Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Good planet. It's a hot zones Tropic, climbs, thriving, season blowing some breathing trees. Strong
Speaker 0 00:00:25 Sunshine.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Good planets are hard
Speaker 0 00:00:29 To find. Yeah. Good
Speaker 2 00:00:35 Planet. Hello, case squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi-weekly case, quid radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipitz. According to Dr. Simon Dolby, professor Emeritus in the Bali School of International Affairs at Wilfred Lawyer University in Ontario, Canada, global politics over the past 70 years has been driven by an overabundance of fire power, 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 second Noor. Essence is the future of life on earth, human and non-human. But the great powers and the not so great resolutely refused 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 fire, power, past, present, and Future. And he is my guest today on sustainability. Now, Simon Dolby, welcome to Sustainability Now.
Speaker 3 00:01:49 Thank you, Ronnie. It's good to be here.
Speaker 2 00:01:52 Well, we've known each other for more than 30 years, and our past and research have crossed more than one time over the decades. You know, you were trained as a geographer, I think, and studied geopolitics. Uh, I was trained as a mishmash of hard and social science and studied geopolitics, although one of my focuses was global environmental politics. And you know, our work hasn't been that far apart over the years. But how did you come to geography and your geopolitical focus? Um, and maybe you can also explain for our listeners what geopolitics means.
Speaker 3 00:02:30 Um, I was trained as a geographer. Uh, I went to Simon Fraser in the early eighties intending to do a PhD on, uh, questions of environmental politics. I was fascinated by the sort of philosophical, um, background that environmentalists were bringing, um, and how that lined up with, uh, all sorts of thinking from the, particularly in the European left. Um, but this was the early eighties, um, 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 at my, my, my curiosity was, was, uh, raised by, well, why do we have so many of these things?
Speaker 3 00:03:24 If the Russians, the Soviet Union, can destroy North America with a couple of hundred nuclear weapons, and the Americans could do the same to the Soviet Union. Um, Casper Weinberger was then defense secretary in the United States, and he had a project for building 17,000 new nuclear weapons. And I, I mean, 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, um, the, the kind of budget priorities that would justify building 17,000 new weapons, nevermind the ones that were already in existence. And that, uh, really got me interested as a social scientist and how that kind of policy would be justified. Um, clearly the overt rationale was, well, you know, these evil Soviet communists are coming to get us, and, and unless we deter them, um, but that wasn't obviously the whole explanation.
Speaker 3 00:04:20 There was a whole lot of other things going on. So I ended up writing a dissertation, trying to unpack, um, the rationale that would make that kind of what seemed to me to be completely insane, um, public investment in weapons that were just guarantee the emulation of everybody. Um, and I basically, it was the reasoning practices, um, that that justified. That was what I wanted to try and figure out. How do you think that? Um, and so when you, when I started digging in, um, 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 exp basically 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 Hal Alfred Meinders, the pivot of history, um, determining Russian behavior supposedly.
Speaker 3 00:05:13 And it was actually, um, intimately interlinked with the strategic thinking, um, which just blew me away. I had no idea that that kind of old geography stuff that had long since been abandoned by sin serious, um, 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, um, thinking about geopolitics. Your, the second point of your question was, well, what do we mean by geopolitics? Um, and obviously geopolitics refers back to that old early or late 19th, early 20th century discussions about, um, the, uh, the, the closure of, of, of, um, colonizing space. There's an American version of it, but the focus has usually been on the, uh, the conduct of Russia and Halford, McLin, Halford mc, kinder, always trip over that name. Halford Mc Kinder, um, wrote his famous paper in the early 19 hundreds on the pivot of history, suggesting that, you know, the, the, the whole of human history that was really interpreted through what happened in Central Asia.
Speaker 3 00:06:19 And of course, subsequently Central Asia was, um, was, was where the Soviet Union was. And so this, this old historical stuff got, got, um, dug out later in the 20th century. Geopolitics was linked with Nazism and, and, and rationales for Leban Thm. The expansion of control by Germany, um, uh, of substantial part of, 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, uh, with this Nazi expansion stuff. I mean, we just, yeah, you know, serious scholars weren't gonna go there, um, because this had been discredited as, as nonsense, and besides, which the United Nations had basically agreed that borders wouldn't, should be changed forcefully.
Speaker 3 00:07:11 Um, and, and so geographies had simply abandoned all that stuff. But my generation grew, you know, uh, tackling nuclear war, um, and, and worrying about, um, this sort of came back to look at, at geopolitics as not just this old geography determining, um, 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, um, 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, in the eighties and nineties by sort of my generation of geographers focused on these reasoning practices on, on, on how it is we frame the world. Um, crucially, of course for me, um, Edward Ed's book Orientalism, um, how the West was distinguished from the East, and how the East was seen as irrational and primitive and, and, and exotic in comparison to the, to the rational, um, west was, was, was absolutely crucial in terms of understanding how the, um, how the world is divided and hence justified policies are justified for, you know, building 17,000 nuclear weapons or intervening militarily in parts of, of, of the world, full sorts of of reasons.
