The Environment-Security Trap

...Some environmental advocates have always been willing to use national-security rhetoric to sell their policy prescriptions...

...But the millions of rural poor flooding the Amazon during the 1980s were largely displaced agricultural workers from the south, forced off the land by the export-driven mechanization of Brazilian agriculture...

...The distorted two-class imagery of North and South obscures the planet's single greatest environmental challenge: preventing the destruction of this large but increasingly fragile middle stratum wherever it is found...

...So too with environmental security: it blames the world's poor, plays to the worst stereotypes of both first and third worlds, and raises the false promise of insulating America from the effects of global environmental problems...

...In our day, it can still elevate tensions among countries or cause ruinous violence within them...

...national interests: the flow of dangerous pollutants into the United States, the "staggering pressures on global resources" from third world population growth, and downward spirals linking environmental degradation, violence, and instability throughout the global South and the former Soviet bloc...

...KEN CONCA is assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland and the author of Manufacturing Insecurity: The Rise and Fall of Brazil's Military-Industrial Complex...

...Consider the way Sherri Goodman, deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, describes the two "pillars" of environmental security: "adequate indications and warnings of potential crises" and "promoting military environmental cooperation that contributes significantly to democracy, trust and understanding...

...This passage from Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address places environmental problems squarely alongside America's most popular post—cold war enemies...

...A global class of marginalized poor does exist, and their actions—a product of desperation, dislocation, and the destruction of traditional communities—do hurt the planet's environmental health...

...This tough-minded rhetoric has been institutionalized in a State Department commitment to produce an annual report on the environment and foreign policy, analogous to its reports on human rights abuses and drug trafficking...

...It might even lead one to ask whether we need a serious rethinking of what is meant by national security...

...more than thirty recent academic conferences...

...Fears that uncontrollable third world disintegration will spill over to the allegedly sustainable societies of the North resonate deeply, and play to the same nativism that has so powerfully fueled anti-immigration sentiment...

...Research efforts such as the Project on Environment, Population, and Security at the University of Toronto 40 DISSENT / Summer 1998 and the Environment and Conflicts Project sponsored by the Swiss Peace Foundation project a disturbing trend in which resource competition and ecological marginalization lead to widening social conflict, particularly in the world's poorer regions...

...Some environmentalists, for example, would like to tap the rich scientific expertise of the weapons labs and the information-gathering abilities of the intelligence community...

...commitments to the Global Environmental Facility fell $100 million in arrears and environmental aid to the former Soviet states fell from $75 million in 1995 to $10 million in 1997...

...Is Mexico—where Coke is now the most popular drink, even as one-third or more of rural people lack safe drinking water —North or South...

...But as we have seen in America's all-too-literal declarations of war on crime, drugs, and oil shortages, the security frame distorts the true problem, blurs underlying responsibility, and produces coercive policy responses...

...What will this mean in practice...

...Beyond the muddled view of the problem lies the dangerous link between security rhetoDISSENT / Summer 1998 • 43 ric and the enduring realities of the national security state...

...At the other end of the spectrum lies a global class of overexploiters whose systems of production, consumption, and exchange do far greater damage...

...ACITIZEN MIGHT reasonably take such warnings as further proof that security policy in today's America has little to do with genuine human security...

...As environmental writer Alan Durning has pointed out, a few simple indicators distinguish these global extremes: Overexploiters get most of their protein from grain-fed meat, work in office buildings that are air-conditioned even in winter, and transport themselves, typically alone, by automobile...

...As the Toronto group concluded: "Environmental scarcity can contribute to population movements, economic decline, and weakened states, which in turn can cause ethnic conflicts, insurgencies, and coups d'etat...

...And the music is being heard at the highest levels of the Clinton administration...

...The addition of environmental degradation to these market-tested demons is no accident...

...The combined force of scholarly research, bureaucratic incentives, and a not-so-gentle push from the administration is raising environmental security to influential heights in U.S...

...A series of reports from the Environmental Change and Security Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center charts the rising tide: environmental security initiatives at the Departments of State, Defense, and Energy, the intelligence agencies, and the Environmental Protection Administration...

...that the tools and ideologies of national security are more likely to promote coercive policies and undermine international cooperation than to mobilize society for creative solutions...

...The world's greatest environmental imperative is also its biggest social challenge—preventing or dealing with the impact of these turbulent changes on relatively stable and sustainable local communities...

...Exposing the roots of global environ44 DISSENT / Summer 1998 mental degradation also reveals the foundations of power and injustice in the international system...

...What of the four billion who coexist with a billion overexploiters and a billion marginalized...

...Instead, a 1996 interagency "memorandum of understanding" places the Pentagon, in conjunction with the EPA and the Department of Energy, at the commanding heights of a wide range of international environmental initiatives...

