CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: Ecological Thinking

Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues.

—Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmental activist (1995)

National security, which has been the primary driver of international relations since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, seems further away today than ever. Global population has passed 7 billion, more sovereign nations exist than ever before, information is transmitted around the world in an instant, and people themselves can be transported anywhere on the planet in less than 24 hours. Weapons are orders of magnitude more destructive than they have ever been, and the world's sole superpower is currently engaged in two wars. Environmental resources—from the air to the land and the ocean—are in declining health, and developed nations are struggling with financial meltdown.

At the time of this writing, the end of 2011:

• The unrest roiling across much of the Arab world is still in full swing nearly a year after it began. A few of the area's autocratic rulers have stepped down in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, and tenuous new governments are still forming in these nations. Others have been forcibly routed from power by their own subjects, such as Moammar Khadafi of Libya. Still others are hanging on to power through a combination of bribery and repression, such as Bashar Assad of Syria. It remains to be seen if the so-called Arab Spring results in a new, open, democratic Middle East and North Africa region, or if renewed sectarian violence will erase any peaceful gains.

• The nation of Iran is making progress, despite various technical setbacks, in its development of nuclear technology. Iran already has working uranium centrifuges at Natanz and Qom, and a nuclear power plant at Bushehr. The international community is asking itself what Iran's intentions are, and there are only two options. First, Iran is developing nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty (NPT). Second, Iran is exercising its sovereign right under the terms of the NPT and developing enrichment capability to support domestic nuclear power. Electricity demand in Iran is expected to increase 7–9 percent annually, and nuclear power is a carbon-free option.

• Over 400,000 famine refugees from the drought-stricken nation of Somalia are streaming toward relief camps in neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya. Tens of thousands of Somalis have already died from the effects of the worst drought in decades. However, the Islamic militant group Al Shabaab is again targeting food aid workers in Somalia, so the paucity of food the refugees do get is likely to be restricted further, as relief agencies like the World Food Program freeze deliveries and pull workers out of the country.

• Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency, recently opined that if the nations of the world do not take immediate steps to move global energy requirements away from fossil fuels and toward renewable, carbon-free energy, we are on track for a global average rise in temperature of 6.5°C by 2100. Most of the IPCC's predictions of sea level rise, ecosystem disruption, and species extinction reach dire levels at 5°C, so if Mr. Birol is correct, humanity may only have a short window of time to avert an ecological disaster the likes of which modern humans have never seen.

Expand or Die—Ecological?

Shortages of fresh water, lootable resources going to further conflict and war, oil politics at the international level, continued food insecurity, climate change, unwanted migration, a near-constant public health risk, and the collateral environmental damage incurred by the very tools that nations use to supposedly protect themselves: many countries around the world are facing multiple environmental security stressors that look to get worse in the coming decades. This sounds like a litany of doom, but it doesn't have to be.

Ecological Thinking

It is tempting to view resources, particularly food, water, and arable land, as obtainable only in a zero-sum fashion. If my nation is concerned about food security, for example, then I might attempt to obtain as much arable land as possible, since every acre of land my neighbor has is an acre that I don't have. Yet food insecurity is only partially related to how much arable land a nation has, and depends in large part upon a host of other environmental, political, and economic factors. Given that many of these security threats are transnational, how can nations work to ensure their security without falling into the zero-sum trap?

The answer may lie in ecological thinking, the view that every component in a complex system is connected to every other component directly or indirectly, and that these relationships are not necessarily fixed or predefined, but change over time the way different components in living systems do. This type of systems analysis is well understood in ecology, but is not usually applied to social and political systems. For example, in traditional economics, every production process relies on inputs in the form of raw materials and produces outputs in the form of waste products. “Value” can be increased only so far as new raw materials are obtained, and wealth accrued to one party is not accrued to another—a linear, zero-sum view of value. In traditional security, most nations founder upon the security dilemma, discussed in Chapter 1. The zero-sum vision of international security means that a particular nation becomes more secure as its neighbors become less secure. “Expand or die” has been the guiding principle for any nation wishing to build an empire, yet this is a linear, zero-sum view of security. Viewing national security in this way makes a nation perpetually insecure, attempting to control as many changing political, economic, and environmental conditions as possible.

However, in ecological systems, every output from one process is an input into another process, and there is no such thing as waste. Every system is connected to every other system, and unlimited expansion isn't possible. Food, water, air, physical space—something is the limiting factor to growth. If human societies changed their view of security to bring it into line with ecological thinking, the idea of continued national geographical and economic expansion would be seen for the imperial pipe dream that it is. Water security is an excellent example. There is no substitute for water, so in order to maintain a secure and stable water supply, nations must live within the physical limitations of the ecosystem that provides them with water. The national security imperative of expansion may not be an environmental option, so ecological thinking can put us in the frame of mind that we need to accept physical ecological limits on our growth. In addition, as ecosystems degrade, nations may not even have the luxury of a zero-sum calculation when it comes to natural resources! Environmentally based threats are inherently negative-sum, since everyone is worse off in the face of environmental degradation. By contrast, the positive-sum theory of collective security is taken to a new, more comprehensive level by thinking ecologically; everyone is better off by ensuring a stable ecosystem, and collective gains can be made by investing time, money, and know-how in environmental preservation. Ecological thinking can give us a new view of national security, and of international relations in general.

Complex Interdependence—The First Step in Ecological Thinking

In 1977, political scientists Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye described a theory of international relations called complex interdependence, designed to synthesize elements of liberal and realist thought to form a system which would more adequately reflect the way policy decisions are made at the international level. Complex interdependence is the best framework in which to consider questions of environmental security, because it is the closest theory we have to ecological thinking in international relations, though in this case, the complexity is scientific and the interdependence is (ecologically) literal.

There are three pillars of complex interdependence theory:

1. The use of multiple channels of action between societies in international relations, including interstate, transgovernmental, and transnational channels;

2. The absence of a hierarchy of issues, with changing agendas and linkages between the issues prioritized; and

3. The objective of bringing about a decline in the use of force and coercive power.

Keohane and Nye did not use the term ecological thinking, but they implicitly recognized that international environmental issues such as ocean policy or climate warming could not be dealt with adequately by purely realist or purely liberal frameworks of international relations.

Environmental security is informed by all three pillars of complex interdependence. First, multiple channels of action are necessary to address the full scope of environmental security issues such as climate change. The IPCC, national governments, informal scientific contacts, financial and business institutions such as the insurance industry, Greenpeace and other international environmental NGOs, and concerned citizens all have their own roles to play in the discussion of whether to mitigate GHG emissions and how. Second, the absence of hierarchy is common in dealing with interconnected environmental issues. For example, climate change will affect precipitation, increasing it in some areas and reducing it in others. This affects irrigation which in turn affects food security and political stability. Farmers, the national water authority, the retailers and food markets, the national government, and the public will each take priority at some point in the decision-making process. Third, force and coercive power play little or no role in issues of environmental security because the threats to security from environment-related issues are endogenous; they arise from our own peacetime behaviors. This very complexity is the reason traditional security scholars become impatient and dismissive of interdisciplinary fields such as environmental security. Yet in an increasingly globalized world, viewing security through a traditional realist lens will not aid in understanding the complex interdependence embedded in environmental security issues, nor will it provide a path to solving them.

Growing Population and Continued Consumption—Ecological?

With the global population surpassing 7 billion in October 2011, we must consider whether continued human population growth is ecological. The 2010 estimate from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs places the global population in 2050 at 9.3 billion, depending on health, fertility, and other factors. By 2100, this is predicted to climb to 10.1 billion. As people get wealthier, they consume more goods and resources; according to the World Bank, global GDP has increased from roughly $11 trillion in 1980 to $63 trillion as of 2010. Furthermore, neither the population nor the consumption is spread out equally. Only 1.31 billion of the global population will live in the developed world by 2050, and this figure will only increase to 1.33 billion by 2100. The rest of the population growth will occur in the developing world, where the rate of resource consumption is already increasing. Per capita energy use in the United States has roughly held steady since as far back as 1973, whereas the same figure in China has almost doubled since only 2001, and national CO₂ emissions, growing since the late 1960s, has skyrocketed since only 2002, making China with a population of 1.34 billion people the largest GHG emitter in the world.

With populations growing around the developing world, and these same countries increasing their rates of consumption and pollution, it is relevant to ask if we might reach a point of “too much” pollution. The theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesizes that as nations develop, they consume resources and pollute more until they reach a developmental tipping point, after which the population is wealthy enough to prioritize environmental health over unfettered economic growth and begins to lower its pollution levels.

The wealthy developed nations are theorized to already be past this point because they generally have strong environmental protection laws, but much more populous developing nations such as China and India are still approaching it, because their pollution levels are rising in tandem with their national GDP. Economists will rightly argue that the relevance of this theory varies with the type of pollutant emitted, and that developed nations have just outsourced the pollution intrinsic to wealth production to developing nations. However, it is important to bear in mind that the growing developing nations have significantly larger populations than the developed nations did when they went through this transition. Consequently, pollution is being emitted globally in much greater amounts. This makes ecologists wonder if there is some absolute environmental limit that we could reach where human well-being and security is permanently affected, though the exact time and amount of pollution it would take to reach this threshold is unknown.

North-South Inequity—Ecological?

Two decades ago, many environmental security thinkers argued that an expanded understanding of the threats to security, especially the links between natural resources and international behavior, was required in order to maintain peaceful relations between the developed world and the developing world. Rich nations had grown rich on their environmental resources, and now that they were wealthy, their cautionary warnings to the poorer nations about global environmental destruction fell on skeptical ears.

In order to help close the growing development gap between the global North and the global South, nations folded the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities into several international environmental agreements, including the 1992 Rio Declaration and the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This principle stated that those nations that had benefitted from natural resource consumption to develop now had a historical responsibility both to mitigate past environmental damage and to help those developing nations that were still fighting poverty to do so in a way that would avoid further global environmental degradation as much as possible. Richer nations in the North would then contribute financially toward the cost of pursuing sustainable development in the South, and this transfer of resources would help to curb the environmentally destructive development practices such as large-scale logging and fishing that would be fueling much of the coming degradation. Unfortunately, while reasonable in theory, such a resource transfer from North to South is not likely to happen in the current economic and political climate.

At present, the development gap between the North and South remains very large. Population growth is much greater in the South, but development indicators in the South such as health care, infant mortality, and literacy often lag their Northern counterparts. Trade in food and agricultural products is still skewed toward the developed nations, which often subsidize the producers of cereals and other export crops. Developing nations that cannot afford to do the same face an enduring competitive disadvantage on the global food market, as their small farmers are unable to sell their grain at profitable prices.

Finally, North-South inequity lies at the heart of the global climate change impasse over who acts first and why. Developing nations like China and India argue that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities obligates wealthy nations like the United States, which have used expansive amounts of fossil fuels to develop, to reduce their GHG emissions first. Then when the developing nations have caught up economically, as outlined by the Kuznets Curve, they will reduce their emissions. However, the United States, which appears to be an outlier among developed nations on this issue, insists that the developing nations must reduce their GHG emissions in tandem with the developed nations, and points to the fact that China's emissions are larger than its own if measured on a national basis (the United States still leads the world in per capita GHG emissions). Until this fundamental inequity is bridged, prospects for any sort of progress on a post-Kyoto international climate regime remain poor.

Is the growing inequity between the North and the South an example of ecological thinking? No, because complex ecological systems tend toward a stable state. This is not to say they do not change; they face perturbations all the time, but large-scale inequalities do not persist because the system brings itself back into equilibrium. Large-scale human inequalities such as knowledge, wealth, or energy use will engender resentment on the part of those lacking such goods, especially if they perceive that they have been purposefully or neglectfully withheld. This gives rise to grievance conflicts of the kind currently occurring in petro-states such as Nigeria. Applying ecological thinking to developmental inequity would allow for the transfer of knowledge and opportunity, and eventually funds, from the developed world to the developing world. The material and financial resources available to the citizens of the global South may never equal to those enjoyed by the global North, but increased equity means increased security.

Geo-Engineering as a Technical Fix—Ecological?

Sometimes human societies cannot come together to adequately address problems of complex ecological interdependence such as climate change. In the face of difficult policy choices such as how to reduce population levels, consumption levels, or both, politicians often resort to the idea that there must be some scientific or technological fix that obviates the need to make a difficult or unpopular decision. In such instances, the lure of technological thinking is very attractive, because the larger systemic reasons for the problem do not have to be addressed.

