Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate stones and tropic climbs and thriving seas.
Winds blowing through breathing trees.
Strong old zones save sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello, k squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly K squid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. According to Dr. Simon Dalby, professor emeritus in the Basili School of International affairs at Wilfred Laureate University in Ontario, Canada, global politics over the past 70 years has been driven by an overabundance of firepower, both nuclear and carbon based. The first was used by great powers during the Cold War to threaten incineration of the world, intentionally or by accident, and in the name of national security.
The second now threatens the future of life on Earth, human and nonhuman. But the great powers and the not so great resolutely refuse to give up fossil fuels once again in the name of national security, but also lifestyle. In 2022, Simon Dalby published rethinking Environmental Security, an analysis of firepower past, present, and future, and he is my guest.
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Today on sustainability now. Simon Dolby, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:01:49] Speaker D: Thank you, Ronnie. It's good to be here.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Well, we've known each other for more than 30 years, and our paths and research have crossed more than one time over the decades. You were trained as a geographer, I think, and studied geopolitics.
I was trained as a mishmash of hardened social science and studied geopolitics, although one of my focuses was global environmental politics. And our work hasn't been that far apart over the years. But how did you come to geography and your geopolitical focus?
And maybe you can also explain for our listeners what geopolitics means.
[00:02:30] Speaker D: I was trained as a geographer. I went to Simon Fraser in the early 80s intending to do a PhD on questions of environmental politics. I was fascinated by the sort of philosophical background that environmentalists were bringing and how that lined up with all sorts of thinking from, particularly in the european left.
But this was the early eighty s, and the discussion of nuclear war was very much in the air. And so I ended up shifting focus to thinking about the environmental impacts of nuclear weapons, first of all. And then when I was trying to figure out what would happen to British Columbia, as it was my initial study of these things, if there was a major nuclear war, my curiosity was raised by, why do we have so many of these things? If the Russians, the Soviet Union can destroy North America with a couple of hundred nuclear weapons, and the Americans can do the same to the Soviet Union. Casper Weinberger was then defense secretary in the United States, and he had a project for building 17,000 new nuclear weapons. And how can you possibly justify building that number of weapons? And then I started digging into nuclear strategy and defense policy and started to figure out, well, what possible rationale could generate the kind of budget priorities that would justify building 17,000 new weapons, never mind the ones that were already in existence. And that really got me interested, as a social scientist, in how that kind of policy would be justified.
Clearly, the overt rationale was, well, these evil soviet communists aren't coming to get us unless we deter them.
But that wasn't, obviously, the whole explanation. There was a whole lot of other things going on. So I ended up writing a dissertation, trying to unpack the rationale that would make that kind of what seemed to me to be completely insane, public investment in weapons that would just guarantee the immolation of everybody. And basically, it was the reasoning practices that justified. That was what I wanted to try and figure out. How do you think that? And so when I started digging in, clearly there was nuclear weapons. Clearly there was a whole lot of stuff to do with international relations and how it was great power activities were understood and interpreted clearly. There was a very obvious focus explicitly on the nature of the Soviet Union as a political system. And there in the middle of it all was some of the old classic geopolitics stuff, the Alfred McKinders, the pivot of history determining russian behavior, supposedly. And it was actually intimately interlinked with the strategic thinking, which just blew me away. I had no idea that that kind of old geography stuff that had long since been abandoned by serious geography scholars, was actually hiding away at the back of the rationales for building these enormous numbers of nuclear weapons. So that's how I got into thinking about geopolitics.
The second part of your question was, well, what do we mean by geopolitics?
And obviously, geopolitics refers back to that old, early, late 19th, early 20th century discussions about the closure of colonizing space. There's an american version of it, but the focus has usually been on the conduct of Russia. And Halford McKinder always trip over that name. Halford McKinder wrote his famous paper in the early 19 hundreds on the pivot of history, suggesting that the whole of human history was really interpreted through what happened in Central Asia. And, of course, subsequently, Central Asia was where the Soviet Union was. So this old historical stuff got dug out. Later in the 20th century, geopolitics was linked with Nazism and rationales for Lebanon's realm. The expansion of control by Germany of substantial part of Europe was justified by all sorts of arguments about population size and the need to grow borders and the competitive nature of great powers. And of course, geography as a discipline abandoned doing that kind of stuff in the aftermath of the Second World War because everything was tainted with this nazi expansionist know. Syrian scholars weren't going to go there because this had been discredited as nonsense. And besides which, the United nations had basically agreed that borders wouldn't should be changed forcefully.
