60 Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North
America
Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
60.1 Introduction1
For the environmental community of North America,
the 1990’s began with great enthusiasm and energy,
buttressed by a grave sense of urgency. In the postCold
War world, sustainable development and conservation
were widely embraced as pillars of a new world
order. After being sidelined for much of the 1980’s,
the environment was restored to a position of primacy
on the global agenda, and in short order elements
of environmental rescue snapped into place
like pieces of a global green jigsaw puzzle – Our Common
Future, the Rio Earth Summit, Agenda 21, the
Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention
on Biological Diversity, the Global Environmental
Facility, and so on. The North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which came into effect in
1994, included an environmental side agreement that
promised to bridge the elusive gap between free trade
and environmental protection.
The sceptical, obstructionist mindset of the Reagan
and Bush I presidencies was swept away by the
science-based environmentalism of Clinton and Gore.
A heady mixture of capacity, resolve and opportunity
wafted through Washington’s corridors of power,
sloshed across energy-hungry Canada, and spilled
southwards into a Mexico seeking rapid economic development.
The environment, the new American administration
argued, could be saved without sacrificing
human development, and the United States would
lead this effort through the example of its own behaviour
and through the authority attached to being the
world’s only remaining superpower.
While environmentalists in North America and
around the world were rallying around sustainable development
and Agenda 21, the North American security
community found itself at sea after five decades of
unwavering focus on preventing a nuclear war with
the Soviet Union. The process of rethinking security
soon became intertwined with the process of environmental
rescue.2
The linkages were forged by many
people, for many reasons. Some believed that in our
degraded global environment, natural resource scarcity
was rapidly becoming a significant contributor to
violent conflict (Homer-Dixon 1991, 1999; Gleick
1993). Others looked at the sheer size of the world’s
militaries, and their ugly Cold War footprints, and
concluded it was time for these powerful entities to
be greened and harnessed to an environmental
agenda (Butts 1999). Still others sought to integrate
environmental issues into the larger project of complementing
– or replacing – the concept of national security
with the concept of human security (Lonergan
1999).
While a plethora of initiatives in Canada and the
United States explored often highly original ways of
associating the environment with security, these initiatives
triggered a sobering, cautionary response literature.
How would such a linkage be viewed in the developing
world (Dalby 1992)? Could it lead to the
securitization of the environment (Käkonen 1994)?
Could the cultures of environmentalism and security
be reconciled enough to ensure the effort produced
more good than bad (Deudney 1990)?
In this chapter we examine several of these initiatives,
focusing on North American scholars and giving
a fair amount of attention to the behaviour of the
Clinton-Gore administration, which sought to lead on
this new policy agenda.3
We conclude that efforts to
1 A few portions of this chapter appeared in ECSP Report
8 (Summer 2002), published by the Woodrow Wilson
Center's Environmental Change and Security Program.
2 See: e.g. Mische/Ribeiro 1998; Renner 1989; Deudney
1990; Finger 1991; Homer-Dixon 1991; Dalby 1992; Kaplan
1994; Käkonen 1994; Levy 1995; Deudney/Matthew
1999; see also chap.20 by Homer-Dixon/Deligiannis.
3 We do not include Mexico that is partly covered in
chap. 90 by Oswald Spring.
792 Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
link environment and security have had mixed results.
For example, some practitioners have reasoned that if
natural resources are becoming so scarce that countries
will fight over them, then we need to lower the
bar for development at home in resource-rich protected
areas such as Alaska and the Arctic – hardly the
outcome sought by scholars and environmentalists.
On the other hand, the environment has been fused
successfully to the burgeoning paradigm of human security,
which is emerging as the foreign policy focus of
middle powers such as Canada and Japan. Most problematically,
we argue that popularizing the concept of
environmental change as a complex, global threat
marked by much uncertainty established a discursive
model that the current Bush II administration has
adapted for explaining terrorism to its public, and for
justifying enormous expenditures and pre-emptive action
through reference to a formulation of the precautionary
principle. The zeal with which some scholars
acted to establish the policy relevance of their work
has had some unintended, and negative, consequences.
At the same time, however, Al Gore has
done much to reframe climate change as a global and
human security issue, integrating natural and social
science research into a powerful presentation for practitioners,
and compelling all North Americans to
think in the often unfamiliar terms of global connectedness
and interdependence.
60.2 Origins of Environmental
Security in North America
Efforts to link environment and security have not in
any sense been confined to North America, and, in
fact, much of the most important, influential and inspiring
analysis has been conducted by scholars in
Scandinavia, Germany, Australia and many parts of
the developing world, such as Pakistan and India. The
brief history we provide here, focused mainly on
events and writings in North America, should be understood
as part of a larger story, to which North
America contributed and with which it has interacted
in many ways.
