Description
Write two brief summaries and a concluding paragraph for the following two texts:
White, Rob. 2014. Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality.
Alt, Suvi. 2023. Environmental apocalypse and space: lost dimension of the end of the world.
For each of the two texts:
– Capture the key argument you believe the author makes in your own words. Use direct quotes
sparingly only, if at all.
– Highlight one or two facts or examples the author mentions.
Concluding thoughts:
– What is your take-away from reading the two articles? How do these readings differ in focus and
objective and what may they have in common?
Be selective and go for big picture: These texts are rather different in character but both cover
considerable ground, so you need to carefully read the texts first, then decide what is important and try
to synthesize your analysis and concluding remarks.
Structure: your essay will have three parts:
– 2 short summaries,
– 1 final concluding section.
Total length: Your essay in total should be at least 800 words and no more than 1400 words. The three
sections do not need to be the same word count. Allocate the word count as you see useful.
Try to stick to the word count. If you end up above it, edit it down: delete, rephrase, condense,
consolidate. This tends to make your writing better. But you will not be marked down for going a bit
over the word count. Use your own judgment!
For reference, this assignment prompt is 420 words long.
Write the total word count in the top right corner of the first page.
Style and format: – Use full bibliographical reference as title for each summary (copy from syllabus).
– If you use direct quotes, do so sparingly and reference with page number (Alt, p. 15).
GRADING will be based on:
1) Effort to identify key arguments and synthesizing concluding thoughts.
2) Organization, clarity of writing and grammar! Be concise and precise.
3) Avoid vague language and repetition. Proof read before turning in.
Upload electronic copy to CANVAS by the due date and time!
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Environmental insecurity
and fortress mentality
ROB WHITE
Shortages of food, water and non-renewable energy sources can trigger nefarious
activities involving organized criminal networks, transnational corporations and
governments at varying political levels. Illegal and excessive fishing, sidestepping of regulations on disposal of hazardous waste, water and land theft, fraudulent manipulation of alternative energy subsidies and policies, and transference
of toxicity and contaminated products across national borders are driven by a
variety of motivations and involve a wide range of actors. The consequences of
such activities contribute to even more ruthless exploitation of rapidly vanishing
natural resources, as well as the further diminution of air, soil and water quality,
thereby exacerbating the competition among individuals, groups and nations for
what is left.
This article explores the political, economic and ecological context within
which preoccupations with environmental insecurity emerge and how they
feed back into a fortress mentality. The pursuit of security based upon a fortress
mentality simultaneously fosters global crimes such as ecocide, contributes to
the proliferation of specific conventional environmental crimes and hampers the
exercise of justice. The net result is insecurity and injustice, a consequence that
further bolsters the fortress mentality. A pernicious spiral of harm is thus reproduced over time.
The accompanying insecurities and vulnerabilities ensure elite and popular
support for self-interested ‘security’. Accordingly, the ‘fortress’ is being constructed
and reconstructed at individual, local, national and regional levels—as both an
attitude of mind and a material reality. The net result is that security is being built
upon a platform of state, corporate and organized group wrongdoing and injustice, in many instances with the implied and/or overt consent of relevant publics.
The intention of this article is to explore these propositions in greater depth.
The aim is to explain why it is that collectively so many are implicated in the
destruction of a particular way of life, under the rubric of doing so for the sake
of enjoying and defending it. The paradoxes embedded in the gross exploitation of nature are explored through consideration of the historical appropriation
of natural resources and the scramble today to carve up what is left. A primary
concern is to examine critically notions of environmental security, the fortress
mentality, and social and ecological insecurity.
International Affairs 90: 4 (2014) 835–851
© 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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Policy development that goes beyond this fortress security agenda will necessarily be based upon a global vision of universal human interests and ecological
citizenship. To do anything less is to invite ecocide—itself the greatest environmental crime of all.
Environmental insecurity
The notion of environmental insecurity is usually tied to actions and conditions
that undermine the ability to exploit or use nature sufficiently to meet human
needs. Hall observes that definitions of ‘environmental security’ differ, but generally the concept tends to link environmental degradation and associated scarcity
of resources with human conflict at individual, group and state levels.1
Scarcity is tied to the overexploitation of natural resources. It is also increasingly linked to the consequences of global warming.2 The choices ingrained in
environmental exploitation stem from systemic imperatives to exploit the planetary environment for production of commodities for human use.3 The means
by which humans produce, consume and reproduce their conditions of life are
socially patterned in ways that are dominated by global corporate interests and
those of the hegemonic nation-states. The power of consumerist ideology and
practice manifests in the way in which certain forms of production and consumption become part of a taken-for-granted common sense, the experiences and habits
of everyday life.
One result of the regimes and routines that sustain contemporary social life,
especially in the global North (or ‘the West’) is the systematic transformation of
nature. Elements of this transformation include, among others:
• resource depletion—extraction of non-renewable minerals and energy without
development of proper alternatives; overharvesting of renewable resources such
as fish and forest timbers;
• disposal problems—relating to waste generated in production, distribution and
consumption processes, and pollution associated with transformations of nature,
burning of fossil fuels and using up of consumables;
• corporate colonization of nature—genetic changes in food crops; use of plantation
forestry that diminishes biodiversity; preference for large-scale, technologydependent and high-yield agricultural and aquaculture methods that degrade
land and oceans and affect species’ development and well-being;
1
2
3
Matthew Hall, Victims of environmental harm: rights, recognition and redress under national and international law
(London: Routledge, 2013), p. 36.
Global warming describes the rising of the Earth’s temperature over a relatively short time span. Climate change
describes the interrelated effects of this rise in temperature, from changing sea levels and changing ocean
currents, through to the impacts of temperature change on local environments that affect the endemic flora
and fauna in varying ways (for instance, the death of coral owing to temperature increases in sea water or the
changed migration patterns of birds). Weather is the name given to the direct local experience of phenomena
such as sunshine, wind, rain and snow, and the general disposition of the elements. It is about the short-term
and personal, not the long-term patterns associated with climate in general. See Constance Lever-Tracy,
Confronting climate change (London: Routledge, 2011).
Paul Stretesky, Michael Long and Michael Lynch, The treadmill of crime: political economy and green criminology
(London: Routledge, 2014).
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Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality
• species decline—destruction of habitats, privileging of certain species of grains
and vegetables over others for market purposes; super-exploitation of specific
plants and animals, due to presumed consumer taste and mass markets.4
The moral and material universe within which these trends occur is one that is
generally supportive of this sort of natural resource exploitation. In other words,
the ravaging of nature takes place with the consent of its beneficiaries, among
whom are the general populaces of advanced industrialized countries.
Nonetheless there are limits to this exploitation, as evidenced by the increasing
scarcity of both non-renewables (e.g. oil and minerals) and renewables (e.g. fresh
water, forests, fertile soils). Sustainable use occurs when the underlying stock
is not depleted in quantity or degraded in quality; this is rarely the case today.
Scarcity can arise from:
• depletion or degradation of the resource (supply);
• increased demand for it (demand);
• unequal distribution and/or resource capture (structural scarcity).5
As Homer-Dixon comments, these three factors are interrelated: ‘Deforestation
increases the scarcity of forest resources, water pollution increases the scarcity of
clean water, and climate change increases the scarcity of the regular patterns of
rainfall and temperature on which farmers rely.’6
The centrality of resource issues has been examined at length by Klare, who
points out that they are especially important for those states that depend on raw
material imports for their industrial prowess.7 Demand is escalating worldwide for
commodities of all types (energy, consumer goods, food), accompanied by huge
population growth and rising affluence via economic expansion in places such as
China and India. Increasingly there are scarcities of specific resources (e.g. forest
cover, marine fisheries, freshwater systems and fossil fuels), leading to a proliferation of ownership contests (e.g. disputes over islands involving China, Vietnam,
the Philippines and Japan; redrawing of boundaries in the Arctic among border
states such as Russia, Canada, Norway and the United States).8 Meanwhile: ‘To
guard against immediate food shortages, government-backed agricultural firms
in China, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates are already
buying vast tracts of arable land in Africa and elsewhere to provide food for
consumption at home.’9 Security is being sought through the appropriation of
resources in specific biosocial locations.
Simultaneously, global warming is transforming the biophysical world in ways
that are radically and rapidly reshaping social and ecological futures. A recent
4
5
6
7
8
9
Rob White, ‘Transnational environmental crime and eco-global criminology’, in Shlomo Giora Shoham, Paul
Knepper and Martin Kett, eds, International handbook of criminology (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010).
Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, scarcity, and violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Homer-Dixon, Environment, scarcity, and violence p. 47.
Michael T. Klare, The race for what’s left: the global scramble for the world’s last resources (New York: Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt, 2012).
See e.g. Avi Brisman, ‘Not a bedtime story: climate change, neoliberalism, and the future of the Arctic’,
Michigan State International Law Review 22: 1, 2013, pp. 241–89.
Klare, The race for what’s left, p. 11.
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report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that:
• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the
observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and
ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen,
and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.
• Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than
any preceding decade since 1850.
• Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system,
accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010.
• Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass,
glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern
Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent.
• The rate of sea level rise since the mid-19th century has been larger than the mean rate
during the previous two millennia.10
Scientific data continue to demonstrate the depth and scale of the problem.
According to those who advocate making ‘ecocide’ a new crime against peace,
the failure to act now to prevent global warming can be considered ‘criminal’.
Ecocide has been defined as ‘the extensive damage, destruction to or loss of
ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes,
to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has
been severely diminished’.11 Where this occurs as a result of human agency, then it
is deemed to be a crime. The failure of nation-states and large corporations to act
sensibly and prudently with regard to climate change can be framed as criminally
culpable behaviour within this framework. Economic and social interventions that
sustain the status quo (and that include maintaining the viability of ‘dirty’ industries) are currently favoured over those that might tackle the key drivers of climate
change and that could diminish the burgeoning threats to ecological sustainability
worldwide. The harms are known, and the acts leading to the generation of the
harms are intentional. This, therefore, is ecocide.
The mainstream or generic sense of environmental insecurity speaks to issues such
as ‘food security’ and related social ills, such as riots and social conflict and/or the
illegal harvesting of fish, animals and plants. Insecurity relates to the biophysical and
socio-economic consequences of various sources of threat and damage to the environment including pollution, resource degradation, biodiversity loss and climate
change.12 In the midst of these insecurities a range of new and old crimes is apparent. For example, drought-induced food scarcity is associated with the rise of illicit
markets, climate-induced migration with human trafficking and the exploitation
of children by gangs and militias, and fraud with carbon emissions trading schemes.
10
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth
Assessment Report, Climate Change 2013: the physical science basis, ‘Summary for policymakers’, 27 Sept. 2013.
11
Polly Higgins, Earth is our business: changing the rules of the game (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2012), p. 3.
12
Nigel South, ‘Climate change, environmental (in)security, conflict and crime’, in Stephen Farrall, Tawhida
Ahmed and Duncan French, Criminological and legal consequences of climate change (Oxford: Hart, 2012).
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Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality
Security is substantially constructed around the notion of control over resources,
enforced by the viewpoint that ‘might makes right’. For example, South observes
that: ‘A new world of hydropolitics emerges in situations where water sources
are currently accessed by several nations but could potentially be controlled—or
indeed monopolised—by one nation or by private water and power consortia.’13
Environmental security is basically defined in relation to specific corporate and
national interests, and threats to these interests. This is reflected in the literature
dealing with these issues. Hall, for example, also makes the point that as natural
resources become restricted by various impacts of climate change and wider
environmental degradation, such resources will become increasingly precious to
states and therefore increasingly attractive to terrorist groups seeking to achieve
symbolic victories.14
Here, a shift can be observed in the notion of ‘security’ towards a conception in which the primary evil is not environmental destruction as such, but the
politics and corruption surrounding such destruction. In a similar vein, Wyatt, in a
book on wildlife trafficking, argues that: ‘It can threaten national security because
wildlife trafficking is carried out through corruption at various levels, organised
crime and possibly terrorists and insurgents.’15
National security is conceptualized here as being more than just military,
encompassing territorial inviolability, and economic and political interests that
protect the value and stability of the state. According to Wyatt, there are three
major problems that states and the international community have to come to
grips with in relation to national security: corruption (entailing ‘corruption of
the officials in origin, transit and destination countries as well as corruption of
the employees of transportation agencies involved along the smuggling chain’);
organized crime (involving wildlife trafficking in conjunction with trafficking in
weapons, drugs and human beings, and including criminal enclaves which, in
some circumstances, supersede the state’s monopoly on use of force); and terrorism
and insurgency (involving natural resource theft, such as wildlife trafficking and
engagement in black markets for ‘blood ivory’ or ‘blood diamonds’). Wyatt also
makes mention of the possible use of the illegal wildlife trade as a vector for transferring disease, that is, as a form of environmental terrorism.16
Security, in the light of an international reconfiguration of wealth and resources,
power and dominance, can be understood in geopolitical terms as containment
and exclusion. This is also reflected in the so-called ‘climate divide’ associated
with global warming:
Climate change is producing a new set of global dividing lines, now between those at most
risk and those at least risk. This ‘climate divide’ is recognised in many ways but arguably
not on a widespread basis or with full appreciation of what it really means. In essence,
the climate divide represents a further extension of the inequitable state of the affairs of
13
South, ‘Climate change’, p. 100.
14
Hall, Victims of environmental harm, pp. 36–7.
15
16
Tanya Wyatt, Wildlife trafficking: a deconstruction of the crime, the victims and the offenders (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), p. 51.
Wyatt, Wildlife trafficking.
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humanity, one in which the conditions producing climate change are contributed to most
overwhelmingly by rich consumer societies but which will impose the greatest costs and
resultant miseries on the already poor and newly developing nations.17
Environmental security is thus basically about security for very specific and
particular social interests. To put it differently, the ‘national interest’ usually reflects
specific sectoral business interests, not universal interests. This is evidenced in the
manner in which climate change contrarianism is pushed by particular industries
and acceded to by dominant nation-states such as the United States.18 Humanity
has certain shared interests—universal human interests—such as the survival of
the human race in the face of phenomena including global warming and climate
change. These common human interests need to take priority over any other kind
of interests if we are, as a species, to survive. Yet this is not occurring. This failure
to act forms part of the conundrum of environmental insecurity and the fortress
mentality that sustains it.
In essence, ‘environmental security’ is not so much about the environment as
it is about security. Consider, for example, the relocation of the environmental
crime unit at Interpol into the ‘Environmental Security Sub-Directorate’ under
the ‘Counter Terrorism, Public Safety and Maritime Security Directorate’. The
equation now seems to go something like this:
Environmental crime + security, terrorism and organized crime = natural resource
protection
This represents a narrowing of the definition of environmental harm in ways
that do not focus on intrinsic harms to the environment as such. Instead, such
conceptions reflect militarized notions of ‘security’, rather than those premised
upon either universal human interests (such as food security, air security and water
security for all) or the intrinsic worth of animals, plants and specific eco-systems
as such.
Environmental security is thus about protecting one’s turf and one’s resources
from those who threaten them through criminal appropriation, political contestation or terrorist intervention.
Constructing the fortress
How ‘environmental security’ is understood mirrors the notion of the ‘fortress’
and how this is constructed and reconstructed at individual, local, national and
regional levels.
Tiers of fortification are built step by step, level by overlapping level (see figure
1). We build walls around ourselves to shield us against the vicissitudes of unkind
economic circumstance. Our social groups—families, friends and local neighbours,
17
South, ‘Climate change’, p. 109.
18
Avi Brisman, ‘The violence of silence: some reflections on access to information, public participation in
decision-making, and access to justice in matters concerning the environment’, Crime, Law and Social Change
59: 3, 2013, pp. 291–303.
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Environmental insecurity and fortress mentality
Figure 1: Tiers of fortification
Global North
Nation-state
Communities
Social groups
Individual
our workmates—band together to protect immediate interests and exclude those
who potentially disrupt any advantages to which we might be clinging. Communities with commonly held beliefs and values extol the importance of their survival,
their interests, their integrity—and the city enclave reproduces identity and exclusivity in the same moment. The nation-state erects ever stronger border controls,
and entry–exit criteria are elaborated in ever-increasing detail at the same time that
surveillance is stepped up. The global North (a metaphor for privilege and wealth
based upon the western ideal) sets out its security plans and charts how best to carve
up new territories, new opportunities for exploitation, new ways to extract from
the Earth its final pounds of (non-renewable) flesh, and new exclusions.
Environmental crime is increasing on a world scale, in terms of variety, volume
and value, mainly because of scarcity and conflict.19 This trend directly affects
access to essentials, such as safe drinking water, food sources and shelter. Table 1,
based on recent information about transnational environmental crime, provides
a snapshot summary of the worth (dollar value) and damage (ecological impact)
caused by illegal trade and trafficking.
The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute has
reported a considerable expansion of transnational environmental crimes in recent
years, largely due to the actions of organized criminal groups across borders.
