Since environmental security is such a wide-ranging and transdisciplinary field, there are many people who have contributed to its development, both as an academic theory and as an operational concern. Consequently, I have included biographical profiles of six people and three organizations which represent the various facets of environmental security, from food to weapons to population to ecosystem integrity. There are many other worthy academic thinkers and organizations that do excellent work in the environmental security field, but they could not be included here due to space constraints.
AFRICOM is the U.S. Africa Command, one of six regional combatant commands within the U.S. Department of Defense. AFRICOM's area of responsibility (AOR) includes the entire African continent (excepting Egypt, which remains under the AOR of CENTCOM). Officially declared on October 1, 2008, and headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, its mission, in concert with other U.S. government agencies and international partners, is to conduct sustained security engagement through military-to-military programs, military-sponsored activities, and other military operations as directed to promote a stable and secure African environment in support of U.S. foreign policy. General Carter F. Ham is the commanding officer.
The AOR for AFRICOM was transferred from three different combatant commands: most of the African continent was transferred from the European command, Sudan and the Horn of Africa from Central Command, and Madagascar and the surrounding islands from Pacific Command. First proposed as early as 2000, a unified command for Africa seemed to be prudent given the national security interests of the United States in Africa, from oil procurement, counterterrorism, piracy, and famine relief. AFRICOM's strategic objectives are to ensure that Al Qaeda and its affiliates do not attack the United States; to maintain freedom of movement throughout Africa; to assist African states and regional organizations in developing the capability to combat transnational threats such as piracy and the illegal trafficking of weapons, people, and narcotics; to assist African states in developing the ability to respond to crises and mount effective peace operations; and to encourage African militaries to operate under civil authority, respect the rule of law, and abide by international human rights norms.
AFRICOM is unique as a combatant command that will face a multitude of environmental security issues on an operational basis, from resource-driven civil conflicts in West Africa to oil exploration in the Niger Delta to water scarcity across the Sahel. If it succeeds in its mission, environmental security could become part of the standard military AOR portfolio. Using AFRICOM as a template, ecological concerns such as protection of natural resources and deployment of green technology could be integrated into each mission profile across all the combatant commands. If it fails, environmental security as a military specialty could fail with it.
Strategic Insights Vol. VI, No. 1, January 2007, on the strategic importance of Africa
http://www.nps.edu/Academics/centers/ccc/publications/OnlineJournal/archivebydate.html#vol6issue1
Lester R. Brown was born in 1934 in New Jersey and obtained a degree in agricultural science from Rutgers University. Having a lifelong interest in agriculture, he spent some time in India after his graduation and saw firsthand how food and population were connected.
He worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foreign Agricultural Service, the first of many government posts. In 1974, with funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. Brown envisioned Worldwatch as the organization to bring together many different strands of environmental knowledge and make them available to policy makers and the public. In 1986, Brown was awarded a MacArthur Fellows Grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Some of Lester Brown's earliest connections on food, environmental health, and security focused on China. He saw China's growing population as a possible tipping point for the world food system; one or two crop failures in China and world market prices would increase to the point where poorer countries could be priced out of the global grain market. If population grew large enough, the earth would not be able to produce enough food to feed everyone, and massive famine would be the result. In May 2001, Brown founded the Earth Policy Institute, a sister think tank devoted to exploring the links between a sustainable environment and sustainable economic development.
Brown was one of the first policy analysts and writers to link environmental health, population growth, food production, and international security, as well as the critical role that large and rising developing nations like China must play in stabilizing global ecosystems. He wrote in 1977 that “the threats to security may now arise less from the relationship of nation to nation and more from the relationship of man to nature.”
Brown, Lester R. 1977. Redefining National Security. Worldwatch Paper 14, October 1977. Washington: Worldwatch Institute.
Brown, Lester R. 2001. Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Brown, Lester R. 2005. Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures. London: Earthscan.