Responding to global concerns about the impact
of human behaviour on the natural world, the contemporary
formulation of the environmental movement
emerged in North America in the 1960’s, building
on an earlier era of conservation identified with
individuals such as John Muir and associated with
achievements such as the founding of the Sierra Club
and the establishment of a national park system. Environmental
historian John McCormick (1989) points
to several factors that converged in the 1960’s to promote
the transformation of earlier conservation movements
into modern environmentalism. The proliferation
of nuclear weapons, the post-World War II
continuation of wartime levels of military spending,
and the rapid pace of economic development raised
general concerns about the high-consumption character
of advanced industrial society. Scientific evidence
began to record and explain the magnitude and variety
of human-generated environmental change with
great – and disquieting – precision. Environmental accidents,
such as oil spills, increased in number and
captured public attention. In North America, as in Europe,
baby boomers entered a period of intense social
critique and activism that engendered, among others,
civil rights movements, women’s movements, antiwar
movements, and back-to-nature movements. In 1962,
Rachel Carson wrote an impassioned account of the
human recklessness evident in gratifying immediate
needs by spraying the planet with poisonous pesticides
such as DDT, which gave rise to new forms of
birth defect and social criticism.
Concern about the environment gathered critical
mass throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s. Throughout
much of this period, however, environmental concerns
seemed of little relevance to national security
analysis and planning. Defence institutions were generally
regarded as an intractable part of the problem.
From an environmentalist perspective, they were irresponsible
entities that resisted the regulatory constraints
emerging around the Clean Air and Clean Water
Acts; dumped and abandoned enormous quantities
of solid and toxic waste on land and at sea;
secretly tested nuclear and other environmentally destructive
weapons, exposing humankind to radioactive
contamination and other health threats; and were
willing to destroy nature when preparing for or engaged
in war. But they had to be tolerated in an anarchic
world dominated by superpower rivalry and ever
vulnerable to the threat of all-out nuclear Armaged-
don.
Nonetheless, evidence of the harmful effects of using
defoliants in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam
War (Neilands/Orians/Pfeiffer/Vennema/Westing
1972; Westing 1976) did lead in 1977 to two important
international agreements: the Additional Protocol I to
the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Victims
of International Armed Conflicts and the Convention
on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other
Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques
(Brauch 2003c).
Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North America 793
The ‘limits to growth’ thesis propounded by
Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens (1972)
and the first OPEC oil crisis in 1973 stimulated some
fear about how resource scarcity might endanger economic
growth in the North and create competitive
conditions ripe for armed conflict. The Carter Doctrine,
affirming the strategic value of the oil-rich Middle
East, was in part a response to these concerns.4
But discussions of energy self-sufficiency garnered little
support. After all, through trade, arms, and ingenuity
one could gain access to anything as long as the
real threat to the United States was held in check: the
threat of Soviet expansion.
But while the structure and character of the Cold
War shaped security thinking in much of the Western
world, the elaboration of broader concepts of security
did gain some attention. The environmentalist Lester
Brown (1977), described by the Washington Post as
“one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” wrote
an exploratory piece on Redefining National Security.
In 1982 the Independent Commission on Disarmament
and Security Issues, chaired by the Swedish
socialist Olof Palme, released a report on Common
Security. The authors of this report distinguished
between ‘collective security’ (security against armed
force provided to its members by NATO) and ‘common
security’, which focused on non-military threats
such as those posed by environmental degradation
and poverty. This conceptual trajectory was pushed
further in Richard Ullman’s 1983 article “Redefining
Security,” in which he sought to broaden the concept
of national security to include non-military threats to
a state’s range of policy options or the quality of life
of its citizens. In the mid-1980’s, former Soviet President
Mikhail Gorbachev expressed a similar perspective
through the notion of ‘comprehensive security’,
and in his speech to the UNGA in 1989 he promoted
the concept of ‘ecological security’.
In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear facility experienced
a meltdown that caused widespread harm and even
wider spread anxiety. Arguments about environmental
threats to human welfare and security seemed suddenly
very persuasive. The World Commission on Environment
and Development chaired by former Norwegian
Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland
(1987), issued its report: Our Common Future that
focused on the interlocking processes of population
growth, food production, ecosystem protection, energy
use, industrialization, and urbanization, the authors
argued for a global commitment to sustainable
development. To fail to make this commitment, they
contended, would place the future of much, perhaps
all, of humankind in jeopardy.
By the late 1980’s, as the Cold War approached absolute
zero and environmental awareness rose to unprecedented
levels, and as some of the more threatening
implications of rapid technological change were
being worked out by researchers, articles began to appear
making explicit linkages between environmental
change and security. Influential writings by Jessica
Mathews (1989, 1997), Norman Myers (1989), and
others began to be widely circulated in policy circles.
Arguments varied enormously, but the basic idea that
environmental change was serious enough to be considered
a security issue made sense to many analysts,
activists, and practitioners.
60.3 Environment and Security during
the Clinton-Gore Era
Perhaps in response to the articles on rethinking national
security published at the end of the Cold War,
former President George Bush added threats posed
by environmental change to the National Security
Strategy of the United States in 1991.5
The following
year the Clinton administration was installed in Washington.