...Several of the largest national environmental organizations have drifted rightward in recent years, lacking ties to a broader progressive coalition and seeking to be players in an increasingly conservative Washington...

...The Pentagon's enormous budget for hazardous waste clean-up ensures that it will dominate interagency discussions...

...the idea that threats come from specific enemies runs deep...

...In contrast with the distorted imagery and dangerous rhetoric of environmental security, a progressive agenda for American environmental diplomacy would begin with a very different set of assumptions: that both North and South are a good deal more complex than the cartoonish portraits of sustainable haven and looming threat would have us believe...

...The growing prominence of the defense and intelligence establishments in environmental foreign policy can only undermine State's already dubious notion that the United States can play the role of honest broker in the global South...

...Responsibility is skewed even more when one considers the industrialized world's ecological shadow—the fact that much of the South's resource use is tied to production processes that feed northern consumption...

...Vice President Gore's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, argued that global environmental problems, like the threat of war, could mobilize society to make changes in industrial practices, consumption patterns, and public policies...

...pollution permits became a fashionable instrument of policy...

...Christopher invoked security themes repeatedly, describing a "vast new danger" to U.S...

...Despite its weak performance on environmental cooperation, the administration has undertaken a concerted effort to repackage the environment as a security issue...

...Some advocates see environmental security as a powerful way to move from a national, conflictual politics to global cooperation...

...embassies has been trumpeted as a way to resolve regional resource disputes, even as U.S...

...But it is in the Clinton era that environment-security thinking has reached critical mass...

...This would be fine, even welcome, if that role were limited to ensuring that the Pentagon would clean up its own mess and share what it learned with military establishments around the world, or that the CIA would make classified data available to civilian environmental researchers...

...Kaplan used scholarly speculations on the future of violent conflict, including the work of Samuel Huntington, Thomas Homer-Dixon, and Martin van Creveld, as a lens for his travels in West Africa...

...The president himself was apparently much influenced by "The Coming Anarchy," a Robert Kaplan essay in the February 1994 Atlantic Monthly...

...and bureaucratic entrepreneurs seeking a new mission for the defense and intelligence communities...

...What of America, where gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles have become a middle-class fashion statement, even as countless small towns victimized by corporate downsizing and relocation have lost access to interurban bus or rail service...

...Western Europe and Japan were described not as the major global polluters they are, but rather as important partners in U.S.-led initiatives...

...and scores of books and articles...

...security and prosperity from "large-scale environmental degradation...

...The go-go 1980s saw the emergence of free-market environmentalism...

...This group is far too diverse to be romanticized as a middle class of planetary sustainers...

...The speech, portrayed as a bold new foreign policy initiative, proposed efforts to strengthen multilateral environmental treaties, stepped-up attempts to resolve regional resource disputes, and the creation of "environmental hubs" in key embassies...

...The reality of global production, consumption, and their environmental burdens is far more complex...

...In remarks to the National Academy of Sciences, Clinton described himself as "gripped" by Kaplan's lurid travelogue: "[If] you really look at what's going on, you could visualize a world in which a few million of us live in such opulence we could all be starring in nighttime soaps...

...Again, America's experiences with wars on drugs, crime, and energy shortages are cautionary tales, in which violence and coercion have become central instruments of policy...

...environmental diplomacy...

...Deutch also trumpeted the value of environmental intelligence in giving American business the edge against foreign competitors...

...They place "the 'dirty' industrialization of the developing world, unchecked population growth and attendant migratory pressures" at the head of the list of "new threats to American national interests...

...This perspective DISSENT / Summer 1998 41 helped to shape the administration's National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement, which stressed the threat to U.S...

...And the rest of us look like we're in one of those Mel Gibson Road Warrior movies...

...It also converges neatly with geopolitical sloganeering about "failed" and "pivotal" states...

...But the polarizing North-South imagery of environmental security conveniently ignores that these are indeed extremes, which don't reflect how most of the planet's people actually live...

...Tellingly, Christopher's speech made not a single reference to the role of the industrialized countries in threatening global ecosystems—targeting instead population pressures and resource consumption in developing countries from China and Mexico to Rwanda and Haiti...

...Human suffering and turmoil make countries ripe for authoritarian government or external subversion...

...In the 1970s proponents of solar energy sometimes argued that nuclear plants, refineries, and large power stations were vulnerable to terrorists or the Russians...

...The Dangers of Environmental Security This new view of environmental problems was on display in an April 1996 speech at Stanford University by then–Secretary of State Warren Christopher...

...Beyond the Environment-Security Trap A globally oriented environmentalism must remain a key part of the progressive agenda...

