of humanity's place within the environment. Published shortly before this first usage of the term ecology in 1864, George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature is widely regarded as the first ecological book in that it used empirical data to prove the effect of human activity on woodlands and waterways (see Box 1.1).

In the wake of this scientific revolution of the 1860s domestic policies to conserve nature and pressure groups campaigning for conservation began to emerge in the US and some Western European states. Yellowstone became the US's first National Park in 1872, and the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) became the world's first conservation pressure group when it was founded in 1889, as a result of fears that the grebe was in danger of extinction due to the fashion of using its feathers for hats. In the US the Sierra Club, founded in 1892, was the pioneer of non-governmental conservation groups seeking to build upon the idea of national parks to protect the natural environment, established with Yellowstone.

The origins of international policy on issues of environmental change can also be traced back as far as the late 19th century's then unparalleled industrialization and globalization. The year 1889 saw the first international policy dealing with flora, with an international convention to prevent the spread of the disease phylloxera in grapes. Then, in 1902, the Convention on the Protection of Birds Useful to Agriculture was the first international legal instrument on animal conservation. These were, however, motivated by economic rather than environmental con-cerns. Wine and internationally traded food were at stake rather than the flora and fauna themselves. The grapes and birds being protected were the subject of such concern because of their instrumental rather than intrinsic value. This distinction is the key to determining whether a political issue is truly environmental/ecological (Greens generally prefer the latter term since ‘environmental’ can be thought to imply that the non-human world is a backdrop to the human world rather than the two co-existing in a single ecosystem). In determining whether a given issue is an environmental one the key question is: Is the environment to be protected for its own sake or just when this furthers human interests?

Box 1.1 George Perkins Marsh – Man and Nature

Born into the New England political establishment in 1801, George Perkins Marsh led a varied life as a linguist, lawyer and politician as well as a pioneer of ecologism. After following in the family tradition and serving as a congressman, he became a distinguished diplomat, serving first as ambassador to Turkey before being switched by President Lincoln to Italy in 1861. He stayed in Rome until his death twenty years later; the longest ambassadorial posting in US history.

Drawing on research Marsh carried out whilst posted in Rome, Man and Nature begins with an overview of how much of the forested and fertile Roman Empire had become unproductive arid wasteland, through overproduction. Hence, Marsh was discussing desertification over half a century before the term came to be employed. The book was also ahead of its time in foreseeing the links between deforestation and flooding. Whilst Man and Nature is more of a scientific than polemical work, in examining the effects of major engineering projects like the Suez and Panama Canals on nature, and questioning their legitimacy, there is no doubt that Marsh sowed the seed of political ecology.

● ‘Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords’ (Marsh 1864: 36).

● ‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life’ (Marsh 1864: 103).

● ‘The great question, whether man is of nature or above her’ (Marsh 1864: 549).

Conservation policies, driven by the aesthetics of loving the countryside or preserving rural lifestyles, permeated the domestic politics of some developed countries in the early 20th century, even including Nazi Germany. The Nazis linked natural and racial German purity, as was encapsulated in their slogan ‘blood and soil’, and Agriculture Minister Richard Darre enacted some policies in line with this, such as the 1935 Reich Law for the Protection of Nature. Hence, the politics of conservation, whilst giving value to the environment and even restricting human interests as part of this policy, is still instrumental or ‘anthropocentric’ since it is about preservation for humanity's sake. Conservation is about the preservation of traditional rural culture for human enrichment, be it practical or spiritual. The support for rural preservation by hunting lobbyists is an obvious example of non-ecocentric conservation-ism (although it is worth noting that the Nazis banned hunting with hounds – so their belief in rural conservation was of a romanticized political conservatism).

National conservation policy gradually internationalized during the 20th century. Since animals are, of course, not confined by state frontiers, the RSPB, Sierra Club and other groups, after the Second World War, came to orientate their campaigns through the United Nations (UN). Several groups, principally from the UK and the US, worked with the newly established United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to found the International Union for the Preservation of Nature (IUPN) in 1948 (Adams 2004: 43–62). The IUPN, a hybrid intergovernmental and non-governmental organization, later changed its title to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and became a focus of international information exchange on endangered species, based on the compilation of ‘Red Lists’ of flora and fauna close to extinction throughout the world. A regime specific to the conservation of whales can also be dated back to the 1940s but, similarly, did not become legally significant until several decades later.¹ The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was set up in 1946, due to concerns at the likely extinction of certain species, but was very much anthropocentric as it was guided by the desire of whaling states to continue their practices in a manner that could sustain hunting. Later in 1959, in a prelude to the international ecocentric turn, the Antarctic Treaty established the idea of a conservation park on an international scale, by outlawing industrialization and sovereign claims on the frozen continent in a successful agreement that still holds firm today. The Antarctic Treaty stands as a notable international political achievement, although the inhospitality of the continent meant that no significant potential for national economic development was being stifled in agreeing to its conservation (see Box 1.2).