And so geographies had simply abandoned all that stuff. But my generation tackling nuclear war and worrying about this, sort of came back to look at geopolitics as not just this old geography determining destiny stuff, but actually looking at the reasoning practices, how it was that we thought about the world here and there, east and west, free world, communist world, the global south versus the global north. All of these are geographical categories that are profoundly important in terms of how we frame our understanding of the world and hence justify policies. So the reinvention of geopolitics in the by sort of my generation of geographers focused on these reasoning practices, on how it is we frame the world crucially. Of course. For me, Edward Said's book Orientalism, how the west was distinguished from the east and how the east was seen as irrational and primitive and exotic in comparison to the rational west, was absolutely crucial in terms of understanding how the world is divided and hence justified.
Policies are justified for building 17,000 nuclear weapons or intervening militarily in parts of the world for all sorts of reasons. But it's that geographical framing is what most of us geographers for the last 30 years or so have focused on, not the old fashioned Alfred McKinder stuff and the lemons realm arguments and so on. So geopolitics is about both the old intellectual trajectory, but also the current analyses of how it is we frame and understand the world, our place in it, and hence what appropriate political action is all about.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: At the time of this recording, we've just had a little geopolitics float across the skies over Canada and the United States. And of course, it caused a big uproar, even though the US does overflights all the time.
So the chinese government described it as a weather balloon gone astray. And of course, the US government thinks that China is spying on its military facilities. It's hard to take seriously. But how do you understand the growing tension between the US and China from a geopolitical perspective?
If you were going know, use that particular framework to explain it or interpret it?
[00:09:46] Speaker D: Well, the conventional analysis is that the United States is increasingly worried that its sort of primacy and world affairs is being challenged by a growing China and economic powerhouse. For the last few decades, there's all sorts of mutual suspicion between the two. And the balloon, the weather balloon or spy balloon, depending on what you want to call it. It's probably actually a bit of both. In some ways has become an object that was discussed in the media intensely. And of course, contemporary politics, once the media jumps all over it, inevitably politicians are sort of drawn into the fray. The interesting point is, of course, that this isn't the first time that a chinese weather balloon, in lots of inverted commas, has drifted across North America. And you're right. I mean, states have been using aircraft and satellites to spy on each other for forever, at least for the last century. Balloons are one of the oldest spy technologies in military stuff, going right back to the napoleonic era. Never been active, not least because they are hard to navigate. Although apparently the chinese weather balloon did have some propellers and could maneuver at least a bit. Mostly it's just simply dependent on the winds. And if you're really smart and you know which winds are going to blow a week in advance, maybe you get lucky with how it is that the balloon actually follows a trajectory around the planet.
The potential for them getting blown off course is huge. And frankly, you'd have to be quite lucky if you launch a balloon in China to actually get it to go over those nuclear facilities in Montana. Whatever that everybody was fussing about. It strikes me as at least a substantial bit of good luck or bad luck, depending on how you look at it, that that's actually where the balloon ended up going. The crucial point, of course, is that, yes, it's spying, yes, it's intelligence, and of course, the fact that it violates sovereignty because we have these artificial borders around our states.
And that then provides the justification for shooting this intruder down.
Of course, the other reason for shooting it down was to have a good hard look at what the heck was actually in those balloons. Assuming, of course, they can actually find the crucial parts of the debris off the coast of, what is it? South Carolina?
[00:12:22] Speaker C: They shall something like. Someplace like that, yeah.
[00:12:26] Speaker D: But it simply focuses on the intensity of the rivalry between these political elites, which of course is hugely destructive because it's distracting us from all sorts of much more important things.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: But I mean, from the perspective from the sort of the geographical space perspective. Right. So maybe we're going back to the old style geopolitics.
I don't want to argue for determinism, but clearly there's a lot of competition or conflict going on around the South China Sea. And then China's trying influence, what is it called, the Belt and Road Initiative, all of these sorts of things.
How do you see that? I mean, again, great power politics, but from a geographical or geopolitical perspective, what's going on exactly?
[00:13:21] Speaker D: Well, I mean, clearly China is dependent on the global economy to very substantial extent. It's been investing in various places, buying ports in Greece and various other places to simply facilitate the global commodity chains that are a crucial part of its rising role in the global economy. It's not surprising that they're investing in port facilities. It's not surprising that they're investing in railways and things in Africa to get crucial minerals out so that they can use them in their factories.