Vice President Al Gore and others took seriously
the claim that the health of the environment
was a matter of utmost importance to the long-term
interests of the United States and the world.
The level of interest in Washington increased notably
when the journalist Robert Kaplan published an
article in The Atlantic Monthly in which he described
environmental change as “the national security issue
4 During his 1980 “State of the Union Address”, President
Carter declared: “Let our position be absolutely clear:
an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the
Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the
vital interests of the United States of America, and such
an assault will be repelled by any means necessary,
including military force.”
5 “Global environmental concerns include such diverse
but interrelated issues as stratospheric ozone depletion,
climate change, food security, water supply, deforestation,
biodiversity and treatment of wastes. A common
ingredient in each is that they respect no international
boundaries. The stress from these environmental challenges
is already contributing to political conflict. Recognizing
a shared responsibility for global stewardship is
a necessary step for global progress. Our partners will
find the United States a ready and active participant in
this effort” (Bush 1991).
794 Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
of the early 21st
century” (Kaplan 1994: 61). Kaplan's
thesis in The Coming Anarchy was simple and, for
many policymakers searching for a new security paradigm,
compelling: combine weak political systems,
burgeoning urban populations, grinding poverty, environmental
degradation and scarcity, and a flood of
cheap weapons, and societies could become highly
volatile. This lethal mixture, Kaplan suggested, already
was generating high levels of violence in West Africa;
soon it would affect the rest of the planet. This was
likely to happen because at the very root of the social
collapse evident throughout West Africa was extensive
environmental degradation--a problem the entire
world was experiencing. The pathways to violent anarchy
might differ from one place to the next, but all
of humankind was being pushed along one of them.
The state of the environment, Kaplan concluded, had
become a matter of national security. This analysis intrigued
both Clinton and Gore who were searching
for an explanation of the tragedies unfolding in Haiti,
Somalia and Rwanda.
Often working behind the scenes and in a context
of stiff resistance from other senior White House officials,
Gore used a variety of strategies to introduce
environmental concerns into key agencies and policy
areas.6
So successful was Gore in rallying support in
the foreign policy arena that in 1996 Secretary of State
Warren Christopher (1998), an individual who until
then had seemed scarcely aware of environmental
problems, made a corner-turning speech at Stanford
University that caught the attention of both environmentalists
and foreign policy-makers around the
world. According to Christopher (1998):
The environment has a profound impact on our
national interests in two ways: First, environmental
forces transcend borders and oceans to threaten directly
the health, prosperity and jobs of American citizens.
Second, addressing natural resource issues is frequently
critical to achieving political and economic stability, and
to pursuing our strategic goals around the world.
Indeed, “Environmental initiatives can be important,
low-cost, high-impact tools in promoting our national
security interests.” What sort of environmental initiatives?
Christopher outlined an ambitious four-part
programme for his Department:
• Produce an annual report to assess global environmental
trends and identify American priorities,
beginning in 1997;
• Establish a dozen Environmental Opportunity
Hubs to involve American embassies in assessing
and addressing regional environmental issues
worldwide;
• Host an international conference on treaty compliance
and enforcement within two years;
• Promote an array of partnerships with business,
and bilateral, regional and global initiatives to
channel environmental problems into the social
settings that have the resources and will to solve
them.
Unfortunately, within a few years budget constraints
and other obstacles had largely erased everything
from the State Department’s far-reaching and even visionary
agenda. Internal opposition, deeply ingrained
and hard-to-change behavioural patterns, lack of congressional
support, and the inability of anyone to articulate
a clear set of foreign environmental policy
goals help explain the mixed results of these efforts
(Hopgood 1998).
Problems within the State Department, however,
did not put the brakes on efforts to integrate environmental
concerns and national security. In July 1996,
John Deutsch, then director of the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), discussed the relationship between
intelligence and the environment in a speech to
the World Affairs Council. According to Deutsch, the
potential for using CIA capabilities and archives to
provide useful environmental intelligence at a low
cost is great.7
Another support was outlined in a
speech by Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental
Security, Sherri Goodman (1996), who
signalled her office’s desire:
to understand where and under what circumstances
environmental degradation and scarcity may contribute
to instability and conflict, and to address those conditions
early enough to make a difference, [and] to determine
where military environmental cooperation can
contribute significantly to building democracy, trust and
understanding.
The flurry of policy statements in 1996 capped several
years of diverse and relentless efforts to integrate en-
6 Gore proved especially adept at restructuring in situ policies
and institutions and at using environmental initiatives
as a basis for advancing diplomatic goals. The socalled
‘Gore bilateral,’ forged with his counterparts in
Russia, South Africa, and elsewhere, are a series of highlevel
agreements to cooperate on shared environmental
problems that are typical of Gore's resourcefulness. For
a sense of his perspective on environmental issues, see
Al Gore (1992).