...The drumbeat raised by this coalition of academics, think tankers, foundations, and bureaucrats plays to the foreign policy establishment's fears about mounting disorder in the politically turbulent and economically polarized second and third worlds...

...American environmentalism follows the times...

...The specter of all those Chinese refrigerators and automobiles notwithstanding, the North remains responsible for two-thirds to threefourths of all major pollutants, with the United States the chief culprit...

...environmentalists who still believe in capturing a slice of the illusory peace dividend...

...And the rise of Indonesia's forestry exports fed Japan's voracious appetite for imported tropical hardwoods, through a cozy relationship between Japanese firms and the Indonesian state...

...But if the 1980s were about unfettered growth and cowboy economics, the watchword for the 1990s has been insecurity...

...Perhaps most important, the rise of environmental security, like the rise of free-market environmentalism before it, shows the need to reinfuse American environmentalism with a progressive agenda...

...and warns that China's heavy cropland losses, water scarcity, and soil erosion, combined with population growth and surging food demand, will "tip the world balance from surplus to scarcity" These and other projections linking environmental problems to third world violence, economic instability, and political chaos have provided rhetorical fuel for several constituencies: liberal arms controllers seeking new themes as they confront structural unemployment in the post—cold war era...

...They can also be seen in the industrialized countries, where global economic integration, deurbanization, corporate relocation, and the destruction of rural communities have had such disruptive effects...

...Environmental diplomacy must be broadened to include not just state organs and a select few Washingtonbased nongovernmental organizations, but rather the full range of citizens' groups and grassroots coalitions protesting environmental destruction...

...Consider Kaplan's stark vision, which apparently so impressed Clinton: "Outside the stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of pop culture and ancient tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible pattern—meaning there's no easy-to-define threat...

...Finding a security threat in social problems certainly gets attention...

...DISSENT / Summer 1998 • 45...

...The article portrayed the region, and by extension the third world, as a nightmarish realm of overpopulation, mounting environmental degradation, urban squalor, and escalating social violence...

...The wrenching changes of economic globalization are eroding it from both ends, with the upper portion being sucked into the global class of overexploiters and the lower portion joining the ranks of the marginalized...

...Development" policies that create a class of overexploiters but fail to meet basic human needs must change...

...Unfortunately, this potential rethinking is being diverted into a more manageable lesson about the threat of political instability in the third world...

...A widely cited 1989 Foreign Affairs article by Jessica Tuchman Mathews (currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) warned, "If .. . resource and population trends are not addressed, as they are not in so much of the world today, the resulting economic decline leads to frustration, resentment, domestic unrest or even civil war...

...The truth, of course, is just the opposite...

...From this starting point, a very different diplomatic agenda emerges...

...Environmental security centers the crosshairs on the global South...

...As CIA Director John Deutch told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council in 1996: "National reconnaissance systems that track the movement of tanks through the desert, can, at the same time, track the movement of the desert itself...

...During the Reagan years the World Resources Institute, a well-heeled environmental think tank, published a report by tropical forest guru Norman Myers, who warned of environmental threats to the stability of such staunchly anticommunist "friends" as Moi's Kenya, Marcos's Philippines, and Numeiry's Sudan...

...The health of the planet and its people are threatened by the same forces creating economic disempowerment, social turbulence, and xenophobic nationalism in American society...

...foundation programs from Pew, MacArthur, Rockefeller, and W. Alton Jones...

...But there is a real danger that mainstream American environmentalism —politically adrift and increasingly reluctant to engage underlying structures of power—will converge with a foreign-policy establishment that can see the global South only as failed states or emerging markets...

...Similarly, Lester Brown, well known for his annual State of the World reports, wonders "Who will feed China...

...Predictably, we hear more and more tough talk about "environmental security," which frames the planet's ills not as a shared problem facing humanity but rather as a threat to American strategic interests...

...No matter that this clashes with the upbeat chanting of neoliberalism about "newly industrialized countries" and "big emerging markets...

...The marginalized, in contrast, face protein deficiencies, suffer in the heat or cold, and walk...

...So far the major organizations have not embraced the concept or rhetoric of environmental security, and perhaps they will see no tactical advantage in it...

...and the vague yet comforting idea of "sustainability" promised that we could have nature's cake and eat it, too...

...As with those other documents, State's first environmental assessment—released on Earth Day 1997—conveniently ignored the domestic roots of this global problem...

...These effects can be seen in the so-called big emerging markets being dragged into the world economy through capital mobility and trade liberalization...

...and that the real enemies are a corrosive consumer culture and the loss of social control over the global economy...

...Think of them: terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, drug trafficking, ethnic and religious hatred, aggression by rogue states, environmental degradation...