The rise of great powers in the past, british imperialism in the 19th century with ports and bases around the world, american influence all over the world since the second world War, particularly with bases in unlikely places like the south of the Indian Ocean and Diego Garcia, Guam, and all sorts of other facilities around the world, the Chinese are doing very similar things. Mostly they've been taking a civilian lead on this, but there's nothing that's purely civilian or purely military in a world of digital communications.
And so the inevitable Americans are worried about rising chinese influence, or with the economy growing the way it's been for the last few decades, although maybe slowing down now, it's not surprising that they're seeking out minerals, they're seeking out markets, and they're building the infrastructure to allow that global trade pattern to benefit them. Should we worry about it? Well, why would we worry about it unless we are concerned that we should be top dog, not them? Right. And so that this rivalry is, of course, at the heart of global politics.
Looking at the technology sitting on my desk here, most of it is actually assembled in China.
My iPhone and my laptop and the microphone that's picking up this. It's all chinese manufacturer. So what are we so worried about?
There's great panic about the chinese monopoly on rare earth metals. Well, guess what? They're the people that are making most of the batteries for our cars and our backup for our wind generators and everything else. So actually, let's make sure that they have access to that stuff so we get the benefit of using all the stuff that they produce, which we love to buy.
[00:15:57] Speaker C: It's reminiscent, of course, of the so called second Cold War, which you wrote your dissertation about. Right?
And I think more so than the first world war, the soviet influence and its activities around the world, including raw materials. But the big difference, of course, is we had nothing to do with the soviet economy. I mean, there was this very stark separation. Now we're welded at the hip with, you know, maybe it's more reminiscent of the british german competition before I, and Ukraine substitutes for the balkan wars. But we don't want to go down that particular path. I hope so.
You, you know, when we began our graduate studies in the 1980s, nuclear war was really the threat uppermost in our mind. I mean, there was a little bit of discussion about climate change, as I recall, but not very much. And since then, over the last 20 years or so, especially, climate change has sucked all of the air out of the room, and nuclear war has been largely forgotten. I should mention I had Helen Caldecott on the show a few weeks ago and have had a show on nuclear winter.
I haven't been ignoring it, but for the most part, people don't think about it.
Now, your book discusses both nuclear and climate change as threats, maybe partly existential, and you put a somewhat different spin on geopolitics. So maybe you can talk to us about the themes you present in the book and what are the major points?
[00:17:51] Speaker D: Hi.
[00:17:51] Speaker C: This is sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and today my guest is professor emeritus Simon Dalby, who has recently published a book called Rethinking Environmental Security and has been a scholar of geopolitics and environmental issues for the last 30 od, 30 plus years.
So, Simon, we were just going to talk about your book, maybe. Do you remember the question, and can you respond?
[00:18:20] Speaker D: The lead into your question was the fact that nuclear war was something that we all worried greatly about in the 80s. But subsequently, climate change has sort of come to dominate. The discussion about dangers and threats, and nuclear war has been mostly forgotten. But, of course, for me, the connection is quite direct, because what first got me thinking really seriously about climate change was the discussion about the consequences of nuclear war back in the 80s around nuclear winter, because a couple of things happened. I mean, first of all, people began to realize that not only would nuclear weapons be very bad in terms of the direct destruction and the radioactive fallout that would come from their widespread use, but the fires that would be set on major cities and probably some forests from nuclear explosions would loft so much soot and material into the upper atmosphere, that it would effectively shade the planet, cooling it off, and give us nuclear winter, which would have dramatic additional disruptions to ecologies, and, of course, hence crop production and everything else that would all be badly disrupted by the direct impacts of nuclear war. But the indirect impacts could change the climate probably for a few years, until the debris in the upper atmosphere fell to ground and was rained out by cloud formation. But that was when we really began to stop and think, wait a minute, human actions can actually fundamentally disrupt the climate. Now, the idea of a nuclear winter was that it would probably last a few years, and then things would sort of revert to more or less where they had been before. But nonetheless, those few years would cause dramatic disruptions and wreck food systems, and many of us would starve to death and freeze in the cold simultaneously. But that really raised the question of, how does the planetary atmosphere work? Because the scientists were trying to figure out how this would play out. Where would the debris move? How much would it cool the planet? For how long? Those kinds of questions really accelerated global climate change modeling. And while some of the climate change scientists were worried before nuclear winter, this really accelerated and focused their attention, and focused mine, too, because after I'd finished the book, when the cold War was over, the whole question of climate change and the larger environmental changes that we were inducing into the earth system was nagging away at the back of my mind. And I actually got a fellowship to think through this whole emerging debate about environmental security, as it was then just becoming called.