7 In fact, as discussed below, several initiatives were well
advanced by 1996, although problems associated with
concerns about declassification criteria persisted.
Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North America 795
vironmental concerns into national security policy. Attention
focused primarily on ways in which environmental
change could threaten national interests and
hence become relevant to the traditional mandates of
military and intelligence institutions. But U.S. environmentalists
and security specialists also considered
ways in which security institutions and practices can
and do affect the environment adversely, as well as
ways in which security assets could be applied to restore
the environment and support domestic and foreign
environmental policies.
60.4 The U.S. Discourse:
Environmental Threats to
‘National Security’
One can discern in the considerable academic and
policy activity that took place from 1990 to 2005 in
the U.S. at least eight ways of linking environment to
security. This list is not intended to be definitive, nor
is it a typological list with a clear ordering logic. Instead
it is an attempt to capture the principal areas of
research and policy, together with some of the criticisms
they triggered, evident in the U.S. during this
time period.8
60.4.1 Tension, Instability, Conflict and
Violence Affecting U.S. Interests
Caused, Amplified, or Triggered by
Environmental Problems
According to researchers such as Peter Gleick (1991,
1993), Michael Klare and Thomas Homer-Dixon
(1994, 1999; Homer-Dixon/Blitt 1998) the potential
for environmentally escalated violence is significant
and growing. Gleick (1993b), for example, has written
extensively on the possibility of ‘water wars’. Throughout
the world, the demand for fresh water is increasing
due to population growth and economic development.
Many states rely heavily on sources that serve
other countries as well. Pollution, depletion, and natural
limits affect the availability of water. As demand
grows beyond supply, which UNEP FI (2005) predicts
could be the case in fifty-two countries by 2025, tension
could grow as well, especially if animosity already
exists. This may be especially true in places like the
Middle East, where several states compete for the already
stressed waters of the Jordan, Nile, Tigris, and
Euphrates. Klare (2001) extends Gleick’s concern
about water to consideration of other resources such
as oil, timber, gems and minerals. While other researchers
point out that, historically, states have almost
always found ways to cooperate over shared water
systems (Wolf 1997) and others raise important
questions about this type of analysis (Lowi 2003);
many acknowledge that acute need may overwhelm
regional cooperation in the years ahead, leading to
tension and perhaps armed violence.
Homer-Dixon (1994, 1999) has argued that environmental
factors could have a far greater impact on
intrastate violence. He contends that the prospects
for environmentally induced or amplified state institutional
failure, ethnic conflict, urban violence, and
mass migration are high and likely to increase.
Through a series of globe-spanning case studies, his
team of researchers paints a foreboding image of a future
in which environmental scarcity plays a growing
role in generating violent outcomes, especially in developing
countries already straining under the burdens
of poverty, inefficient and corrupt governments,
ethnic hatred, and renegade militaries. Work on the
scarcity-conflict thesis has received a great deal of criticism.
Some critiques focus on the recommendations
and predictions resulting from the research, rather
than on the underlying theoretical notion that environmental
degradation can indirectly contribute to security
threats (Deudney 1990; Peluso/Watts 2001).
Other critiques emphasize serious methodological
flaws in the research (Levy 1995). Compelling arguments
also have been developed by mainly European
scholars suggesting that careful quantitative analysis
does not support the conflict-scarcity thesis, but uncovers
instead a strong link between abundant, lootable
natural resources and violent conflict (Collier/Hoeffler
1999; Collier/Hoeffler/Soderbom 2001; Hauge/
Ellingsen 1998; Gleditsch 1997).
60.4.2 Activities Affecting U.S. Access to
Environmental Goods Abroad
The cornucopian thesis (Gleditsch 2003) promoted
by writers such as Julian Simon and Herman Kahn
(1984) suggests that under conditions of resource scarcity,
innovation accelerates and technology often can
be used to develop substitutes. Where this is not possible,
others note that trade will often prove an economical
approach to meeting shortfalls (Deudney
1990). But some analysts contend that substitution
and trade will not always succeed. The easy access the
8 For a European perception of ‘environmental security’
as a US national defence goal, see Brauch 2003: 89–90.
796 Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
U.S. has enjoyed to the world’s natural resources may
diminish.
Recently numerous conflicts have taken place over
access to fisheries (Porter 1995). Popular discussions
of the Gulf War (1990) and the Iraq War (2003) suggest
that U.S. desire to protect access to cheap oil
played a major role in the decisions to use force. It is
conceivable that states will one day consider using
force to protect environmental goods such as rain forests
– which regulate climate, serve as important carbon
banks, and contain high levels of biodiversity – if
diplomatic solutions prove unsuccessful. In short, factors
such as resource depletion, population growth,
and economic development in the South could affect
U.S. access to or enjoyment of some natural re-
sources.
60.4.3 Terrorist Activities Responding to
Environmental Degradation, Targeting
the U.S. Environment, or Using Ecological
Systems as a Medium for
Spreading Terror
In the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks
and the anthrax incidents of October 2001, one of the
great doomsday scenarios that has seized the imagination
of the American public and policymakers is that
of a group of terrorists contaminating the water,
food, or air supply of one or more major American
cities with some dangerous substance such as plutonium
or a virulent pathogen. Recent studies suggest
that the country is vulnerable to this sort of attack
and unprepared to respond. In April 1998, following
the ‘anthrax scare’ in Las Vegas, FBI Director Louis
Freeh described chemical and biological terrorism as
“the greatest vulnerability we have right now.”9
At the
same time, Attorney General Janet Reno stated: “We
need to make sure we have a significant stockpile –
and I don’t think we do – of vaccines and other med-
ications.”10
Numerous researchers have suggested that
there is a growing risk of a major chemical or biological
attack on the U.S. Small incidents have already
been identified, such as in 1985, when members of a
religious cult contaminated several restaurant salad
bars with salmonella, causing 751 people in Oregon to
become seriously ill (Torok et al. 1997). A growing
concern in the U.S. is the steady stream of attacks on
targets such as commercial logging, government facilities,
bio-engineering companies and land developers
by groups such as the Earth Liberation Front and the
Animal Liberation Front.11
These network-structured
organizations are difficult to neutralize and have demonstrated
a willingness to engage in violence.
60.4.4 Greening the Military
While many environmentalists promote deep structural
changes that would tend to render the military
obsolete, some are more pragmatic, aware that
throughout the world militaries are highly trained,
well-organized, and well-funded social institutions.
Moreover, in a world that regularly produces a vast array
of threats – including the threat of armed aggression
– militaries are not likely to be dismantled in the
near future. One must ask whether they can be made
less environmentally destructive than they have been
in the past. For in the past militaries throughout the
world – and especially in the United States and the
former Soviet Union – have been reckless and cavalier,
devouring energy, treading carelessly over vast tracts
of territory, experimenting with lethal weapons, and
generally creating and disposing of huge quantities of
toxic chemical and solid waste (Feshbach 1995).
According to Kent Butts (1994 1996), in the 1990’s
the Department of Defense decreased toxic waste by
fifty per cent. In cooperation with Sweden, it developed
guidelines for environmental standards for military
training and operations. It worked with Russia
and other Arctic nations to reduce radioactive contamination
of the Arctic region. The Australia-Canada-U.S.
trilateral commission is another example of
an attempt to address environmental problems cooperatively.
Base cleanup was somewhat less successful,
and anecdotal evidence suggests that throughout the
world militaries continued to treat the environment in
a reckless manner. Nonetheless, environmental awareness
appears to have penetrated this historically single-minded
and independent entity, and even generated
more sustainable forms of behaviour. Even as the
American military became more focused on fighting
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and the global war on terror,
it continues to address environmental issues.12
Further research needs to be done, however, to fully
9 “Pentagon undergoes mock terrorist attack”, in: CNN,
30 May 1998; at: .
10 “Reno, FBI head report on terrorism”, Associated Press,
22 April 1998.
11 Stefan H. Leader; Peter Probst: “The Earth Liberation
Front and Environmental Terrorism”, 2002; at .
Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North America 797
assess the ecological modernization process still under
way in the defence sector.
60.4.5 Using Military and Intelligence Assets to
Support Environmental Initiatives
Intelligence and defence possess highly sophisticated
resources that can assist in environmental assessment
and monitoring and in developing ‘green’ technologies.
This issue received considerable attention in the
United States in the 1990’s. Under the aegis of Vice
President Gore, the CIA permitted civilian scientists
to examine archived material that might be useful in
assessing environmental degradation. The ‘Medea
Group’, set up by the National Intelligence Council
(NIC) in 1992, determined that archived satellite imagery
was of great scientific value. Moreover, current
intelligence technology is so sophisticated that satellite
imagery could be used to diagnose the health of
forests as well as monitor deforestation. It can penetrate
water well enough to assist in evaluating the condition
of fisheries. It already has been used to track
and help fight forest fires. In view of this, the NIC began
exploring ways to make the CIA’s data gathering
and analysis capabilities available to environmental
consumers, including foreign and nongovernmental
organizations. In 1997 the Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI) Environmental Center was created
partly for this purpose.
Some observers are sceptical of this initiative, on
the grounds that the CIA’s penchant for secrecy and
other responsibilities might corrupt its public offerings.
Critics advocate the development of commercial
satellite systems. But the technological sophistication
of intelligence assets may not be achievable in the private
sector for many years, although the private-sector
demand for surveillance technologies seems strong.
Thus efforts to build bridges between the CIA and
new consumers could remain important.