Speaker 3 00:08:31 But it's that geographical framing, um, is what most of us geographers for the last 30 years or so have focused on, not the old-fashioned Cal Alfred McKendry stuff, um, and the lemons from arguments and, and and so on. Um, so geopolitics is about both <laugh>, the old intellectual trajectory, but also the current analysis of how it is we frame and understand the world are place in it, and hence what appropriate political action is, is all about
Speaker 2 00:09:00 At the time of this recording. You know, we've just had a little geopolitics float across the skies over Canada and the United States, and, and of course it caused a big uproar, even though the US does over flights all the time. Um, so the Chinese government described it as a weather balloon gone astray. And of course, the US government sinks that China is spying on its military facilities. I, you know, it's hard to take seriously, but, you know, how do you understand the growing tension between the US and China from a geopolitical perspective, um, if, if you were gonna, you know, u use that particular framework to explain it or interpret it?
Speaker 3 00:09:46 Well, the conventional analysis is that, um, the United States is increasingly worried that it's sort of primacy and world affairs has been challenged by a growing China and economic powerhouse for the last few decades. Um, there's all sorts of mutual suspicion, um, between the, between the two and the, the balloon, the, the weather balloon or spy balloon, depending on what you want to call it. Um, it's probably actually a bit of both in some ways. Um, uh, is, is, is simply, uh, uh, has, has become, um, uh, you know, an, an object that that was in, uh, 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, uh, that a Chinese weather balloon in lots of inverted commerce, um, has drifted across North America.
Speaker 3 00:10:43 Um, and I, you're right. I mean, states have been using aircraft and set lights, um, to spy on each other for forever, um, at least for the last century. Um, balloons are one of the oldest spy technologies, right, in military stuff going right back to nap Napoleonic era, right? Effective not least because they're hard to navigate, although apparently the Chinese weather balloon, um, did have some propellers and could maneuver at least a bit. Mostly it's just simply dependent on, on, on the winds. And if you're really smart and you know which way, which winds are going to blow a weak in advance, maybe you get lucky with how it is that the, uh, that the balloon actually, um, follows a trajectory around the planet. Um, the potential for them getting blown off course is huge. And, and frankly, it'd have to be quite lucky if you launch a balloon in, in, in China to actually get it to go over those nuclear facilities in Montana, whatever that everybody was fussing about.
Speaker 3 00:11:40 It strikes me as at least a substantial, um, chuck, uh, you know, bit of good luck or bad luck depending on how you look at it. But that's actually whether the, the, the, the balloon ended up going. Yeah. Yeah. The crucial point, of course is that, that yes, it's spying, yes, it's intelligence, um, and of course, the fact that it violates, um, sovereignty because we have these artificial borders around our states. Um, and, and that then provides the, the, the justification for shooting this in, in intruder down. Um, of course, the other reason for shooting it down is to have a good hard look at what the heck was actually in those balloons, assuming, of course, they can actually find the, the crucial parts of the debris off the coast of, what is it, South Carolina, they
Speaker 2 00:12:22 Show something like someplace like that. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:12:26 Um, uh, but it's, it's, it's, it simply focuses on the intensity of the rivalry between these political elites, which of course is hugely des disruptive because it's distracting us from all sorts of much more important things.
Speaker 2 00:12:39 But I mean, oh, from the perspective, from the sort of the space pers the, the geo geographical space perspective, right? So maybe we're going back to the old style geopolitics. Um, I don't wanna, I don't wanna argue for determinism, but clearly there's a lot of, of competition or conflict going on around the South China Sea, and then, you know, China's tri influence, the, what is it called, the Belt and Road Initiative, all of these sorts of things. How do you, you know, how do you see that? I mean, again, great power politics, but from a geographical or geopolitical perspective, what's, what's going on exactly?
Speaker 3 00:13:21 Well, I mean, clearly China's dependent on a global economy to very substantial extent. Um, it's been investing in, in various places, buying ports in Greece and various other places, um, to simply facilitate the global, um, commodity chains that are a crucial part of, of its rising, um, role in, in, in the global economy. Um, 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, um, use them in their factories. Um, the rise of, of great powers in the past, British imperialism, um, uh, in, in the 19th century with, with ports and bases, um, uh, around the world, um, American influence all over the world since the second World War, particularly with, with bases in unlikely places like the south of the Indian Ocean, um, and, and Jaguar Garcia, um, uh, Guam, uh, and all sorts of other facilities around the world.