Brown, Lester R. 2009. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (substantially revised). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Brown, Lester R. 2011. World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
http://www.earth-policy.org/about_epi/C32
Since 1994, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has hosted the Environmental Change and Security Program. ECSP was one of the first clearinghouses for scholarly and policy information related to environmental security. Its purpose is to explore the connections among environmental, health, and population dynamics and their links to conflict, human insecurity, and foreign policy. ECSP brings together scholars, policy makers, the media, and practitioners through events, research publications, multimedia content (audio and video) and its daily blog, New Security Beat. Much of the early academic and policy writing on environmental security as a topic was published in its annual report. Some of the recent topics that have been presented at ECSP include the institutional resilience to climate change in international river basins, population and health concerns in Tanzania and Kenya, the effects of a changing climate on U.S. humanitarian and disaster response, and conflict-free certification of minerals in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution, supported by public and private funds and engaged in the study of national and world affairs. ECSP currently has three primary focus areas:
1. Integrated Development—Health, Environment, Livelihood, Population, and Security—Global population dynamics such as urbanization, youth bulges, and migration can affect political stability and conflict dynamics. ECSP serves as a forum for presenting new research and debating practical policy options on population-health-environment connections and demographic security in developing countries.
2. Environment, Conflict, and Security—Natural resources are increasingly factors in conflict outcomes and the security of states. Climate change is expected to act as a threat multiplier in many security contexts. Yet environmental interdependence is proving to be a powerful incentive for cooperation and peace building. ECSP works with policy makers, practitioners, and scholars to debate new research and develop policy responses in environmental, diplomatic, development, and security realms.
3. Water—Changes in water availability pose fundamental challenges to the health, development, and stability of communities and states. ECSP programs and publications focus on water's potential to spur conflict and cooperation, its social and economic value, and its relationship to health and disease.
ECSP and the Woodrow Wilson Center are located in Washington, DC.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/environmental-change-and-security-program
http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/
Albert A. Gore Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., in 1948. His father, Al Gore Sr., was a representative from Tennessee, and later a senator, a career path that Al Jr. would follow. He enrolled at Harvard in 1965, and in 1967, he attended a lecture on climate science by Roger Revelle, an oceanography professor who would spark Gore's interest in climate change and environmental issues. After graduation, he enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam for two years.
In 1976, he ran for his father's former seat in Congress and was elected representative from Tennessee. As a freshman congressman, he held some of the first congressional hearings on global warming, calling as a witness his former Harvard professor Revelle. Describing himself as a “raging moderate,” he served in the House until 1984, when he was elected senator. His interest in science and the environment resulted in a number of bills supporting high technology and environmental protection, including the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 that helped fund the early development of what became the internet. In 1992, he published his first book, Earth in the Balance, in which he proposed a “Global Marshall Plan” under which developed nations could assist developing nations economically while still protecting the environment (some of these ideas became the forerunners of the joint implementation and clean development mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol).
That same year, Gore was elected vice-president under Bill Clinton, and green constituents in the United States were looking forward to a new, environment-friendly administration. However, it turned out that this was not the case, as the administration faced an increasingly partisan and polarized discussion regarding environmental policy. The American negotiators pushed for many economic concessions in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations to protect the economies of developed nations, but when the Byrd-Hagel Resolution was passed in 1997 voting down any global climate agreement, further federal action on climate change was shelved for the rest of the Clinton administration.
In 2000, Gore ran against George W. Bush for the presidency. The election results were not immediately clear: Gore won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes, but the electoral votes, awarded on a state-by-state basis, came down to a recount in Florida. On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and awarded the state's 25 electoral votes to Bush. This gave Bush 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266, handing him the presidency (270 needed to win).
After this defeat, Gore turned to other tasks, particularly those related to his environmental interests. In 2004, he launched Generation Investment Management, an investment firm for green portfolios, and continued to speak about the dangers of anthropogenic global warming. His documentary film on climate change, entitled An Inconvenient Truth, won the Oscar in 2007 for Best Documentary. Also in 2007, Gore shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
Al Gore was one of the first American politicians at the national level to insist that climate change and environmental security was a salient matter for federal policy. His continued engagement with these issues has been critical in bringing environmental issues like climate change to the forefront of both the national political discussion and the popular consciousness. Some have argued that his lifelong membership in the Democratic Party has made his advocacy on this issue politically suspect, and that any recommendations he makes must be seen through a partisan lens. However, the Norwegian Nobel Institute recognized that “climate changes may also increase the danger of war and conflict, because they will place already scarce natural resources, not least drinking water, under greater pressure, and put large population groups to flight from drought, flooding, and other extreme weather conditions.” Gore is cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, and of CurrentTV.
Gore, Al. 1992. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. New York: Rodale Books.
Gore, Al. 2006. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York: Rodale Books.
Gore, Al. 2009. Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. New York: Rodale Books.
http://www.globalmarshallplan.org/index_eng.html
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
Formed in 1988 and headquartered in Geneva, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the epistemic community for knowledge about the scientific basis of global warming, its impacts, and mitigation methods and opportunities. It was established by the UN Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization to provide the world with a clear scientific view of the current state of knowledge of climate change and its potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts, and is currently chaired by Rajendra K. Pachauri.
The IPCC does not conduct its own scientific research. Rather, it is an intergovernmental body made up of thousands of physical, natural, and social scientists from 194 countries whose work relates to global environmental change in some way and whose job is to assess the scientific information relating to all aspects of climate change. It is divided into three knowledge areas: Working Group I examines the physical science basis for climate change knowledge; Working Group II studies climate change impacts on regions and societies across the globe, as well as the adaptation and vulnerability of these regions and societies to such climate change; and Working Group III assesses climate change mitigation strategies.
The IPCC is in charge of the publication of state-of-the-knowledge reports, and releases a report approximately every five years. The First Assessment Report was published in 1990 and declared that there was a 50–50 chance that human actions were contributing to global warming. The Second Assessment Report was published in 1995, the Third Assessment Report in 2001, and the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, which had concluded that the chances of human contribution to climate change was over 90 percent. The Fifth Assessment Report, taking into account all the knowledge generated since 2007, is due sometime in 2013 or 2014. Along with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”
In 2010, the IPCC and its chair Pachauri were criticized by some scientists for not adhering to standard peer review procedures. Some factual and numerical errors were found in the Fourth Assessment Report, and an independent review panel recommended that the IPCC overhaul its assessment process and take more care with its scientific explanations. Likewise, and as expected in an endeavor with global ramifications, the IPCC has been called both too alarmist, for making climate change sound worse than it is, and too conservative, for understating the future risks and dangers from rising temperatures.
Understanding what the IPCC does and how it does it is critical to any study of environmental security. The IPCC provides the basis for knowledge of climate change science, its impacts, and mitigation strategies vetted by the international scientific community. Without this knowledge, the links between climate change and international security will not be clear, and hence decisions about national security issues that stem from climate drivers cannot be made with trusted scientific input. All publications on the IPCC website are available to the public for free download.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/
Dr. Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya in 1940. She received a scholarship from the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation and went to the United States for postsecondary studies, graduating with a Bachelor of Science from Mount St. Scholastica College in 1964, and a Master of Science in biological science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. In 1971, she graduated with a PhD in anatomy from the University of Nairobi, the first Eastern African woman to earn a doctoral level degree.
After her graduate studies, she continued her work at the University of Nairobi. Her husband's political campaign gave her the idea of linking reducing unemployment with environmental preservation, and in 1977 she founded the Greenbelt Movement, which focuses on poverty reduction and environmental conservation through tree planting. She encouraged women within Kenya to plant native trees to foster environmental protection, food security, and women's empowerment, and paid a small stipend for each tree planted.
She ran into personal and political obstacles in her career. In 1979, her husband Mwangi Mathai divorced her, saying she was “too strong minded for a woman” and that he could not control her. Much of her conservation work involved arguing for public control and preservation of public lands. This angered Daniel Arap Moi, the Kenyan president, because she protested against his plans to give away plots of public land to his political supporters, and although she was arrested and jailed several times, the movement grew.
In 1984, Dr. Maathai was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, which supports activists who support the principle of “right livelihood”; this principle says that persons should follow an honest occupation and take no more than a fair share of the earth's resources. UNEP began funding the Greenbelt Movement in 1986, and delegates from 15 countries came to Kenya to learn how to set up similar programs. In 1991, she was awarded the Goldman Prize for environmental activism at the grassroots level where positive change is created through community or citizen participation in the issues that affect them. After Arap Moi was barred from standing for president again in 2002, Dr. Maathai ran for a seat in Kenya's parliament, and during the period 2003–2007, she held the position of assistant minister for environment and natural resources. In 2004, Dr. Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.”
Wangari Maathai and the Greenbelt Movement are important to the study of environmental security. This is because Wangari Maathai and her fellow women recognized that security in a community comes from a protected environment, a pacified people, and a democratic government, and that these things are not only not separable, but they must be achieved together. Today, the Pan-Africa Greenbelt Movement Network has programs across Africa, and has planted over 40 million trees since its founding in 1977. Dr. Maathai passed away on September 25, 2011.