...Environmental degradation is framed instead, in classic national-security terms, as an external threat to American strategic and economic interests...

...But in the NAFTA debate, an important part of the environmental community chose to support the political and economic structures that underlie pollution, environmental degradation, and ecological injustice...

...Both scholarly research and common sense suggest that environmental degradation and violence are indeed linked...

...And at home, security themes reinforce the dangerous notion that the United States can insulate itself from environmental damage through unilateral action, threats, deterrence, and other traditional security practices...

...The priorities are clear: environmental monitoring in the hands of the intelligence community and international environmental dialogue through military channels...

...Gore invoked the struggles against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as precedents, and he described environmentalists around the world as "a new kind of resistance fighter...

...By starting with the geographic location of visible symptoms rather than the social location of underlying causes, the security framework draws attention away from the roots of the problem...

...And we must stop equating global environmentalism with a few narrow, issue-specific environmental agreements such as the biodiversity accord struck at the 1992 Earth Summit or the ongoing climate-change negotiations...

...foreign-policy circles...

...But the main thrust was to highlight international environmental threats to U.S...

...To be sure, rainforest destruction is also driven by local factors ranging from resource scarcities or population pressures to the desires of a coercive regime to occupy remote territories and control dissident minorities...

...But rhetoric also creates a conceptual frame for policy, and some of the more tangible dangers of environmental security can be seen in the way it is used to bring the defense and intelligence communities into a more central role in U.S...

...Security institutions have enormous power to resist change...

...But they do share a higher quality of life than the marginalized poor while imposing a much lower environmental impact than the overexploiters: adequate protein without the ecological excesses of grain-fed beef, personal mobility without the planetary burden of the single-passenger automobile, and, if not the luxury of year-round air conditioning, then perhaps the modest comfort of the sensibly designed dwelling and the electric fan...

...citizens at home and U.S...

...If this happens, Warren Christopher's claim that environmental issues are entering "the mainstream of American foreign policy" will prove all too accurate, to the detriment of the planet and its people...

...But the culture of hierarchy and secrecy pervading these institutions is poorly suited to an open exchange of useful information, and it inhibits practical applications...

...Adding this environmental dimension to traditional political, economic and military analysis enhances our ability to alert policymakers to potential instability, conflict, or human disaster and to identify situations which may draw in American involvement...

...that polarization of the planet's ecological middle strata into overexploiters and marginalized poor is the world's biggest environmental threat...

...Thus Paul Kennedy and colleagues identify nine large third world nations as "pivotal" and warn that "The threats to the pivotal states are not communism or aggression but rather overpopulation, migration, environmental degradation, ethnic conflict, and economic instability...

...ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY also sketches a nightmarish cartoon of the global South as a realm of overpopulation, natural resource depletion, and ecological degradation...

...It distorts the problem, blurs underlying responsibility, legitimizes coercion, and diverts attention from where action is most badly needed...

...major speeches on the theme by the secretary of state, senior Pentagon officials, and the director of Central Intelligence...

...In the 1960s a progressive, grassroots movement elbowed its way to the table next to the staid conservation organizations of an earlier era...

...reworking the security frame itself is not...

...In the briefing accompanying the report's release, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted, "Competition for scarce resources is an ancient form of human conflict...

...Although sometimes touted by environmentalists as a way to generate attention and action, the linking of environmental problems to national security and "strategic" American interests is deeply troubling...

...In the foreword to the report Vice President Gore describes the environment as a key post-cold war strategic interest, critical to American efforts to promote democracy, free trade and "stability" worldwide...

...Last fall's fast-track debate showed that the major organizations can still back (or at least not oppose) progressive positions...

...interests abroad...

...But framing environmental problems in security terms is easy...

...Its hallmarks are economic anxiety, a steep decline in America's self-image as an affluent society, the rise of anti-immigrant xenophobia, and a desire to be insulated from turbulent change...

...The rhetoric of security plays to the South's worst suspicions—that the real goal is geopolitical pressure backed up by veiled suggestions of military intervention, all to protect "global" resources from local uses...

...Responses to global environmental problems that 42 DISSENT / Summer 1998 do not begin with a hard look at the workings of the global economy and the demand side of this destructive equation are at best naive and at worst deceptive...

...The State Department, in contrast, fiddles with bureaucratic reorganization: the creation of environmental "hubs" at a few U.S...

...The destruction of tropical forests occurs in the Amazon and Sarawak, but is fueled by a transnationalized world economy centered in New York, Brussels, and Tokyo...

...These brokered deals are too easily captured by narrow sectoral interests, and have little prospect for success if they are not linked to a greening of the web of global economic practices in which they are embedded...

...Rhetoric matters in part because of what it highlights and conceals...