2018-02-14
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When American astronauts first viewed the earth from the Apollo spacecraft, they remarked to millions of listeners about the "blue planet" they saw through their small windows and how the clouds and continents flowed into one another without regard to the political boundaries humans had imposed on a pristine planet. Those images are still often replayed. However, the improvement in space technology has also enabled us to see from afar uncomfortable images – of atmospheric poisons that encircle the globe; of violent winter and summer storms pounding islands and continents with relentless fury; of massive holes in the ozone shield that protects humans from dangerous ultraviolet rays; of vanishing forests and widening deserts. The same satellite technology enables military commanders to target their opponents in warfare, in order to defend national borders.
Warfare can clearly be laid at the doorstep of humankind. Are environmental problems also our doing? Is the growth in world population during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries responsible for recurrent and irrefutable images of a global environment under stress? Or are the consumption patterns of the world's wealthy the primary culprits? There is no consensus on these issues. Not surprisingly, then, there is no more consensus on how states ought to respond to rapid environmental change than on how they should deal with profound demographic, economic, and political transformations.
This unit explores global environmental challenges and responses to them, broadly described in the concept of ecopolitics –the intersection of ecology and politics. Ecology deals with the impact of human activity on the environment. Politics, as we have seen, is concerned with the exercise of power. Ecopolitics, then, centers on how political actors influence perceptions of, and policy responses to, their environments.
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Peoples and states today face a broad range of environmental and resource challenges. This discussion will cover a limited yet representative sample including issues related to nonrenewable resources, common properties, and renewable resources – in seeking to understand how ecology and politics interact to shape our future. Not surprisingly politics emerges as a powerful force that permeates all dimensions of environmental and resource issues, ranging from the evaluation of scientific evidence to prescriptions for dealing with that evidence.
Environmental security and sustainable development [1]: an overview
"Security" means freedom from fear. It also means freedom from risk and danger. During the Cold War, fear of nuclear holocaust haunted much of the world. Security was equated with "national security," which typically connoted freedom from the fear, risk, and danger posed by the threat of war. This required the development of national strategies for coping with the struggle for power central to realist thinking. Today many analysts urge a broader conception of what constitutes security at both the state and global levels.
One view suggests that threats to national security should encompass actions or events that "degrade the quality of life for the inhabitants of a state or narrow the range of policy choices available to the government of a state or private, nongovernmental entities (persons, groups, corporations) within the state" (Ullman). This is the politics of scarcity, which predicts that future international conflict will likely be caused by resource scarcities – restricted access to food, oil, and water, for example, rather than by overt miliftary challenges.
Compelling as this unconventional viewpoint may be, scarcity continues to be studied primarily from a state-centric ecopolitical perspective. To broaden the definition of national security, pushing our vision beyond borders and their protection, environmental security is a useful concept. Focusing on the transboundary character of challenges to preserving the global environment, it recognizes that "threats to global life systems such as global warming, ozone depletion, and the loss of tropical forests and marine habitats are just as important to the future of humankind as the threat of nuclear catastrophe"(Porter and Brown). Because environmental degradation undercuts states' economic well-being and the quality of life all governments seek for their citizens, it invites a neoliberal [2] interpretation of how states can cooperate with IGOs and NGOs to cope with environmental challenges. Because the effort by the neoliberal epistemic community [3] to redefine security moves beyond realism's popular state-centric fundamental conceptions of world politics, the enterprise is understandably controversial.
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Global environmental issues pose another controversy, one that engages the competing perspectives of cornucopians and neo-Malthusians. Cornucopians believe that if free markets and free trade are practised, ecological imbalances that threaten humankind will be corrected. For them, prices are the key adjustment mechanism that in time produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Neo-Malthusians, on the other hand, share more in common with liberal internationalists and mercantilists. For them, markets' failure to account for the cost of excessive exploitation of both renewable and nonrenewable resources requires intervention by nonmarket agents. More fundamentally, it requires revision of the "dominant social paradigm," which says "first, that the free market will always maximize social welfare, and second, that there is not only an infinite supply of natural resources but also of 'sinks' for disposing the wastes from exploiting those resources. Humans will not deplete any resource, according to this world view, as long as technology is given free rein and prices are allowed to fluctuate enough to stimulate the search for substitutes, so absolute scarcity can be postponed to the indefinite future" (Porter and Brown).
The dominant social paradigm – a view shared by cornucopians – is under serious attack by environmental activists. It is also under attack internationally. Sustainable development is now perceived as an alternative to unlimited growth, a concept that enjoys widespread support among governments and a broad range of NGOs that are particularly active in shaping the global environmental agenda. Its heritage is traceable to Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, popularly known as the Brundtland Commission after the Norwegian prime minister who chaired it. The Commission concluded that the world cannot sustain the growth required to meet the needs and aspirations of the world's growing population unless it adopts radically different approaches to basic issues of economic expansion, equity, resource management, energy efficiency, and the like. Rejecting the "limits of growth" maxim popular among neo-Malthusians during the 1970s, it emphasized instead "the growth of limits." The commission defined a "sustainable society" as one that "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
The Brundtland Commission report is an important landmark in the rapid emergence of environmental issues as global concerns. The process began in earnest in 1972, when the UN General Assembly convened the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Conferences have since been held on a wide range of environmental topics, with scores of environmental treaties negotiated and new international agencies put into place to promote cooperation and monitor environmental developments.
A second milestone in the challenge to the dominant social paradigm is the Earth Summit, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 – the twentieth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference on the environment. Formally known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the meeting brought together more than 150 states, fourteen hundred nongovernmental organizations, and some eight thousand journalists. A program of action agreed on at Rio, Agenda 21, embodies a political commitment to a broad range of environmental and development goals. Prior to the Earth Summit, the environment and development had been treated separately – and often regarded as being in conflict with each other, as development frequently imperils and degrades the environment. Now the concept of sustainability galvanized a simultaneous treatment of environmental and development issues. Recognition of the interrelatedness of global welfare issues continued at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), where population and development were again placed on the same track. Acceptance of the proposition that all politics – even global politics – are local, and that protection of the earth's environment is a primary international security issue, was reaffirmed at the 1997 "Rio Plus Five" UN Earth Summit. A warming, polluted globe requires a global remedy, and for that reason environmental security is an issue destined to stay atop the twenty-first century global agenda.
Notes:
1 Sustainable development: the expansion of income and wealth in ways that do not destroy the resources provided by the environment.
2 Neoliberal: seeing the globe as the integrated whole, without meaningful national boundaries; this viewpoint attempts to explain international cooperation and change through the mutual activities of states, IGOs, NGOs.
3 Epistemic community: a group of experts from around the world who, based on their knowledge, develop a shared understanding of a problem on the global agenda and a set of preferences for responding to it.
Exercises:
1 Answer the following questions:
