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Taking a Livelihoods Approach to Understanding Environmental Security
February 17, 2012 // By Kate DiamondMORE
Since the concept of “environmental security” first gained traction in the early 1990s, research on the issue has been overwhelmingly focused on how environmental change impacts state security. That has been to the detriment of policymakers trying to preempt instability and conflict, according to the University of Toronto’s Tom Deligiannis in his article, “The Evolution of Environment-Conflict Research: Toward a Livelihood Framework,” published in February’s Global Environmental Politics.
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Winning Hearts and Minds: An Interview with Chief Naval Officer Admiral Gary Roughead
May 23, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffMOREThe original version of this article, by Rosemarie Calvert, appeared in the Center for a Better Life’s livebetter magazine.
Few people understand “smart” power as well as Chief Naval Officer (CNO) Admiral Gary Roughead. To this ingenious, adept leader of the world’s largest and most powerful navy, it’s not just about military strategy or political science; it’s about heart. It’s about the measure of a man with regard to honor, courage and commitment. And, it’s about appreciation and respect for the natural world. As one of the U.S. Defense Department’s most powerful decision-makers, Roughead has helped mold a new breed of sailor who understands that preventing war is just as important as winning war – that creating partners is more important than creating opponents. Add mission mandates such as humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and environmental stewardship, and it’s clear why Roughead and his brand of smart power are having a profound impact on international peace, national security, and natural security.
Engendering Environmental Advocacy
“You don’t live on the ocean and not love it. My appreciation for the environment came from a very early age – from just loving to be on the water. It’s something that’s had a very strong impact on me,” explains Roughead, who grew up in North Africa where his father worked in the oil business. He and his family lived along an uninhabited area of coastline where his father’s company built a power plant and refinery to process and transport Libya’s huge oil field finds to offshore tankers.
“We were the first people to move there; I was still in grammar school. The beauty in being the first was that the coastline was absolutely pristine. Even before school, I would get up and go skin diving. There were beautiful reefs, and fish were everywhere. The vegetation was just incredible. The company built an offshore loading area a few miles off the beach with 36-inch pipes pumping crude oil out to where these big supertankers would come in. Back then, there wasn’t a high regard for the environment, so when storms would kick-up and ships got underway in a hurry, they would just cast them off and all that oil would go into the ocean.
“Fast forward about five years, and the last time I went skin diving I didn’t see a living thing. The vegetation was dead. At that time I was visiting my folks on summer leave from the Naval Academy. There were periods when I would skin dive and then surface after being down about 35-40 feet, and my lungs would be ready to burst. I’d look up, having moved from my original location, and see this massive oil slick. And, I’d go, ‘Oh gosh…no!’ But, you didn’t have any choice. I would come home and actually have to clean the oil off with kerosene because it was caked on me.
“I saw and experienced environmental devastation, and it had an effect on me. Being at sea all the time – I love going to sea and seeing everything about it – drove me to the views I have. I really do think there’s compatibility between the Navy and the environment. We have things we must accomplish, but we can do them cleanly and responsibly. That’s what we’ve tried to demonstrate to those who have different views – that there has to be compatibility between the two.”
Continue reading on the Center for a Better Life.
Rosemarie Calvert is the publisher and editorial director of livebetter magazine and director of the Center for a Better Life.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “USS Nitze underway with ships from U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and foreign navies,” courtesy of flickr user Official U.S. Navy Imagery. -
From the Wilson Center
Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace
Download Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace from the Wilson Center.MORE
How does globalization affect natural resource issues such as water on local, national, and international levels? Can our common dependence on these stressed resources be a force for bringing people together rather than dividing us? What lessons can we learn from sharing insights from communities at these very different levels of organization?
Pathways to Peace
In January 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fetzer Institute invited 22 scholars and practitioners to a two-day seminar to discuss these questions and the deep connection between caring for the environment and caring for community. Pathways to Peace: Defining Community in the Age of Globalization was the second seminar in a three-year initiative to combine scholarship, public policy, and local practice to articulate and support global conflict transformation and reconciliation in communities throughout the world. Examining the effect of environmental peacebuilding on communities, the discussion explored how governments, NGOs, the private sector, and other interested parties can generate positive outcomes while minimizing negative ones.
Participants from Canada, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States brought to the table a wide range of experience and expertise from diverse fields, including peacebuilding, community building, health care, economic development, conflict resolution, and foundation management. By convening leaders in environmental peacebuilding and community building, the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute drew on a wide range of experience and perspectives related to environment, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and research. The group used water access and peacebuilding case studies as a means to enter into dialogue about the challenges of global community engagement.
Shared Waters
In preparation for the seminar, geographer and renowned water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University contributed a paper, “The Enlightenment Rift and Peacebuilding: Rationality, Spirituality, and Shared Waters,” in which he laid out the complicated, sometimes conflictual, and often surprisingly collaborative aspects of negotiations over water resources. For Wolf, given water’s life-sustaining quality but limited quantity, it seems intuitive that “water should be the most conflictive of resources.” However, he maintains that “while press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, what has been more encouraging is that, throughout the world, water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues…there is a long, and in many ways deeper, history of water-related cooperation.”
On this foundation, Wolf illustrates four stages of water conflict: from adversarial, to reflective, to integrative, to action. Lessons from the “spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation” he says, “offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools, and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation.”
Seminar participants used Wolf’s paper as a starting point from which to write short papers based on their own expertise and experience. From Kenya to Nepal to Harlem, participants shared their perspectives on the challenges and promises of environmental issues, community building and organizing, and peacebuilding.
This report, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, draws from the rich dialogue of the seminar and seminar papers to share the broad range of experience and the insight of the participants. To learn more about these remarkable programs and the people working on natural resources, peacebuilding, and community development, see the complete list of papers on page 120, which can be downloaded from the Wilson Center. -
Reading Radar
The Impact of Environmental Change and Geography on Conflict
MORE“Environmental Change, Strategic Foresight, and Impacts on Military Power,” published in Parameters by Chad M. Briggs, the Minerva Chair of Energy and Environmental Security at the Air University, USAF, tackles the changing definition of “environmental security” and how the concept can help planners better prepare for the effects of climate change and an elevated focus on energy security. New potentially destabilizing issues like glacial melt, sea-level rise, and Arctic ice melt are on the horizon, writes Briggs. China and others are already planning for these events, and it’s important that the United States does the same, starting with a greater appreciation for the impact of environmental security on vulnerability and risk. “Due to past practices and bureaucratic stovepipes, implementation is limited more by initiative and imagination than actual resources,” he writes.Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College Dublin and the International Peace Research Institute finds in “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Does Physical Geography Affect a State’s Conflict Risk?” that a region’s geography does not have a uniform effect on its likelihood of experiencing conflict. Raleigh’s conclusions, published in International Interactions, run counter to traditional histories which often emphasize the importance of physical geography, specifically with regard to civil war and insurgencies. Focusing on the Great Lakes region of Africa, Raleigh finds that other factors – like how populated an area is and its proximity to valuable natural resources – correlate higher with an area’s propensity for violence than any other factor. -
Teaching Environment and Security at West Point
February 16, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoMOREU.S. strategic assessments like the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the 2010 National Security Strategy, and the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment have placed natural resources, climate change, population, and poverty squarely on the American security agenda. But are these broad statements in doctrine and threat assessments translating into tangible changes, such as new approaches to the education of future military officers? My colleague Sean Peoples and I recently spoke with faculty and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy about how West Point’s Geography and Environmental Engineering Department is integrating these issues directly into their curriculum.
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Book Preview: ‘Environmental Politics: Scale and Power’
February 1, 2011 // By Shannon O’LearMOREThe cover of my book, Environmental Politics: Scale and Power, shows two cows casually rummaging through piles of garbage on the streets of a city somewhere in India. It’s a colorful, but disturbing, image. Why not show cows in their “natural” setting, say, in a Kansas pasture? Who let them into the street? Why are they eating garbage? The image is symbolic of what the book aims to achieve: to get us out of our comfort zones in thinking about environmental issues and challenge us to reconsider how we think about issues like climate change, energy, food security, garbage, toxins, and resource conflicts.
The book draws from my experience teaching environmental policy, environmental geopolitics, international conflict, and human geography. It starts by asking some fundamental questions: What exactly is “the environment” anyway? Is there any part of the world that is completely untouched by human actions? How do different forms of power selectively shape our understanding of particular environmental issues (while obscuring other issues from our view)?
The book draws on the idea of the “Anthropocene” – a new geologic era characterized by irreversible, human-induced changes to the planet. Because these changes (which in large part have already occurred) are irreversible, Anthropocene-subscribers argue we should focus our efforts on mitigation, adaptation, and coming to terms with the realities of the environment as it is, rather than something that must be returned to some previous or “normal” state.
Our understanding of environmental issues is shaped by various types of power – economic, political, ideological, and military – and therefore tends to be limited in terms of spatial scale. Why do we tend to think of climate change as a global phenomenon instead of something we might experience (and contend with) locally? Is food security something we should be mindful of when we make individual choices about food? We tend not to discuss what happens to our garbage, but everyone knows about recycling, right?
Environmental Politics: Scale and Power offers non-geographers an appreciation of how and why geographers think spatially to solve problems. Commonly accepted views of environmental issues tend to get trapped at particular spatial scales, creating a few dominant narratives. When we combine a spatial perspective with an inquiry into the dynamics of power that have influenced our understanding of environmental issues, we can more clearly appreciate the complexity of human-environment relations and come to terms with adapting to and living in the Anthropocene era.
Today’s environmental challenges can sometimes appear distant and immense, but this book aims to show how decisions we make in our day-to-day lives – from buying bottled water and microwave popcorn to diamond jewelry – have already had an effect on a grand scale.
Shannon O’Lear is a professor of geography at the University of Kansas and the author of Environmental Politics: Scale and Power. She has recently completed a research project examining why we do not see widespread or sustained environmental resource-related conflict in Azerbaijan, as literature on resource conflict would suggest.
Image Credit: Environmental Politics: Scale and Power, courtesy of Justin Riley and Cambridge University Press. -
UN Millennium Development Goals Summit: PHE On the Side
September 21, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffMOREFrom 20-22 September 2010, world leaders will meet in New York City to discuss the United Nations’ “We Can End Poverty 2015” Millennium Development Goals, which include food security, maternal and child health, and environmental sustainability as key objectives, but controversially, make no mention of population. Officially, there is only one small “side session,” organized by Vicky Markham of the Center for Environment and Population, devoted to talking about the MDGs in the integrated context of population, health, and environment (PHE).
Since 2005, annual Millennium Development Goals reports have published data from a large number of international organizations and UN agencies to track progress. According to the 2010 Millennium Development Goals Report, the 2008 economic downturn has stalled momentum to achieve the eight goals. The report also stated that “though progress had been made, it is uneven. And without a major push forward, many of the MDG targets are likely to be missed in most regions.”
While PHE remains somewhat taboo at the UN, The New Security Beat continues to highlight the important linkages between these issues. Check out some of our recent coverage including Calyn Ostrowski’s blogging from the 2010 Global Maternal Health Conference, perspectives on Pakistan’s ongoing environmental and development disaster, the World Bank’s latest report on international land grabs and their effect on food security, and our coverage of all things population, health, and environment.
Sources: AFP, United Nations.
Photo Credit: Adapted from “United Nations,” courtesy of flickr user Ashitakka. -
Walker’s World: From Warming to Warring: A Review of Cleo Paskal’s New Book
January 15, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffWilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker recently reviewed Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map by Cleo Paskal, for his UPI column, “Walker’s World.”MORE
Excerpts:The Copenhagen summit showed that climate change is as much about geopolitics and power as it is about the weather. China‘s blunt refusal to accept any binding limits on its carbon emissions, despite the agonized pleas of small island governments facing extinction, demonstrated that this new aspect of the game of nations is going to be played as hardball.
And yet, as Cleo Paskal argues in her pioneering new book “Global Warring,” China is also powering ahead on every aspect of climate change. While protecting its right to pollute (because it depends heavily on coal as its main homegrown energy source), China is using state subsidies to seize the lead in solar power manufacturing….But perhaps Paskal’s most striking story is the way that China is also seeking to become a major player in the arctic. China has acquired an icebreaker, a seat with observer status on the Arctic Council and its own arctic research base at Svalbard. (China also has two research bases in the Antarctic.) …
Paskal’s book is full of such vignettes, illustrating the way that climate change and the intensifying competition for resources is starting to change the nature of power politics. Paskal, a Canadian who is a fellow of London’s prestigious Chatham House think tank and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, has been a pioneering scholar of the new terrain where climate change confronts national security, where geopolitics, geoeconomics and global warming all collide. It is not just rivalry for oil and gas supplies and water, but also for fishing rights and undersea mining and mineral rights that may well be up for grabs when some of the lowest-lying Pacific island countries disappear under the rising waves. …
“We need to start thinking about the legal and economic implications of these developments now, before we have to start tackling them in the middle of a crisis or a humanitarian emergency,” Paskal told a seminar at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center Friday. …
Paskal sees China and Russia taking these issues more seriously that the United States and Europe, and her book is not just a wakeup call for Western leaders but is also an arresting and original work on climate change, probably the most important book on the environment to be published this year.
“As pressure is put on food, water supplies and national boundaries, famine and war may become more frequent,” Paskal concludes. “This instability may make populations more tolerant of autocratic governments, especially nationalistic capitalist ones where the political, economic and military sectors combine to protect existing resources and aggressively try to secure new ones. China and Russia already have a head start on this model.”
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