Geo-engineering, which is the attempt to control the earth's climate to suit human needs, is a perfect example of technological thinking. The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology defines it as “the deliberate large-scale modification of the earth's climate systems for the purposes of counteracting and mitigating anthropogenic climate change.” There are currently two methods of attempting geo-engineering, solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). CDR involves removing CO₂ directly from the earth's atmosphere and storing it in order to allow heat to pass back through the atmosphere into space. This can be as prosaic as planting trees or as complicated as chemical storage, but it generally requires a long time horizon for the effects of carbon removal on the climate to be felt. SRM, which involves blocking incoming sunlight in order to lower global temperature, is both faster and more problematic from an environmental security perspective. Various methods, such as cloud whitening and space-based reflectors, are years away from deployment, but sulfate aerosol dispersal is possible now. Aerosols increase the albedo, or reflectivity, of the planet's atmosphere and lower global average temperature quickly. Volcanic eruptions cause much the same effect; the 1981 eruption of Mount Pinatubo lowered global average temperature by 0.5°C for several years.

There are several ecological and political concerns surrounding SRM. First, blocking sunlight can affect net primary productivity (NPP), a measure of how much photochemical energy is captured from sunlight and stored by plants. Lower NPP means less energy moving up the global trophic web. Of more direct concern to humans is the loss of agricultural output, one of the direct causes of food insecurity. Second, it is unclear as to how and where these effects will be felt. Just as climate change will cause some nations to benefit and some nations to suffer, so too will geo-engineering. Whose hand will be on the global thermostat is yet to be determined. Should the ability go to whichever nation can successfully deploy the technology, or should this deployment require global permission? Third, and something to be expected under the terms of complex interdependence, is that some methods of SRM are on the order of “only” several hundred million dollars, cheap enough for a corporation or wealthy individual to accomplish. This means the ability to fundamentally alter the earth's climate now rests in the hands of not only nations, but transnational actors.

The specter of successful geo-engineering technology raises a moral hazard problem for the citizens of GHG-emitting nations. If one or more of these technologies works, it is easy to think that the problem is now fixed, so we place less emphasis on attaining a costly Kyoto-type global climate change mitigation treaty. However, this path to fixing the problem of climate change means that SRM must be continually maintained. If GHG emissions are allowed to continue to rise and then the SRM measures fail or are discontinued, the planetary temperature could spike upwards.

All this assumes that the technology for geo-engineering is deployed from a position of mutual agreement—what if there is no mutual agreement and one nation deploys the technology unilaterally? Can one nation change its neighbor's weather (and likely its own), and if so, is this an act of war? This is not just an ecological concern, but a security concern, because a global SRM scheme makes the concept of national sovereignty further obsolete on a functional level. We currently have no guidelines for how to approach the ecological, ethical, and security aspects of climate modification, but scientific research into the topic continues apace.

Figure 6.1 Joel Pett comic

(Joel Pett Editorial Cartoon used with the permission of Joel Pett and the Cartoonist Group. All rights reserved.)

Is addressing the climate crisis by tinkering with the earth's atmosphere ecological thinking? In one way, yes it is. By mimicking the effects of a natural phenomenon, we are using the earth's own systems and mechanisms to achieve the desired result, that of cooling the planet's average temperature. However, in another way, attempting to geo-engineer the global climate is the most unecological option available to us. We haven't been able to live within our planetary limits, so we are using the equivalent of ecological trickery in an attempt to change the limits! Even now politicians are talking of geo-engineering as a possible fallback option if the global temperature begins to rise significantly and nations have not been able to agree on an international GHG mitigation regime.

Ecological Security Is Environmental Security

If our study is going to yield fruitful results in the long run, we need to be aware of all the facets of security. There are academic and policy dangers in being too pedagogical and not flexible enough in the study of environmental security. Those scholars who insist on a narrow definition of security or find nothing convincing without a statistical correlation are missing the trees for the forest. Political scientist Arnold Wolfers wrote in 1952 that “efforts for security are bound to be experienced as a burden; security after all is nothing but the absence of the evil of insecurity, a negative value so to speak.” Nations that view security in this way are constantly wary of threats that may materialize and so they spend their limited time, funds, and personnel to “sweep back the ocean,” counting their success in disasters avoided. I will respectfully disagree with Wolfers; ecological thinking makes national security a positive value, a direct benefit to be enjoyed by all nations.

Perhaps the fundamental difference between traditional national security and international environmental security is the difference between being secure “from” something versus being secure “in” something. Armies, weapons, and border fences can keep a nation secure “from” invading forces, refugees, smugglers, and insurgent groups. But the strongest military in the world cannot protect a nation from water and food shortages, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, floods and droughts, and infectious diseases. A nation that invests in maintaining its cropland, its water infrastructure, and its public health system is secure “in” its ability to provide for its citizens. Living within our ecological means provides environmental security to all nations, and any other security threats are manufactured by humans.