Box 1.2 Timeline of scientific ecology and political conservation

1798	Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population predicts that the world's population growth will exceed its food supply.
1854	Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species establishes the theory of evolution.
1864	US scientist George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature released arguably the first book to prove that human activities can harm the environment.
1866	German biologist Ernst Haeckel coins the term ecology.
1872	Yellowstone National Park becomes world's first major nature conservation scheme.
1879	Royal National Park established in Sydney, Australia.
1889	Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Great Britain becomes the world's first conservation pressure group.
1889	First ever international policy on non-human life form agreed combating the spread of the disease phylloxera in wine grapes.
1892	Sierra Club conservation pressure group founded in the US.
1902	Convention on the Protection of Birds Useful to Agriculture becomes the first international policy on animal conservation.
1909	Great Britain (Canada) and the US sign Boundary Water Treaty launching formal cooperation over the Great Lakes.
1911	North Pacific Fur Seal conservation agreement between the US, Great Britain, Japan and Russia.
1915	Ecological Society of America established to promote conservation.
1926	South African statesman Jan Smuts coins the term holism, to describe the idea that, in nature, the whole (an ecosystem) is greater than the sum of its parts.
1946	International Whaling Commission established.
1948	International Union for the Preservation of Nature founded by pressure groups and the UN (later became International Union for the Conservation of Nature).
1952	London smog (urban air pollution) kills over 4,000 people in four days.
1959	Antarctic Treaty creates a non-sovereign ‘world park’ in which industrial development is prohibited.

Green revolution? The rise of political ecology

The emergence of truly environmental rather than human-focused politics – that is, ecocentric rather than anthropocentric policies – did not occur until the 1960s – around a century after the birth of the science of ecology. A major factor in this development was the publication of Rachel Carson's hugely influential pollution polemic Silent Spring in 1962 (see Box 1.3). Silent Spring most notably highlighted the polluting effects of the insecticide dichlorodiphe-nyltrichloroethane (DDT) on wild animals, vegetation and rivers. The book quickly influenced US policy, with the government enacting legislation restricting DDT applications in 1969 and then outlawing its use altogether in 1972.

Box 1.3 Rachel Carson – Silent Spring

US marine biologist Rachel Carson is widely feted as having launched environmentalism as a political ideology in the early 1960s with this hugely influential work, the title of which forewarns of a future world without birdsong. The book highlighted the harmful effects of organochlorine insecticides such as DDT on birds and other wildlife, bringing into question the use of newly synthesized chemicals until then near-universally lauded for their role in controlling insects responsible for diminishing crop yields or transmitting diseases.

Carson's determination to present nature's case against profitable and, in many ways, beneficial human practices saw her succeed in getting Silent Spring published in 1962 despite a longstanding personal fight with cancer and attempts to block the book's publication by a hostile chemical industry. The book had been serialized in the New Yorker magazine prior to its release and caused such interest that chemical companies began fearing a consumer backlash against their products and so mounted vitriolic attacks on the scientific authenticity of the work. The attacks, though, failed to prevent the book becoming a major success commercially and politically, both in the US and across the developed world, such was the scientific rigour of Carson's arguments.

‘Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called “insecticides”, but “biocides”.

Carson (1962: 7)

Transboundary pollution

Soon after the upsurge of political interest in environmentalism prompted by Silent Spring it became apparent that, like conservation, pollution had international ramifications and could not be dealt with by domestic policy alone. Most notably, the effects of acid rain became appreciated, and more long-standing problems such as oil pollution by tankers came to command far greater prominence.

Acid rain became a contentious issue in the 1960s, not only through the emergence of evidence that rainwater could become contaminated and the effects of this on groundwater and wildlife, but also because it was a problem in some countries that could not be resolved by that country's government. Sulfur dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) which accumulate in the Earth's atmosphere can return to the surface as precipitation, hundreds of miles from where they departed as waste fumes. Hence, countries particularly suffering from this phenomenon, such as Sweden, Norway and Canada, which were at the forefront of the greening of governments that was occurring at the time, found that they could not resolve the problem since the root cause of it lay in other sovereign states. This form of transboundary pollution most graphically demonstrated the need for international cooperation to resolve certain environmental issues, which was already obvious in the case of countries sharing rivers and other forms of water.

The 1967 Torrey Canyon disaster, when an oil tanker was wrecked and spilled its load off the coast of the UK's Scilly Isles, was also influential in stimulating awareness and an international political environmental resp...