Maathai, Wangari. 2003 (revised 2006). The Greenbelt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience. New York: Lantern Books.
Maathai, Wangari. 2006. Unbowed: A Memoir. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Maathai, Wangari. 2010. Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World. New York: Doubleday Image.
Maathai, Wangari. 2010. The Challenge for Africa. New York: Vintage/Anchor.
http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/maathai.html
http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/126
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2004/
Alexander Nikitin is a former Soviet submarine officer and nuclear safety inspector. He served in the Soviet Navy and attained the rank of captain. He was not originally an environmentalist; indeed Soviet Russia was not known for its focus on environmental issues, preferring to put security and nuclear weapons at the pinnacle of its national interest. (The environmental NGO Greenpeace Russia has had a small presence in the USSR, but in 1990 when the MV Greenpeace sailed from Norway to Novaya Zemlya to protest nuclear testing there, they were turned back by the Soviet Navy.) The Russian Northern Fleet, headquartered off the Kola Peninsula, contains many nuclear vessels and decommissioned nuclear submarines whose fissile material has not been properly secured. After the demise of the Soviet Union as a political entity, the new government of Russia inherited a nuclear mess that it could not immediately afford to clean up.
After his retirement from the Soviet Navy in 1992, Captain Nikitin worked with the Norwegian environmental group Bellona Foundation to publish a report about the radioactive contamination of the Arctic environment by the heavily nuclear Russian Northern Fleet. The FSB (Russia's federal security service, successor to the KGB) attempted to confiscate the papers and computers from Bellona's Russian office and Nikitin's home, but the report was sent to Bellona electronically and published from Norway. Despite the information for the report being taken from unclassified sources, Nikitin was arrested in 1996 by the FSB and charged with treason and espionage for releasing state secrets, namely the condition of the fleet's nuclear components.
Nikitin spent 10 months in pretrial detention. Because the Russian media portrayed him as a traitor, his case did not garner much support within Russia, but the Norway home office of the Bellona Foundation released the details of Nikitin's arrest. Pressure from the Western media and NGOs such as Amnesty International grew. In 1997, he was released from custody, but the charges of treason against him were not dropped. Instead, the court sent the case back to the FSB for further investigation, and he was eventually rearrested. That same year, he was awarded the Goldman Prize for grassroots environmental work, but was not released to attend the ceremony. After 13 court hearings, Captain Nikitin was finally acquitted in 2000.
The case of Captain Nikitin is important to the study of environmental security because it puts the traditional and modern definitions of national security in direct conflict. Security during the Cold War was measured in nuclear missiles, but once the Cold War ended, the missiles served no real purpose. Rather, by contaminating the Russian Arctic, they became detrimental to the real environmental security on which Russia's future national interests depend. Nikitin's legal defense was based not only on the open source information that he used, but on the fact that Article 42 of the Russian Constitution states that environmental information may not be kept secret. Nikitin is now the director of the Bellona Foundation's St. Petersburg office and is still active in environmental security affairs in Russia.
Nikitin, Alexander, Igor Kudrik, and Thomas Nilsen. 1996. The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination. Bellona Report Vol. 2. Available at http://www.bellona.org/reports/The_Russian_Northern_Fleet.
Handler, Joshua. 2000. “An Acquittal At Last? The Nikitin Affair.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Vol. 56, No. 2, March/April 2000, pp. 17–19.
http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/139
http://www.bellona.org/Aboutus/Greetings_from_spb
Ken Saro-Wiwa was born in 1941 in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta and studied English at the University of Ibadan. He was a writer of books and short stories in which he supported the autonomy of indigenous peoples such as the Ogoni from the Nigerian government. The land which the Ogoni occupy is at the mouth of the Niger River and has produced over $30 billion worth of oil for the Nigerian government and its primary partner, Shell. The area has suffered considerable environmental degradation from oil extraction, as farmland and fishing grounds have been polluted with oil.