The U.S. military also possesses extensive resources
that might be detailed to environmental policy
initiatives, including technology-driving programmes,
land restoration projects, treaty monitoring,
and, possibly, treaty enforcement. Experiments in the
1990’s with recycling technologies and ecosystem restoration,
by different branches of the U.S. military,
may serve as models for future endeavours. Discussions
on using the U.S. military (or NATO or UN
forces) to monitor compliance with international environmental
law remain at a preliminary stage and face
stiff opposition.
One of the more fascinating features of these various
activities is the notable expansion of interagency
communication and cooperation. It seems inevitable
that addressing environmental problems will be most
successful if the different types of expertise and experience
spread throughout the American government
are coordinated. Government departments and agencies
have a history of being less than forthcoming
with each other and of zealously trying to protect and
expand their jurisdictions and budgets regardless of
how resources might be most efficiently deployed.
Concern about the environment may be breaking
down some of this hostility and distrust. Intelligence
agencies have signalled their intention to be more accessible
to agencies that never consulted them in the
past. The Departments of Energy (DoE) and Defense
(DoD), together with the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA), signed a Memorandum of Understanding
in 1996 stating that they would try to cooperate in
this area.13
Of special importance, through the Environmental
Change and Security Project, the
Woodrow Wilson Centre has hosted regular meetings
since 1994 that bring together diverse government officials,
scholars, and representatives of environmental
NGOs to discuss different aspects of environmental
security.
60.4.6 Promoting Dialogue, Building
Confidence, and Transferring
Technology
Within American military circles there is much informal
talk about the value of face-to-face encounters to
relieve tensions, address fears, and improve transparency.
In the 1990’s, this desire created another promising
approach to linking environment and security.
Conferences on environmental security have provided
a new context for dialogue. These can have collateral
benefits insofar as they create greater awareness of
the concerns, incentives, and beliefs of other countries.
Throughout the 1990’s, the U.S. hosted or par-
12 See for example the websites of the Office of the Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense for Instillations and the
Environment; at: and:
Defense Environmental Network & Information
eXchange (DENIX); at: .
13 For a comprehensive listing of these activities, see: Environmental
Change and Security Project Reports published
annually since 1995 by the Woodrow Wilson
Center in Washington, D.C.
798 Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
ticipated in conferences and workshops on environmental
themes, such as those organized by the Army
War College, the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies,
and NATO through its Partnership for Peace pro-
gramme.
60.4.7 Providing Disaster and Humanitarian
Assistance
In recent years the U.S. military has been called upon
to assist in natural and humanitarian disasters. The
suitability of military forces for such roles has been
demonstrated during responses the 2004 South Asian
Tsunami, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, and
the October 2005 Northern Pakistan earthquake. For
example, in response to the December 2004 tsunami,
the U.S. deployed over 18,000 military personal to assist
with search and rescue, disaster assessment and
recovery operations. In times of crisis and disaster,
the U.S. military will likely continue to find itself involved
in helping with water and food distribution,
managing population flows, and combating disease
outbreaks. If it is to succeed, it will clearly require
more focused training and a more robust mandate
than have been the case in the past.
On this issue, it is important to remember that in
many smaller countries the military is the only state
resource that can be called upon to help implement
and monitor state-wide policies and assist in managing
disasters and other crises. Because these often
have an important environmental component, some
training in environmental factors may be crucial to
success.
60.4.8 Environmental Peacebuilding
A new and related focus is emerging through the
work of a network of U.S. scholars that includes Erika
Weinthal (2002), and Ken Conca and Geoff Dabelko
(2002).14
Their current research objectives are to clarify
the role of environmental considerations in postconflict
peacebuilding; to define the current state of
our knowledge about environment-peace linkages; to
identify both the benefits and challenges of incorporating
environment, sustainability, and human security
into post-conflict reconstruction and development initiatives;
to identify environmental management strategies
as a tactic for building confidence between
former parties in conflict; and to identify the most
pressing research and policy agendas around these
questions. The principal goal is to identify the environmental
conditions necessary for sustainable peace
and the circumstances under which environmental initiatives
can help to facilitate that goal.
To date, conventional approaches to post-conflict
peacebuilding have concentrated on United Nations
peacekeeper operations and civilian missions that include
economic reconstruction, institutional reform
and election oversight. Too often lost in this approach
is a focus on efforts to foster human security and sustainability.
Ignoring environmental management in
post-conflict peacebuilding ignores another potential
strategy for building trust and cooperation as steps towards
broader peace. The core premise of this new research
project and the starting point for inquiry is that
overlooking considerations of environmental quality,
ecosystem health, and the natural resource base from
which people extract their livelihoods risks undermining
any gains that may be made in the political sphere
and through development-assistance initiatives. If this
is correct, then it becomes necessary to explore environment-peace
linkages in a deeper, more specific,
and targeted way than has been done to date.
60.5 Canadian Discourse on
Environmental Change and
‘Human Security’
While it was a Canadian scholar, Thomas HomerDixon,
who caught the attention of the U.S. administration
in the early 1990’s and whose central arguments
are described above, the Canadian experience
in this arena has differed significantly from that of the
United States. As in the U.S., Canadian scholars
fiercely debated the scarcity-conflict thesis, and this
debate will not be reiterated here. Concerns about
Canadian access to natural resources, environment
and terrorism, greening the military, using military
and intelligence assets to support environmental initiatives,
and promoting dialogue by focusing on shared
environmental threats have all been expressed in Canada,
but with far less fanfare and intensity than in the
U.S. for obvious reasons. Canada has a small military
and intelligence capacity, and a much more modest
role on the world stage. It is a resource rich country
with a natural resource based economy, and far less
concerned about its access to foreign resources.
14 The text for this subsection is based on the unpublished
description of a workshop on environmental peacebuilding
that was written by Ken Conca, Geoff Dabelko,
Richard Matthew and Erika Weinthal. The workshop
was held at Duke University on 29–30 November 2006.
Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North America 799
Perhaps the most vibrant development in Canada
during the time period under discussion has been the
growing effort to link global environmental change to
the concept of human security, which has moved into
a central position in Canadian foreign policy and
scholarship. Canadians have also made a significant
contribution to the resource curse debate, and are involved
in the emerging issue of environmental peace-
building.
60.5.1 Global Environmental Change and
Human Security
Canadian research on global environmental change
and human security is covered in detail by Jon Barnett,
Richard Matthew and Karen O’Brien (2008).
Therefore, we limit ourselves to very brief comments.
The concept of human security became popular with
the 1994 United Nations Development Programme’s
Annual Report. In this report, human security “was
said to have two main aspects. It means, first, safety
from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression.
And second, it means protection from sudden
and harmful disruptions in the patterns of daily
life” (UNDP 1994: 23). The report also emphasizes
four key dimensions of human security: it is universal,
its components are interdependent, it is easier to protect
through prevention than intervention, and it is
people-centred (UNDP 1994: 22). In the past 14 years,
the term human security has been redefined in numerous
ways and it has become central to the foreign policy
paradigms of several countries, including Canada
and Japan. The Canadian formulation is well-covered
by the Government of Canada ().
The Canadian approach
stresses ‘freedom from fear’ and its work is
centred on six areas of activity: protection of civilians;
conflict protection; peace operations; governance and
accountability; public safety; and new policy development.
In this context, the environment is scarcely
mentioned let alone focal. However, during the same
period that the Government of Canada developed human
security as its foreign policy focus, several Canadian
scholars were prominent in establishing an international
project to explore linkages between global
environmental change and human security. A highlight
of this work was the development of a new definition
of human security “as something that is
achieved when and where individuals and communities
have the options necessary to end, mitigate or
adapt to threats to their human, environmental and
social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise
these options; and actively participate in pursuing
these options (GECHS Science Plan 1999). In other
words, human security is a variable condition where
people and communities have the capacity to manage
stresses to their needs, rights, and values” (Barnett/
Matthew/O’Brien 2008).
The issue, however, is a part of the focus of Liu
Center for Global Issues established at the University
of British Columbia and initially directed by Senator
Lloyd Axworthy. One of the Center’s research areas is
“the connections between environmental change and
human security, defined in terms of wellbeing.”15
60.5.2 Environmental Peacebuilding
Canadian researchers are participating in the environmental
peacebuilding initiative described above. Earlier
work in this area includes the edited volume Conserving
the Peace (Halle/Matthew/Switzer 2002),
produced by the International Institute for Sustainable
Development in Winnipeg.
60.5.3 The Resource Curse
Important work examining linkages among natural
resource exploitation, human rights abuses and violent
conflict has been carried out by Philippe LeBillon
(2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; LeBillon/Addison/Murshed
2003; LeBillon/Khatib 2004). This work has
been well-received as more empirically defended than
the scarcity-conflict thesis discussed above (see chap.
83 Swatuck/Black).
60.6 Conclusion
In the U.S., research, debate and policy focused on integrating
environmental concerns into ‘national security’
have been a small part of a larger global effort to
explore linkages between various conceptions of environmental
change and national well-being. It is also a
rather small part of national security thinking and policy
in the U.S. itself. In both contexts, it is a controversial
undertaking, freighted with rhetorical and analytical
tension that has mobilized scepticism and
resistance from security specialists and environmentalists
alike. The former fear obscuring national security
planning and preparedness (Levy 1995); the latter a
degradation of environmental policy and of the envi-
15 See at: .
800 Richard A. Matthew and Bryan McDonald
ronmental movement (Deudney 1990). It is a small
piece of a large picture, but a piece that has come into
focus quickly, that has attracted billions of U S$ in the
U.S. alone, that has garnered attention throughout
the world, and that has mobilized many critics as well
as supporters.
There are good reasons to be concerned with the
real world effects of linking environmental change to
national security. The first is the problem of blowback.