And so, for me, the direction was, the connection was quite direct, that it was this nuclear winter stuff that got me thinking about climate change. And then, of course, the climate change discussion took off as increasingly alarming. Reports from the World Meteorological Office, the IPCC and so on were suggesting that we really were messing with the climate. But it was going to be a slower, longer term set of changes, in contrast to the short term, immediate, rapid onset climate change of nuclear war. So, for me, the connections were fairly direct there.
The longer I stopped and thought about this, and I just couldn't seem to get an adequate handle on the mechanisms that were at the heart of all of this stuff. A lot of the conventional environmental stuff didn't seem to be quite grappling with the gravity of the situation. Lots of the conservationist stuff was focused on sort of parks and overpopulation problems, but the larger sort of earth systems stuff that seemed to me to be crucial just didn't seem to be quite in focus. I did a book back in 2002 on the debates in the 90s, basically trying to summarize this and think through what kind of security was involved in this debate. And I was left with a sort of an uneasy inadequateness at the heart of that thinking.
Then along came the idea of the Anthropocene, suggesting that the global scale human impact was such that we were effectively living in a new geological period because we were doing so much, so fast to the earth's system. That filled in at least part of the conceptual gap. But what was the mechanism?
Is there a way we can link the social and the material, the environmental and the physical, together? And I stumbled across some marvelous essays from Stephen Pine, the fire historian. And he was suggesting, look, forget this anthropocene stuff. We've actually moved into the fire age.
The Pyrocene is what he suggested would be a better designation. And that was the moment of which sort of the penny dropped. Win a minute. We are insecure because of nuclear weapons, because of the immense amount of firepower that we have generated in all these devices. But the same danger is at the heart of climate change, because of combustion. It's because we are burning so much stuff in our cars, in our furnaces, in our factories, the trains that are hauling the goods around the place. All those chinese freighters, all the freighters carrying the chinese goods, they're all using combustion as the energy source. And the side effect of that is the massive production of carbon dioxide, which is at the heart of climate change. So it dawned on me that really, the source of both insecurities lies in our overuse of the processes of combustion, because we're the only species in the history of the planet that has actually partially, and it's only partial. You can get to wildfires and such things later, but partially controlled fire. We've learned, to use Steve Pine's terms, the ignition trick and the consequences, both in terms of massive disruptions from nuclear war and massive disruptions at a bit of a slower scale from climate change, have the same origins. And so then I went back and started thinking about international relations, and particularly its focus on international security in the cold War, and suggesting that, in fact, the failure to effectively constrain firepower is at the heart of insecurity.
In both cases, yes, the power allows us to do all sorts of things, but it's come back to bite us, because it's actually had unintended consequences which are disrupting the natural ecological cycles in the planet, or in the case of nuclear war, would very dramatically do the same thing. So the failure to responsibly use combustion lies at the heart of our insecurities in both nuclear and climate change.
That's the key theme that runs right through the book, because I'm trying to find the mechanism at the heart of this and link the physics and the global environmental stuff up with our social sciences. And that seems to need to be one of the keys that is so obvious, it probably most people simply take it for granted. But the book's trying to make this the crux of the argument, to get us to think absolutely about how we constrain firepower to make ourselves all more secure in the future.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: Let me get this straight. You see that the constraints on the technology basically is an approach to reducing the threat, as opposed to looking at the greater complexity of the systems, the social systems in which those things are embedded.
[00:26:19] Speaker D: Is that a fair security now has to be about how we modify the social systems so that they don't use so much firepower in either form, either military dangers or the climate change dangers. And so the crux of the job for us social scientists is to figure out how to come up with transition strategies that reduce simultaneously the dangers of nuclear warfare standoffs, whether it's China and the United States or any other powers that are using immense quantities of military firepower to threaten each other or using large quantities of fossil fuels to make themselves rich, but in the process making everybody less secure because it's destabilizing the global ecological systems. So the role of our social sciences has to be now about how we think about how to rapidly transition off the use of technological violence in terms of threats and the use of firepower and war, and the immense destabilizations that the huge amount of burning that we are doing in fossil fuels is also creating.
[00:27:30] Speaker C: I recall that. I think it was clement. So who said after World War I, the allies floated to victory on a flood of oil or something like that? Right. And of course, now the Defense Department is trying to find ways to get away from oil and rely more on renewables to support them, presumably in war as well. That seems like a faint hope.
[00:27:58] Speaker D: It is pretty much a faint hope. I think one should also point out that if you don't do military interventions, the other side of the world, you dramatically reduce the amount of fuel that militaries are actually using, because it's those long distance expeditionary forces that chew up huge quantities of fuel.
That is at least part of decarbonization, is about demilitarization and finding peaceful ways to resolve disputes rather than sending in the marines, is clearly part of global governance, which has the benefit of reducing both the dangers of warfare and the indirect consequences of burning up huge quantities of fuel in those military interventions.
[00:28:43] Speaker C: You've used the term security. Obviously, it's in the title of your book. And I know, again, that we both expended a lot of blood, sweat and tears trying to define security.
So I'm wondering, what does it mean and what is environmental security as compared to national security? Because, of course, the chinese balloon was deemed a national security threat, I guess, for those who it might fall on. But what exactly do we mean? Or do you mean by security?
[00:29:15] Speaker D: I try to avoid defining it, Ronnie. It's used in all sorts of complicated ways. And so in terms of how one does analysis of these things, teasing out the implications of different meanings of the word is part of what I'm doing here. The contrast between national security and environmental security is one obvious way into this discussion. What is national security? Well, a lot of national security, really, since the second world war in american thinking, has been about maintaining the existing social order and maintaining, loosely at least, the economic structures that keep that social order running. The problem, of course, we now have, and this is where environmental security contrasts, is precisely that social order, depending on the vast use of fossil fuels, is undermining the environmental stability of the planetary system. So environmental security now has to mean changing that social order, changing the reliance on fossil fuels and the at least implied threat of nuclear coercion that undergirds much of international politics.
So the contrast here is if national security is to be meaningful in the future, it's going to have to dramatically rethink the role of environment in maintaining modern societies. And so we need to think about what it is that is needed. And the latter parts of my book start talking about regenerative agriculture and agroecology and not thinking about ecosystems as stuff we extract resources from, but as contexts which we actively live in and shape by how we choose to live, quite literally what we make. Are we making solar panels, windmills, or are we making vast quantities of carbon dioxide? Because, of course, fossil fuel burning is producing carbon dioxide. So we need to shift the focus to quite what kind of world we are making, because there's no point in thinking about carbon dioxide as sort of just sort of an unfortunate byproduct. No, it's integral part of how we are shaping the planet. And so now environmental security has to be about making different things, making agricultural systems that buffer our ecologies against the worst aspects of climate change, while simultaneously, hopefully reversing the large scale biodiversity losses in many parts of the planet. That's a very different understanding of security, but it's one that focuses on the long term ecological fecundity that all of us are going to need, or at least future generations are going to need. In contrast to the sort of the dominance games that traditional geopolitics was about controlling large chunks of space, keeping balloons out of our airspace, that mentality has to be changed so that we now understand ourselves as actively coproducing the future ecologies of the planet and requires us to understand the interconnections between different parts of the world. Because, of course, that balloon was flying over the United States recently, but it was launched in China and it was carried by the winds around the planet. We need to understand that those winds interconnect us in all sorts of complicated ways, which we have usually assumed we can ignore by arbitrarily putting boundaries around supposedly discrete spaces. So that whole geography of our understanding of our place in the world needs an upgrade quite dramatically if we're going to have thriving civilizations for future generations. That's a really tall order. But if you start thinking seriously about what it is that we need to secure, we need to secure a fecund, fertile, flexible ecological system, because that's what we can thrive in. We don't need ever more boundaries and things floating around, spying and being shot down. That whole notion of security is actually just a distraction from the priorities that we now need to focus on.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschutz, the host of the show. And my guest today is professor emeritus Simon Dalby, who recently published a book called Rethinking Environmental Security. And we were just talking about the concept of security, what it means, and basically how we have to change the way we think and act in response particularly to the threat of climate change.
Simon I want to pursue some of the security questions because the institutions that we have. And now I'm going a little bit. I'm going outside of geography, but the institutions, like, for instance, the military, the US military, which is enormous and swallows up close to a trillion dollars a year, is incentivized to continue its existence and its organization and its activities, right? Because all so many people depend on it. And not just people in the military, but people in all of the industries that supply the military.
And so you're proposing, in essence, not only that we reduce the size of the military, but that we eliminate many of the tasks that has been assigned. Now it doesn't matter whether those tasks are necessary or just make work. Okay, so this gets to the question of how do we change those institutions?
Explaining and understanding is one thing, but how does your work then help to drive or to motivate those kinds of changes that you deem necessary?