Speaker 3 00:14:23 The Chinese are, um, doing very similar things. Mostly they've been taking a civilian lead on this. Um, but, you know, there's nothing that's purely civilian or purely military in a world of, of digital, um, communications. Um, and so the inevitably, um, you know, 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, um, it's not surprising that they're seeking out minerals, they're seeking out markets. Um, and, and they're building the infrastructure to allow that global trade pattern to, to, to benefit them. Um, should we worry about it? Well, um, 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, is across at the heart of, of, of global politics. Um, I'm, you know, looking at the technology sitting in on my desk here, um, most of it is actually assembled in China, right?
Speaker 3 00:15:20 Um, my, my, my phone and my, my laptop, uh, and, and, and the microphone that's picking up this, it's all Chinese manufacturer. Um, so what are we so worried about? Um, uh, you know, there's great panic about the Chinese monopoly on, on rare earth metals. Well, guess what? They're the people that are making most of the, um, the, the batteries for, for our cars and our, um, you know, 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 of, of using all the stuff that they, uh, that they produce, which we love to buy.
Speaker 2 00:15:57 It's, it's, I mean, it's reminiscent of course, of the, the, the so-called Second Cold War, which you wrote your dissertation about, right? Yeah. Um, and I think more so than the first World War, the, the, uh, you know, influence, 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, this very stark separation. Now we're we're welded at the hip with China. Yeah. Um, and, you know, maybe it's more reminiscent of the, the British German competition before World War I. Yes. Uh, right. And, and Ukraine substitutes for the Balkan wars, but we don't want to go down that particular path, I hope. Um, uh, so, so you, you, when, when we began our graduate studies in the 1980s, nuclear war was really the threat uppermost in our mind.
Speaker 2 00:16:55 I mean, there was a little bit of discussion about climate change, as I recall, but, you know, not very much. And, um, since then, over the last 20 years or so, especially, uh, climate change has sucked all of the air out of the room. And nuclear war has been largely forgotten. I I should mention, I had Helen Caldecott on this show a few weeks ago, um, and, you know, and have had a show on nuclear winter. And so, you know, I haven't been ignoring it, but, but for the most part, people don't think about it. Um, now your book discusses both nuclear and, and climate change as, as threats maybe partly existential, um, 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, you know, what are the major, major points? Hi, 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, of geopolitics and environmental issues for the last, uh, 30 odd 30 plus years. Um, so Simon, we were just going to talk about your book, maybe. Do you remember the question? And, you know, can you respond
Speaker 3 00:18:19 <laugh> your, your, the, the lead into your question was the fact that nuclear, uh, war was something that we all worried greatly about in, in the eighties, but subsequently, climate change is sort of, um, come to dominate the, the, the discussion about dangers and threats and, and, and nuclear wars being mostly forgotten. But of course, for me, the connection is, is, is quite direct. Because what g first got me thinking really seriously about climate to change was the discussion about the consequences of nuclear war back in the eighties around nuclear winter. Um, because one of, well, 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, um, and the radioactive fallout that would come from their widespread use, but, um, the fires that would be set on, on major, um, cities, and probably some forests from nuclear explosions would left so much, um, so, and, and material into the upper atmosphere that it would effectively shade the planet, cooling it off, and give us nuclear winter, which would have, you know, dramatic additional disruptions to ecologies.
Speaker 3 00:19:20 And of course, hence crop production and, and everything else that would all be badly disrupted by the direct impacts of nuclear war. But the indirect impacts could change the climate, um, probably for, you know, a few years until the debris in the upper atmosphere was felt a was rained out, um, by, 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, um, and then things would sort of revert to more or less where they had been before. But nonetheless, those few years would such, would cause dramatic, um, uh, dramatic disruptions and wreck food systems and, and, and many of us would starve, um, to death and, and, and freezing cold simultaneously. But that really raised the question well, well, um, how does the free atmosphere work?
Speaker 3 00:20:12 Because the scientists were trying to figure out how this would play out. Where would the, where would the debris move? How much would it cool the planet for how long? Those kinds of questions really accelerated, um, global climate change modeling. And while some of the climate change scientists were worried, um, before nuclear winter, this really accelerated and focused their attention and mine too, because after I'd finished the book, when the colon war was over, um, uh, the, the whole question of climate change and the larger environmental, um, uh, changes that, that we were in inducing into the earth system, um, was nagging away at, at the back of my mind. And I actually got a fellowship to think through, um, this whole emerging debate about environmental security as it was then just becoming, um, uh, called. And so for me, the direction was the, the connection was quite direct.
Speaker 3 00:21:02 Uh, the, the, it was this nuclear winter stuff that got me thinking about climate change. Um, and then of course, the climate change, uh, discussion, um, took off, uh, as increasingly alarming reports from the World Meteorological Office, the I P C C and so on were suggesting that we really were messing with the climate, but it was going to be a slower, longer term, um, set of changes, uh, in contrast to the short term immediate rapid onset climate change of, of, of nuclear war. Um, so for me, the connections were fairly direct. Um, there, um, the longer I stopped and thought about this, um, the, uh, and I just couldn't seem to get, uh, adequate handle on, on the mechanisms that were at the heart of all of this stuff. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, a lot of the conventional environmental stuff didn't seem to be quite grappling with the gravity of the situation.
Speaker 3 00:21:53 Lots of the conservationist stuff was focused on sort of parks and overpopulation problems, but the larger of earth systems stuff that seemed to me to be crucial, um, just didn't seem to be quite in focus. I did a book back in 2002 on the debates in the nineties, basically trying to summarize this and, and, and think through what kind of security was involved in this debate. And I was left with a sort of an uneasy, um, uh, inadequate at the heart of that thinking. Um, then along came the idea of the anthrop scene, um, suggesting that, you know, the global scale human impact was such that we were effectively living in a, in a, a new geological period because we were doing so much so fast to the earth system, not filled in at least part of, of, of, of the conceptual gap. But what was the mechanism, you know, was, is is there a way we can link the social and the, and the material, the, the environmental and the physical together?
Speaker 3 00:22:50 And I stumbled across, um, some marvelous essays, um, from Stephen Pine, um, uh, the fire historian. And he was suggesting, well, forget this, an anthrop scene stuff. Um, we've actually moved into the fire age. Um, the pyro scene is what he suggested would be a better designation, and that was the moment at which sort of the penny dropped, win a minute. Um, we are insecure because of nuclear weapons, because of the immense amount of firepower that we have, we have generated in all these devices. But the same danger, um, is at the heart of climate change because of combustion. It's because we are burning so much stuff, um, in our cars, in our furnaces, in our factories, and the trains that are hauling the goods around the place. All those, um, Chinese freighters or the freighters carrying the Chinese goods, they're all using, um, uh, combustion as the energy source.
Speaker 3 00:23:44 Uh, and the side effect of that is the massive production of carbon dioxide, which is at the heart of climate change. So, dawned on me, um, that really the source of both insecurities lies in, in our, um, overuse of the processes of combustion because we're the only species in the, 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, um, controlled, um, uh, fire, we've learned to use Steve Pines terms, the ignition trick and the consequences, both in terms of, 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, you know, international relations and, and particularly its focus on, on, on international security in the Cold War, and suggesting that in fact, it's the, uh, failure to, um, effectively constrain firepower is at the heart of insecurity.
Speaker 3 00:24:45 In, in, in both cases. It's, 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, um, uh, the, 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, um, responsibly use combustion lies at the heart of, of, of our insecurities in both nuclear and climate change. That's the key theme that runs right through the book, um, because I'm trying to look, find the mechanism at the heart of this, um, and link the, the, the, the physics and, and, and, and the, and the, the global, um, environmental stuff up with our social sciences. And, and that seems to me to be one of the keys that is so obvious. It probably <laugh> most people simply take it for granted. But the book's trying to make this, um, the, the, the crux of the argument to get us to think absolutely about how we constrain firepower, um, to make ourselves, um, all more secure in the future.
Speaker 2 00:25:55 So let me get this straight. You, you see that the constraint constraints on the technology basically, uh, is, uh, is an approach to reducing the threat as opposed to looking at the, the greater complexity of the systems of social systems in which those things are embedded. Um, is, is that, is that a fair
Speaker 3 00:26:20 Security now has to be about how we modify the social systems so that they don't use so much, um, fire power in either form, either military dangers or the climate change dangers. And so the crux of, of, of the job for a social scientist is to figure out how to, um, come up with transition strategies that, that reduce simultaneously the dangers of nuclear warfare in the standoffs, whether it's China and the, and the United States or any other, um, uh, powers that, that, that are using immense quantities of, of military fire power to threaten, um, each other, um, or using large quantities of, of fossil fuels to make themselves rich. But in the process, making everybody, um, less secure because it's destabilizing the dorm ecological systems. So the role of, of, of our social sciences has to be now about how we think about how to rapidly, um, transit transition off the use of, of, of technological violence in terms of threats and, and the use of fire powering war. And the immense destabilizations that the huge amount of burning that we are doing in fossil fuels, um, is also creating,
Speaker 2 00:27:29 I I, I, I recall that I think it was clemen. So who said, after World War I, the allies floated to victory on a flood of, of oil or something like that. Yeah. Right. And, and of course now the defense department is trying to find ways to get away from oil and, and, you know, be, rely more on renewable renewables to, to, uh, to support them, uh, presumably in war as well. Uh, that, that seems like a, a faint hope.
Speaker 3 00:27:57 It, it is pretty much a faint hope. I think. Um, 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 show up with such huge quantities of fuel. Um, uh, and, and that is at least part of, of, you know, decarbonization is about demilitarization. Uh, and, and finding peaceful ways to, to resolve disputes rather than sending in the Marines, um, is, is 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, in, in those military interventions.