Having persuaded many security practitioners
and other senior policymakers that environmental
change is a serious threat, environmentalists now find
themselves having to defend the value of protecting
wilderness in remote, resource-rich environments
such as Alaska and the Arctic Circle. For example, in
2003 and again in 2005 President Bush presented a
plan for developing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
(ANWR) that was rejected by a slim majority in
the Senate. As of February 2007 Bush has lifted restrictions
on oil and gas development in Alaska’s Bristol
Bay.16
The danger of framing something as a national
security issue is that, once this is accepted in
the U.S., it has the potential to trump any other way
of framing the issue. Placed side by side, protecting
the U.S. is always going to trump protecting wilderness
if Congress and the public can be persuaded that
such a choice needs to be made. And while this tradeoff
has yet to be fully accepted, incremental moves
within this logic have already been taken.
A second reason for concern is that the more extreme
variants of the neo-Malthusian conflict-scarcity
thesis – such as the violent and anarchic world expressed
by Robert Kaplan (1994) and tied to the research
of Thomas Homer-Dixon (1991, 1994; chap. 20
by Homer-Dixon/Delingiannis) – may have created a
perception of complex global threat that politicians
and the security community can exploit. In the days
after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against
the U.S., President Bush noted that in crafting their
response his administration would not distinguish between
terrorists and those who harbour them. By
2002, the Bush administration had developed a doctrine
justifying the pre-emptive use of force in the war
on terrorism, which was first publicly announced during
the President’s commencement address at West
Point Academy:
For much of the last century, America's defence relied
on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and
containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply.
But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence
– the promise of massive retaliation against nations
– means nothing against shadowy terrorist
networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment
is not possible when unbalanced dictators
with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those
weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist
allies. We cannot defend America and our
friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our
faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation
treaties, and then systemically break
them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we
will have waited too long. Homeland defence and
missile defence are part of stronger security, and
they're essential priorities for America. Yet the war on
terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take
the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront
the worst threats before they emerge. In the
world we have entered, the only path to safety is the
path of action. And this nation will act. Our security
will require the best intelligence, to reveal threats hidden
in caves and growing in laboratories. Our security
will require modernizing domestic agencies such as
the FBI, so they're prepared to act, and act quickly,
against danger. Our security will require transforming
the military you will lead -- a military that must be
ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner
of the world. And our security will require all
Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be
ready for pre-emptive action when necessary to defend
our liberty and to defend our lives.17
The justification for a pre-emptive strike is similar
to that provided by environmentalists for the precautionary
principle – “a willingness to take action in advance
of scientific proof [or] evidence of the need for
the proposed action on the grounds that further delay
will prove ultimately most costly to society and nature,
and, in the longer term, selfish and unfair to future
generations.”18
A third concern is that it is certainly not clear that
linking the environment and national security has resulted
in more investment in ecologically sustainable
behaviour and green research. At the Earth Summit in
Johannesburg there were numerous reports suggesting
that progress was slower than expected or
needed. It does not seem credible to even suggest
16 Announcement of this available at: .
17 See at: .
18 Taken from the Wikipedia entry at: .
Environmental Security: Academic and Policy Debates in North America 801
that, so far, linking the environment to this strand of
high politics has paid a measurable dividend.
There are, however, also several reasons to be encouraged
by the academic and policy activity in Canada
and the United States over the past fifteen years.
First, elements of the U.S. military, including the Marines
and National Guard, have gradually accepted
that they will have to play major roles in addressing
humanitarian and natural disasters such as Hurricanes
Rita and Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami and the
earthquake in Kashmir, and that their efforts will be
more productive if they are prepared for these types
of events and able to work effectively with entities
such as human rights and environmental NGOs that
have expertise but cannot be forced into a traditional
command hierarchy.19
Second, the direction taken by the Bush-Cheney
administration has run counter to the aspirations of
its predecessor, but it has opened a political space in
which former Vice-President Al Gore has been able to
operate with a high level of success. His documentary
and book An Inconvenient Truth, have educated millions
of Americans and others about the science of climate
change, and the threat it is posing to human se-
curity.
Third, linking environmental change to national
security was disturbing to many environmentalists.
But one of the outgrowths of this activity has been the
new research agenda examining links between the environment
and peacebuilding. This is likely to be a far
more comfortable association for many, as peacebuilding
is not a primarily military activity but rather
one that fully encompasses the human rights and development
communities
Finally, the work on global environmental change
and human security is creating a platform for influencing
the foreign policy direction being charted by Canada
and other countries such as Norway and Japan.
Ultimately, one must conclude that research and
policy activities in North America have generated
mixed results, but that there is great promise evident
in many of the elements of this programme that have
emerged recently and shifted the centre of attention
towards human security and peacebuilding, and away
from framing the environment as a national security
issue on the grounds that it has or will become a significant
cause of violent conflict.
19 These comments are based on Matthew's direct experience
working with U.S. Marine Forces Pacific on planning
for humanitarian and natural disasters.