[00:35:30] Speaker D: The crux of this book is this attempt to reimagine what security actually now means in these new circumstances that we find ourselves. Much of the traditional notions of military rivalries simply took for granted that there was a relatively stable planetary backdrop on which these rivalries could be played out. That assumption no longer holds. The earth system science stuff is suggesting that we live in a much more dynamic world than that traditional notion of security has always assumed. It also suggests that the consequences of our actions stretch much further into the future in terms of ecological consequences, particularly because of the presence of carbon dioxide, which is going to hang around for centuries. So we are actually now by how we decide to define what we need to secure, shaping the future in much more dramatic ways than until recently we realized, because it's really only the last sort of 30, 40 years, basically, while you and I were having our careers as professors, that we've really understood just how dynamic the world is and how consequential human actions actually are for the future of the planet. And that's what really needs to be thought about very profoundly. How it is that we can then influence the decision makers, of course, is the big question, because through much of the cold war, national security was the top priority.
That was what justified all sorts of buying those weapon systems and the trillion dollar budget for the Defense department.
If the basic assumptions on which that is all based turn out now to not be the basic assumptions that we need to operate on, then we really do have a fairly dramatic change that's needed. And this is across the crux of the issue of security. If security is the most important function for governments, and that has long since been what they have claimed, then the crucial point is to change that discourse of security and talk to people at the heart of government and say, look, if you want to have national security and perpetuate many of the aspects that the government has traditionally understood its job is to protect. We need to change course, because if we go on trying to burn our way to perpetual prosperity, we're going to destroy the planet and our societies and our civilization in the process. If security is at the heart of the justifications for government action, then rethinking what it is that needs to be secured is part and parcel of what has to be done to generate this change, of course. So the argument here, it's not my original argument from me. I think Nick, maybe 1517 years ago, put it really succinctly in a document for the UK, the british government, in which he said, what agency has the responsibility in modern states to think about long term threats to society? And, well, his argument was, well, actually, that's the security sector, not just the military, but the intelligence analysts and the security services that have the obligation to think about the long term, to think about where it is that there might be major threats coming down the pike to modern societies. Therefore, we need to stop and think about the larger context in which we are operating and what it is we need to do to secure the long term perpetuation of our societies. And clearly, climate change is now one of those major issues. Likewise, the loss of biodiversity and all the spinoff effects of both of those have for oceans and atmospheres and all the rest of it. But the crux of this issue is the job of states is to provide security for their social systems going forward in the long term, therefore, that has to be a clear focus for climate change activists.
We are endangering our long term survival of our societies unless we change course. That's why security matters.
[00:39:48] Speaker C: I mean, look, I'm sort of playing the devil's advocate here, right? And I read many of these military and intelligence assessments of the threat of environmental change.
But the problem is that the people who write these things end up thinking in military terms. I'm not sure even the intelligence agencies. There was that famous CIA study back in the 90s, right, which involved many, many people and a lot of analysis, and they couldn't find.
And they were focused more on social structures and institutions, as I recall, right? And they looked for correlations and they found, I think, two of them, and I can't remember exactly what they were, but they certainly weren't military.
And so, again, when you say, what is the agency responsible for this? Perhaps relying on the security agencies is a big mistake.
[00:40:55] Speaker D: In those terms. It may be a big mistake, but that's the logic. If you're dealing with security, this is why it's important. Now, it may well be. Much of that discussion in the. My earlier book was sort of dancing around this question, because most of this is actually dealing with symptoms, not causes.
All that literature on, well, does environmental change cause conflict? And very little of it directly does. It's in the mix somewhere. But drawing direct connections between environmental change and conflict turned out to be really difficult to do. You need all sorts of what we used to back in those days called intervening variables, societal structures, economies, what kind of technologies for agriculture, the abilities of societies to deal with migrants, and all of those things were crucially important. And that was a really interesting exercise, not least because it sort of once again suggested environmental determinism just doesn't work.
But the point in much of my writing has been that most of this is dealing with sort of peripheral symptoms, not the core causes of climate change, which is metropolitan society's fossil fuel consumption. That's the cause of climate change, not the behavior of smallholder peasants across Asia or whatever, who were worried about may cause security problems because of climate change.
Focusing on the causes rather than the symptoms is part of what I'm trying to get people to do by sort of rethinking international relations, by going back to some of the core notions of firepower at the heart of security dilemmas.
And this isn't the only way that it needs to be done. But this publisher was on my case to write this book for years, and Covid actually finally forced me to sit in my study and not go out. And I wrote the book confined to my study during COVID really, because the publisher had been saying, well, look, rethinking international relations, environment is part of it. And so I wrote the book in response to that. But it does seem to me that international relations, as a scholarly enterprise needs to take the material context of humanity much more seriously than it's been doing if we're going to grapple with the current crisis effectively in those intellectual terms.
[00:43:31] Speaker C: Well, so then how do you see earth system instability or change impacting international politics?
Do some prophecy here or some.
[00:43:47] Speaker D: Mean it's all policy dependent? If we get serious about drastically reducing the use of fossil fuels over the next decade or two, then the instabilities are likely to be much less.
And this plays in different ways. We may end up with instabilities because some parts of the world literally do become uninhabitable and their economies collapse as people are no longer able to grow food or live there, and they migrate out and we have collapsing societies.
That may be a major problem. We may have the opposite effect. Failure to plan may lead for some societies heavily dependent on oil revenues, and the world suddenly decides it's really going to get off oil revenue, and we end up with societies collapsing because they haven't planned a transition strategy off oil revenues. And of course, one thinks about the big oil producers in the Middle east. For instance, if global demands for fossil fuels quickly dry up, their whole budget calculation gets thrown out the window. And are they going to be able to rapidly transit to a society that doesn't depend on fossil fuel revenues to keep them going. You could get collapsing societies there too.
I suppose nightmare scenarios suggest that we end up with a few rogue states insisting on continuing to use coal power plants and large amounts of fossil fuels, and we end up with some countries actually attacking them to stop them doing it, or we have situations where we go the other direction. Everybody keeps burning fossil fuels, and this makes the arguments for geoengineering irresistible to at least some power. So we start putting huge amounts of various chemicals into the stratosphere to act as a shade to cool the planet. This will inevitably have uneven effects on agricultural production, because it'll rain someplace. And there's real concern if we do that, we will end up disrupting the monsoon rains, which of course feed, well, close to half of humanity in Asia. Will that then cause one state to want to attack the state that's actually doing the geoengineering to stop it?
Or will we end up with intense political disputes, short of geoengineering, with sanctioning states that are actually doing geoengineering? There's all sorts of scenarios that you can play with, all of which are much, much easier to avoid by reducing the amount of use of fossil fuels quickly.
So all these scenarios about the future are just that, scenarios. But one common denominator is this point. If we reduce using fossil fuels quickly, we may be able to avoid many of those things, but to do so requires states, particularly the states that are heavily dependent on oil revenues, to actually get serious about figuring out what's their next economy. How do they use their oil wealth to build something that in future isn't dependent on further streams of revenue from those oil wells. And that's really the challenge that we need some kind of much, much better global cooperation on in the coming decades.
[00:47:19] Speaker C: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschutz, host of the show, and my guest today is professor emeritus Simon Dalby, who was recently published rethinking Environmental Security. And we've just been talking about the impact, in particular of unstable climate and other systems on international politics.
Simon, one of the intriguing topics in your book is the geopolitics of colonizing nature. And humans have been transforming nature since time immemorial, but I think you're talking about it in a somewhat different way. Can you say something about that?
[00:48:03] Speaker D: It's a phrase that is tempting to suggest that we have been both incorporating larger and larger amounts of natural phenomena into human systems, but also simultaneously doing it by drawing property boundaries and state boundaries around ecosystems and appropriating.
This is my bit. I will do these resources and use them the way I want, making global cooperation and governance across those boundaries more difficult.
One of the things that is in this book, and it was written and actually published more or less on the 50th anniversary of the original Stockholm conference on the Human Environment in 1972. And one of the basic principles that was at the heart of the Stockholm Declaration and has subsequently become a principle in international law, is that states have the right to extract resources from within their territories. But the proviso is that you do it in a way that doesn't damage other states and populations in other states. And, of course, this has been one of the major problems we have. This is my chunk of territory. I will do what I want because I've drawn a neat boundary around it, either in property on the small scale or sovereignty on the big scale. We've drawn all these boundaries. We do whatever we want within our chunk of property, and to heck with the consequences. And of course, Stockholm was trying to point out that actually, you can't do that to heck with the consequences point. You have to act responsibly within your territory, whether it's within your property or on a larger scale within your sovereign space. And of course, the argument in climate change is that northern rich states have been doing anything, but we have been prodigiously productive in terms of carbon dioxide, paying no attention to what consequences this would have. And, of course, vulnerable agricultural populations in the global south that are more directly vulnerable because they are agricultural and hence dependent on rainfall and sunlight and its fairly predictable patterns, which we are starting to mess up. So the colonizing nature is, we'd be taking over more and more spaces, more and more resources. Just think about how exclusive economic zones in the ocean has extended territorial control over ever larger parts of the ocean. Not very effective control, but nonetheless, that's what we've been doing.