Speaker 2 00:28:41 You, you used the term, you've used the term security, obviously it's in the title of your book. And, um, I know again, that we both expended a lot of, a lot of blood, sweat and tears trying to define security. Um, so I mean, I'm wondering, you know, what, as does it mean and what is environmental security as compared to national security? Cause of course, the, the Chinese balloon was deemed a national security threat, uh, I guess, you know, for those who, who it might fall on. But, um, what, what exactly do we mean, or do you mean by security?
Speaker 3 00:29:16 I try to avoid defining it, Roni, it's used in all sorts of complicated ways. And so in terms of of of how one does analysis of these things, I'm teasing out the implications of different meanings of the word is, is part of what I'm doing here. Um, the contrast between national security and environmental security is, is, is is one obvious way into, into this discussion. Um, what is national security? Well, a lot of national, national security, um, really since the second world war in American thinking, um, has been about maintaining, um, the existing, uh, social order, uh, and maintaining loosely at least, um, the economic structures that, that, that keep that social order running. The problem, of course, we now have, and this is where environmental security contrast is precisely, um, that social order, depending on the vast use of fossil fuels, is undermining, um, the environmental stability of, of, of the planetary system.
Speaker 3 00:30:13 So environmental security now has to mean changing that, um, social order changing the, the reliance of fossil fuels and, and the at least implied threat of, of, of nuclear coercion. Um, it that, that undergirds much of international politics. Um, so the contrast here is, 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. Uh, and so we need to think about, um, uh, what it is that is needed. And the latter start parts of my book, start talking about regenerative agriculture and agro ecology and, and not thinking about ecosystems as stuff we extract resources from, but as context which we actively live in and shape by how we choose to live, quite literally what we make, are we making solar panels, uh, windmills, or are we making vast quantities of carbon dioxide because of course, fossil fuel burning is a, is a producing, um, uh, carbon dioxide.
Speaker 3 00:31:16 So we need to shift the focus to quite what kind of world we are making, um, because there's no point in thinking about, you know, carbon oxide as sort of just, um, just a sort of an unfortunate byproduct. No, it's integral part of, of, of how we are shaping the planet. Um, and so now environmental security has to be about making different things, making agricultural systems that that, that are buffer our, our, our, our, our ecologies against the worst as, uh, aspects of climate change, but simultaneously hopeful, hopefully reversing the large, um, scale biodiversity losses in many parts of the planet. That's a very different understanding of, of security, but it's one that focuses on the long term, um, ecological for candid. The all of us are going to need, or at least future generations are going to need. In contrast to the sort of the dominance, um, games that traditional geopolitics was about, controlling large chunks of space, keeping balloons out of our airspace, that mentality, um, has to be, uh, changed to so that we now understand ourselves as actively co-producing the future ecologies of the planet and requires us to understand the interconnections, um, between different parts of the world.
Speaker 3 00:32:29 Because of course, that balloon, um, is, is it was, was flying over the United States, um, recently, um, 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, um, which we have usually assumed we can ignore by arbitrarily putting boundaries around, uh, 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, um, have thriving civilizations for future generations. That's a really, really tall order. But if you start thinking seriously about what it is that we need to secure, um, we need to secure a foun, you know, fertile, um, flexible ecological system because that's what we can thrive in. Um, we don't need, um, evermore boundaries and, and, and, and things, um, floating around spying and being shot down. That whole notion of security is, is actually just a distraction from the priorities that we now need to focus on.
Speaker 2 00:33:34 You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipshitz, 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, uh, what it means and, and basically how we have to change the way we think and act in response, particularly to the threat of, of climate change. Um, Simon, I wanna, um, pursue some of the security questions because, uh, you know, the institutions that we have, and now I'm going a little bit, I'm going outside of geography, but, but the institutions, like, for instance, the, the military, you know, the US military, right? Which is enormous and, and swallows up close to a trillion dollars a year, uh, is incentivized to continue its, uh, existence and its organization and its activities, right? Because all, so many people depend on it, and not just people in the, uh, in the military, but people in all of the industries that supply, uh, the military.
Speaker 2 00:34:46 And so you are, you are proposing in essence, not only that we, uh, reduce the size of the military, but that we eliminate many of the, the tasks that has been assigned. Now, you know, it's, it doesn't matter whether those tasks are are necessary or, or just make work. Okay? So, you know, this gets to the question of how do we change those institutions? I mean, you know, explaining and understanding is one thing, but, you know, how does, how does your work then, uh, help to drive or to motivate those kinds of changes that you deem necessary?