In 1990, Saro-Wiwa helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an umbrella group designed to represent the interests of the Ogoni people in the oil dealings between Shell and the Nigerian government. Specifically, MOSOP demanded that a fair share of the proceeds from oil extraction on their land or off their shores go to benefit the Ogoni people, and that Shell provide funds for the remediation of environmental damage to Ogoni land. Saro-Wiwa was arrested several times for his political activism, and in 1994, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, for his nonviolent work in attempting to secure the environmental and economic rights of the Ogoni people.
Saro-Wiwa was arrested again by the government of Gen. Sani Abacha, the military president of Nigeria, in 1994 and held for a year. During his imprisonment, he was awarded the Goldman Prize for grassroots environmental activism in 1995. He and nine alleged co-conspirators were tried before a military tribunal on charges of conspiracy to incite murder, charges that were widely viewed as trumped-up and retaliatory for Saro-Wiwa's political activism on behalf of the Ogoni. “The Ogoni Nine,” as they came to be known, were found guilty and executed on November 10, 1995, by the Nigerian military. Their deaths caused international outrage and resulted in the expulsion of Nigeria from the Commonwealth of Nations for three years.
One year later, lawsuits were filed in the United States under the 1789 Alien Tort Statute by various environmental and human rights groups against Shell and the head of its Nigeria operations for being complicit in the deaths of Saro-Wiwa and the others. After many delays and petitions from Shell, the trial was set to start in June 2009. Before it could begin, on June 8, Shell agreed to settle the suit with a $15.5 million payment to the families of the nine Ogoni leaders who were hanged. Shell admitted no liability in the deaths of Ken Saro-Wiwa or the others, or any wrongdoing in their Nigerian operations.
Ken Saro-Wiwa's trial and execution foreshadowed many of the current problems of environmental security: the economic and political instability of a petro-state such as Nigeria, the collateral environmental damage suffered due to the extraction of oil and the antigovernment insurgencies that such resentment can spawn, and the criticality of a healthy environment for the security of the state. His remains are buried in Nigeria, but a memorial to his life stands in London, where his son resides.
Na'allah, Abdul-Rasheed. 1998. Ogoni's Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. 1996. A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary. New York: Penguin Books.
Wiwa, Ken. 2001. In the Shadow of a Saint: A Son's Journey to Understanding his Father's Legacy. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press.
http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/160
http://www.rightlivelihood.org/saro-wiwa.html
Dr. Vandana Shiva was born in 1952 in Uttarakhand, India. She was educated as a physicist and earned her doctoral degree in physics in 1979, but became involved in issues of agriculture, soil, ecology, and environmental policy. She chronicled the endeavors of some of the women tree-huggers from the 1977 Chipko Movement in India, where village women in the Himalayas protected local trees from loggers by forming human chains around them and hugging them. (Shiva herself claims to have been involved with the movement, but it is unclear if she actually participated.) In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology to promote local agriculture. By 1991, the resulting network of seed savers and organic farmers spread across 16 states in India had helped set up 54 community seed banks across the country. Called Navdanya (“nine seeds,” symbolizing the protection of biological and cultural diversity), it continues to promote local agriculture, organic farming, and the use of native seeds.
Dr. Shiva is known for her outspoken public campaigns against industrial agriculture, biotechnology companies, and genetically modified food and seeds. Her ecological argument is that uniform production of commodity crops reduces the health and biodiversity of both the soil and the diet of the people. Socially and economically, overindustrialization of the land actually decreases food security by taking knowledge and decision-making away from local farmers and concentrating it in the hands of large multinational agricultural corporations like Monsanto. In her view, large industrial agricultural movements—such as the Green Revolution and the development of genetically modified seeds—is bad for India and for the world. She has come under some criticism for her antiglobalization views, and indeed the crop production gains made under the Green Revolution are estimated to have prevented the starvation death of millions of people. Navdanya has also campaigned against the attempts by biotechnology companies to patent genes from native seeds, plants, and animals, arguing that this local diversity is a gift from the earth and is not to be owned.
Dr. Shiva is regarded as a key eco-feminist for her linkage of agricultural health and productivity with women's empowerment and her view of the earth as female. In 1993, Dr. Shiva received the Right Livelihood Award, for “placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse.” She is currently engaged in a three-year project with the Royal Government of Bhutan to assist in the country's shift away from industrial agriculture and toward organic farming.
Shiva, Vandana. 1989. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. London: Zed Books.
Shiva, Vandana. 2000. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Shiva, Vandana, ed. 2007. Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Shiva, Vandana. 2008. Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.