And the only way we seem to be able to think about managing resources is to enclose everything and then assign property rights. And then, of course, we forget about the consequences that flow across the boundaries from using that property in irresponsible ways. And so what I'm trying to use is the phrase is to grapple with that larger collection of processes which are all part and parcel of the growth of european colonization, and then subsequently, the ever larger extension of property rights through what we now call globalization.
So I'm trying to point out the fact that this has all sorts of deleterious consequences, and we need to stop and think much more carefully about how it is we use law and jurisdictions because we can no longer take for granted that there's more planet out there to enclose, or more planet that we can just dump the carbon dioxide into the planetary system and not worry about it. We can no longer live in a world where that sort of basic assumption about governance is taken for granted because it's obviously the spatial division into territories is the geopolitics of this colonizing is the history of european colonization, which has appropriated resources at distance. And I'm trying to use a pithy phrase to summarize all those processes as being part and parcel of the problems that we're now confronting.
[00:51:59] Speaker C: Well, we're almost out of time, so I have one last question, right. And that seems to me, given what you've just said, the contradiction between the idea that we can do within our boundaries what we please, but we are extraordinarily reliant on what other countries do within their boundaries, or what we might be doing to them as well. And of course, I think about the Amazon as a kind of the archetypal case of you in the last couple of minutes. Can you talk about that?
[00:52:34] Speaker D: We all have to stop and think about the contradictions that are going on here. I mean, the Amazon debate is fascinating because it clearly is a major ecological system that is getting trashed.
And it would be really nice if the Brazilians stopped doing it. But do we have the right, non Brazilians have the right to intervene in Brazil, to stop the Brazilians destroying their own ecosystem because they've decided that, well, they want to clear the forest and have cattle on it instead? This is really the question of global responsibilities running headlong into sovereign prerogatives of particular states.
And therein lies much of the difficulty because, like the commodity chains we were talking about earlier, consequences spill over the sovereign boundaries of states.
One of the more interesting arguments in the whole climate change thing is, of course, has been compensation payments for foregone resource extraction opportunities. That's an awful mouthful, but basically, if you promise not to cut down your forests and make money from the forest, we will pay you to keep the forest intact has been one of the basic side payment arguments in climate change. Of course, it doesn't work very well in an increasingly volatile world.
I think some of the so called carbon offsets from Quebec have been forests in California, which are supposed to be intact, sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to make up for the stuff that the Quebecas are putting into the atmosphere. At least half a dozen of those forests have over the last few years, burnt, which means that these site payments simply ain't working because the ecological services that their forests are supposedly provided are simply disappearing because wildfires are destroying those forests.
We've got to stop and think very much more carefully about how we do this kind of international arrangement, because it's quite clear that a lot of the promisers not to do things are just fictions. But that said, somewhere along the way, many ecosystems do need to be protected. And in a world where growing populations are all aspiring to more affluent lifestyles, it's really tricky to figure out how it is that you can actually keep some of those places intact.
There's another debate about this that's really tricky, and that's the whole discussion about half Earth. In other words, we should basically leave large chunks of the planet uninhabited to let them get on doing their ecological things, because in the long run this will be for the benefit of biodiversity and probably for all of our benefits in the long run. But of course, there's a very nasty history of colonial notions of conservation, which required removing native peoples from environments what they'd inhabited in perpetuity, because somehow people were the problem in terms of causing environmental destruction. So the violence of dispossession is another aspect of this colonization, the geopolitics of colonization.
Can we find ways that indigenous populations actually become the protectors of local ecosystems rather than being seen them as the problem because they inhabit those ecosystems? That requires another fundamental change, and I don't think we've yet collectively, in terms of global governance stock to really think carefully about how to figure out how to have actively flourishing ecosystems as that which we promote effectively. That's a major challenge which lots of the conservation people are starting to think about. And some of the environmental peace building people are starting to think about too, in terms of what kind of social arrangements will ensure intact ecosystems in perpetuity, but still allow people to live reasonably well in those ecosystems. That's the real challenge that much of that discussion now presents. A whole new generation of social scientists are going to have to devote their attention to that. And that's part of the rethinking environmental security discussion, too. And I hope there's a whole lot of potential PhD students listening in who will take some of these tasks on as their dissertation topics and get on with it, because we need to do a whole lot more serious rethinking on these topics for a sustainable future for future generations.
[00:57:23] Speaker C: Well, Simon, I want to thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:57:30] Speaker D: You're welcome. I've enjoyed this conversation.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. And thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make case squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday, sustainability now.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find out. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah, good.