Speaker 3 00:35:29 The, I mean, the crux of this book is, is, is this attempt to reimagine what security actually now means in these new circumstances that we, we find ourselves much of the traditional notions of military rivalries simply took for granted that there was a relatively stable, um, planetary backdrop on which these rivalries could be played out. Yeah. 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. Um, it also suggests that the consequences of our actions, um, are stretched much further into the future in terms of ecological consequences, uh, particularly because of the presence of carbon dioxide, which is, is take is gonna hang around for centuries. So we are actually now by how we decide to define what we need to secure, um, shaping the future, um, in, in much more dramatic ways than until recently we realized, cause it's really only the last sort of 30, 40 years, basically, while you and I were having, uh, our careers as professors, um, that we've really understood just how dynamic the world is and how, um, consequential human actions actually are for the future of, of, of the planet.
Speaker 3 00:36:41 And that's what really needs, um, to be thought about, um, very profoundly how it is that we can then influence the decision makers, of course is the, is the big question because through much of the Cold War national security was the top priority. Um, that was what justified all sorts of, of, of, of, well, of buying those weapon systems and, and, and, and, and the, the trillion dollar budget for the, for the, 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, um, change that's needed. But, and this is the course, the crux of the issue of security as if security is the most important function for governments, um, that has long since been what they have claimed.
Speaker 3 00:37:30 Um, uh, then the crucial point is to change that discourse of security, um, and talk to people at the heart of government and say, look, if you want to have national security and perpetuate, um, many of the aspects that the government has traditionally understood its job is to protect, we need to change course. Um, 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, of, 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, this change. Of course. So the argument here has, it's not my original argument from, from me. I, I think may maybe 15, 17 years ago put it really, really succinctly in a, in a, in a document for the, uh, for the, uh, the uk the British government, in which he said, what agency has the responsibility in, in modern states to think about long-term threats, um, to, to society?
Speaker 3 00:38:38 And well, his argument was, well, actually that's the security sector, not just the military, but the intelligence analysts, um, and, and the security services that, that have the obligation to think about the long-term, uh, to think about where it is that there might be major threats down coming down the pike to to, to modern societies. Therefore, um, we need to stop and think, um, about the larger context, um, in which we are operating and what it is we need to do to secure the long-term perpetuation of, of, of our societies. And clearly, climate change is now one of those major, um, issues. Likewise, the lots of biodiversity, um, and all the spinoff effects of both of those have for oceans and atmospheres and all the rest of it. Um, but the crux of this issue is the, the job of states is to provide security for their, their social systems going forward in the long term. Therefore, um, that has to be a clear focus on, on, on, on, on, on for climate change activists, the, we are endangering our long-term survival of our societies unless we change course. That's why security matters.
Speaker 2 00:39:48 I mean, look, I'm sort of playing the devil's advocate here, right? And I've, I've read, I read, you know, many of these military and intelligence assessments of, you know, the threat of, of environmental change. Um, but the, the problem is that, uh, they, the people who write these things end up thinking in military terms. I'm not sure, even the intelligence agencies, there was that famous, uh, CIA study back in the nineties, right? Which involved many, many people and much a lot of analysis and, uh, they couldn't find, you know, 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, uh, exactly what they were, but, but they certainly weren't military. Um, and so again, uh, you know, when you say what is the agency responsible for this? Perhaps relying on the security agencies is a, is a big mistake. Um, in,
Speaker 3 00:40:55 In those terms, it may be the, a big mistake. Um, but that's the, the logic if you're dealing with, with, with, with security, um, this is why it's important. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Now it may well be, uh, in much of that discussion in the nineties, and, you know, my earlier book, um, uh, was sort of dancing around this question because most of this is actually dealing with symptoms not causes. Um, we, you know, there was the, the, all that literature on, well, does environmental change cause conflict? And very little of it directly does. It's a, it's, it's in the mix somewhere, but drawing direct connections between the environmental change and conflict is, it turned out to be, um, really difficult to do. Um, you need all sorts of what we used to back in those days called intervening variables. Yeah. Um, societal structures, um, economies, um, you know, what kind of technologies for agriculture, the abilities of societies to deal with migrants, and all of those things are, were crucially important.
Speaker 3 00:41:50 Um, and you know, that was a really interesting, um, exercise, not least because it sort of once again, suggested that environmental determinism just doesn't work. Right. Um, but the point, um, uh, in, in much of my writing has been that most of this is dealing with sort of peripheral symptoms, not the core causes of, of, of climate change, which is, um, you know, metropolitan societies, fossil fuel consumption. Um, that's the cause of, of, of, of, of climate change, not the behavior of, um, small home or peasants in, in, in across Asia or whatever, who were worried about may cause security problems because of climate change. The focusing on the on, on, on the causes rather than the symptoms is part of what I'm trying to, to get people to do. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> by fo by sort of rethinking, um, in, in international relations by going back to some of the core notions of, of fire power at the heart of, of, of, of, of security dilemmas.
Speaker 3 00:42:46 Um, and, you know, 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, in my, in my study and, and not go out and I just, I wrote the book confined to my study during Covid. Really? Yeah, yeah. Um, because the publisher had been saying, well, look, you know, rethinking international relations environment is part of it. And so I wrote the book in, in, in, in response to that. But it does seem to me that, um, uh, international relations as a scholarly enterprise needs to take the material context of humanity much more seriously than it's been doing, um, if we're going to grapple with the, with, with the current crisis effectively in those intellectual terms.
Speaker 2 00:43:31 Well, so then how, how, how do you see earth system instability or change impacting international politics, uh, in, you know, in de you know, do some prophecy here or some futurism?
Speaker 3 00:43:46 It, it's, it's, I mean, it's all policy dependent. Um, if, if we get serious about, um, drastically reducing the use of fossil fuels over the next decade or two, um, then the instability are likely to be much less. Um, and this plays in different ways. Um, we may end up with instabilities, uh, because some parts of the world literally do become uninhabitable, um, and their economies collapse as, as, as people are no longer able to grow food or live there and they migrate out and, and we have collapsing societies, um, uh, that may be a, a, a major problem. Um, 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 gotta get off oil revenue. And we end up with society's collapsing because they haven't planned a transition strategy off oil revenues.
Speaker 3 00:44:39 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, um, their whole budget, uh, <laugh> calculation, um, it gets thrown out the window. And are they going to be able to rapidly transit to, uh, to a society that doesn't depend on fossil fuel revenues to keep them, keep them going? Um, uh, you could get collapsing societies there too. Um, I mean, I suppose nightmare scenarios, um, suggest that, that we end up with, uh, a few rogue states insisting on continuing to use coal power, um, plants and, and large amounts of fossil fuels. And we end up with some countries actually attacking them to, to, to stop them doing it. Or we, uh, have situations where we go the other direction. Everybody keeps burning fossil fuels. And this makes us the, the, the arguments for geoengineering, um, uh, irresistible to at least some power.
Speaker 3 00:45:38 So we start putting huge amounts of, of, well, various chemicals into the stratosphere to act as a shade to cool the planet. This will inevitably have uneven effects on, on, on agricultural production cause it'll rain someplace. And there's real concerned if we do that, we'll end up disrupting the monsoon rains, which of course, feed well close to half of humanity in, in, in, in Asia. Will that then cause one state to want to attack the state that's actually doing the geoengineering to stop it? Um, uh, or will we end up with, you know, in, in, in intense, um, political disputes, short of geoengineering with sanctioning states that are, are actually doing geoengineering? Um, there's all sorts of scenarios that, that you can play with, um, all of which are, are are much, much easier to avoid by reducing the amount of use of fossil fuels quickly.
Speaker 3 00:46:35 Um, so that all these, you know, scenarios about, um, about the future are just that scenarios. Um, but one common denominator is this point. If we reduce using fossil fuels quickly, uh, we may be able to avoid many of those things. But to do so require states, particularly the states that are heavily dependent on oil, um, 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, um, streams of, of, of revenue from, from those, those oil wealths. And that's really the challenge, um, uh, that, that we need some kind of much, much better global cooperation on, uh, in, in, in the coming decades.
Speaker 2 00:47:19 You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ron Lipshutz, host of the show, and my guest today is Professor Emeritus Simon Dalby, who was recently published, uh, rethinking Environmental Security. And we've just been talking about the impact in particular of, uh, Insta unstable climate and other systems on international politics. Um, Simon, one of the, uh, intriguing topics in your book is the geopolitics of colonizing nature. And, you know, humans have been transforming nature since time immemorial. Um, but I think you are, you are talking about it in a somewhat different way. Can you say something about that?
Speaker 3 00:48:03 It's a, it's a phrase that is attempting to suggest that, um, we have been both incorporating larger and larger amounts of natural phenomena into human systems, but also simultaneously doing it by, um, drawing property boundaries and state boundaries around ecosystems and appropriating. Um, you know, this is my bit, I will do these resources, um, uh, and, and, and use them the way I want, making, um, global cooperation and, and, and governance across those boundaries more difficult. Um, one of the things that, uh, was, is, is in this book, and it was written and actually published on more or less on the 50th anniversary of the original Stockholm, um, conference on the human environment in 1972. Um, and one of the basic principles on that, 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 ex, um, to, uh, extract resources from within their territories.
Speaker 3 00:49:03 But the priv 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, um, because I've drawn a neat boundary around it as either in property on the small scale or sovereignty on the big scale. Um, and 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. Um, you have to act responsibly within your territory, whether it's within your property or on a larger scale within your, your, your sovereign space. And of course, the argument in climate change is that northern rich states have been doing anything, but, um, we have been prodigious productive in terms of carbon dioxide, uh, pay no attention to what consequences this would have.
Speaker 3 00:49:54 And of course, um, vulnerable, um, agricultural populations in the global south, um, that are more directly vulnerable because they are agricultural and hence dependent on rainfall and, and, and sunlight and, and, and, and, um, and, and it's fairly predictable patterns, which we are starting to mess up. Um, so the colonizing nature is we'd be taking over more and more spaces, more and more resources, just think about how e exclusive economic zones in, in the ocean has extended territorial, um, uh, control over ever larger parts of the, of, of, of, of the ocean. Not very effective control, but nonetheless, that's what we've been doing. Um, and the only way we seem to be able to think about managing resources is to enclose everything and then assign property rights. Um, and then of course, we forget about the consequences that flow across the boundaries from, from using that property in irresponsible ways.
Speaker 3 00:50:48 And so what I'm trying to use is the phrase is to grapple with, with, with that larger, um, collection of processes, which are all part and parcel of the growth of, of European colonization, and then subsequently the ever larger extension of property rights through what we now call globalization. Um, so I'm trying to point out the fact that this has all sorts of deleterious consequences. Um, and we need to stop and think much more carefully about how it is we use law and jurisdictions, um, because we can no longer take for granted that there's more planet out there to, to enclose or more planet that we can just dump the, the, the carbon dioxide into the planetary system and not worry about it. Um, we, uh, can no longer live in a world where that sort of basic assumption about governance is, is taken for granted. Um, because it's obviously, you know, the spatial division into territories is the geo um, politics of this, um, colonizing is, is the history of European colonization, which is appropriated resources and distance. Um, and I'm trying to use a, a pithy phrase to summarize all those processes as been part and parcel of the, the, the, the problems that we're now, um, confronting.
Speaker 2 00:51:59 Well, we're, 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, uh, between the idea that, um, you know, 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 the kind of the archetypal case of this. Um, can you, in the last couple of minutes, can you, um, talk about that?
Speaker 3 00:52:33 Um, we all have to stop and think about the contradictions that, that, that are going on here. I mean, the Amazon debate is, is, is fascinating because it clearly is a, a major ecological system that is getting trashed. Um, uh, 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, um, destroying their own ecosystem because they decided that, well, they want to clear the forest and, and, and, and have cattle on it instead. Um, this is really the question of dual responsibilities running headlong into, into sovereign prerogatives of, of particular states. Um, and you know, therein lies, you know, much of the difficulty because like the commodity chains we were talking about earlier, consequences spill over, um, the, the, uh, spill over the, the, the sovereign boundaries of states.
Speaker 3 00:53:32 The, one of the more interesting arguments of in, in the whole climate change thing is cause has been compensation payments for foregone resource extraction opportunities. That's an awful mouthful. But basically, if you promise not to cut down your, your forest and make money from the forest, we will pay you, um, to keep the forest intact has been one of the basic side payment arguments in climate change. Um, of course it doesn't work very well in, in an increasingly volatile world. Um, I think in the sum of the, um, so-called carbon offsets from, uh, 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 Quebecers are putting into the atmosphere, or 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 foresters supposedly provided are simply disappearing because wildfires are destroying those forests.
Speaker 3 00:54:33 Um, where 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, um, promisers not to do things, um, are just fictions. Um, but that said, somewhere along the way, um, many ecosystems do need to be protected. And in a world where grown populations are all aspiring to more affluent lifestyles, um, it's really tricky to figure out how it is that, uh, you can actually keep some of those places, um, in, in 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 of, in the long run, this will, um, uh, this will, uh, be for the benefit of biodiversity and probably for all of our benefits in the, in, in the long run.
Speaker 3 00:55:32 But of course, there's a very nasty history of, of colonial notions of conservation, which required removing native peoples from environments where 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. Um, the geopolitics of colonization. Uh, can we find ways that indigenous populations actually, um, are, uh, become the, the, uh, the, the protectors of, of, of local ecosystems rather than being, seeing 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, um, how to, to have actively, um, uh, flourishing ecosystems as that which we, um, which we, um, promote effectively. Um, that's a major challenge, uh, 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, um, to live reasonably well, um, in those ecosystems.
Speaker 3 00:56:49 That's the real challenge, um, that uh, that much of that discussion now, um, presents, uh, whole new generation of social scientists are gonna have to devote their attention, um, to that. And that's part of, you know, the rethinking environmental security discussion too. Um, and I hope there's a whole lot of potential PhD students, um, listening in <laugh> who will take some of these tasks, um, on as their dissertation topics and get on with it because we need to do a whole lot more serious rethinking, um, on these topics for to, for a sustainable future, for future generations.
Speaker 2 00:57:23 Well, Simon, uh, I want to thank you for being my guest on sustainability now.
Speaker 3 00:57:30 You're welcome. May I have enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 2 00:57:33 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
Speaker 1 00:57:53 Good planets a hot zone tropic climbs, season winds blowing some breathing trees. Strong sunshine, good planets are hard to
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