Led by vast financial gains and facilitated by a low risk of detection and scarce conviction
rates, criminal networks and organized criminal groups are becoming increasingly interested in such illicit transnational activities. These phenomena fuel corruption and moneylaundering, and undermine the rule of law, ultimately affecting the public twice: first, by
putting at risk citizens’ health and safety; and second, by diverting resources that would
otherwise be allocated to services other than crime. The level of organization needed for
these crimes indicates a link with other serious offences, including theft, fraud, corruption,
drugs and human trafficking, counterfeiting, firearms smuggling, and money laundering,
several of which have been substantiated by investigations.20
19
Avi Brisman and Nigel South, ‘Resources, wealth, power, crime and conflict’, in Reece Walters, Diane Solomon
Westerhuis and Tanya Wyatt, eds, Emerging issues in green criminology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 57–71.
20
United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, Environmental crimes, 2013, http://www.
unicri.it/print.php, accessed 18 May 2014.
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Table 1: Worth of environmental crime—selected commodities
Type of crime
Annual value, US$ % of world activity
Examples
Wildlife crime
15–20 billion
Birds, ivory
and rhino horn,
reptiles and insects,
tigers,wild game
Illegal, unreported 10–23.5 billion
and unregulated
fishing
Est. 20% of world Abalone, caviar,
catches
shark fin, sturgeon
Illegal logging
15–30% of global
trade
30–100 billion
Timber production, land clearing,
crop substitution
Source: United Nations Environment Programme and One World South Asia, Theft of
natural resources is a new challenge (Nairobi: UNEP, 2013), http://southasia.oneworld.net/
news/theft-of-natural-resources-is-a-new-challenge-unep, accessed 15 May 2014.
It is not only traditional criminal networks and syndicates that are implicated in
transnational environmental crimes. There are also links between terrorist groups
and particular types of environmental crime. For example:
The recent terror attack on the popular Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, has
placed environmental crimes like the ivory and rhino horn trade under increased scrutiny.
Al-Shabab, the Islamist militant group that has taken credit for the attack, is widely
believed to fund as much as 40 percent of its activities from elephant poaching, or the
‘blood ivory’ trade.21
Not surprisingly, agencies such as Interpol have stepped up their activities in
response to the nature and dynamics of contemporary environmental crime and
its perpetrators as defined in conventional legal terms.
Yet there is also to be considered the larger ‘crime’ associated with private and
state ownership where land is utilized for profit-making activities (e.g. biofuels,
mining, logging, flex crops22 and agriculture for export) rather than to meet social
need. There is nothing particularly new about this; the history of colonialism is
in essence a history of resource extraction and exploitation. Globalization is but
a more intensive and intrusive extension of an imperialism that has always been
oriented towards exploitation of people and natural resources in the global South,
perpetrated by the transnational corporations and hegemonic nation-states of the
global North.
21
Irin, ‘Environmental crimes increasingly linked to violence, insecurity’, 3 Oct. 2013, http://www.irinnews.
org/printreport.aspx?reportid=98872, accessed 18 May 2014.
22
Flex crops refer to a single crop, such as soybean, that has multiple characteristics and uses (food, feed, fuel),
and as such are highly valued commercially.
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Social inequality and social conflict
Out of this mix emerge a series of related environmental conflicts, as Brisman
and South note:
The environment and natural resources can be a source of conflict (for example when groups
fight over access to or use of natural resources), can fuel or fund existing conflicts (for example
when warring groups extract diamonds or metals or timber that are then sold to finance
conflicts), and can be a casualty of conflict (for example, in the Vietnam War, when deforestation chemicals, such as Agent Orange, caused crop destruction; in the first Gulf War, when
oil wells were set ablaze).23
Defending economic interests and preserving a certain way of life are far too often
deemed to be in the ‘national interest’. Contrary to this, any shift towards international environmental sustainability tends to be shunned or actively hindered as
sectional interests prevail.
The divide between North and South, geographically and metaphorically, is
already deepening as crises related to food production and distribution, energy
sources and pollution, and changing climates reconfigure the established world
order. Social inequality and environmental injustice will undoubtedly be the drivers of continuous conflict into the future, as the most dispossessed and marginalized
of the world’s population suffer the brunt of food shortages, undrinkable water,
climate-induced migration and general hardship in their day-to-day lives. Women
will suffer more than men, people of colour more than the non-indigenous and
the non-migrant, the young and the elderly more than the adult, and the infirm
and disabled of all ages. Social conflict linked to climate change is as much as
anything a reflection of social inequality, and not simply determined by changes
in environmental conditions.24
When subsistence fishing, farming and hunting wither due to overexploitation
and climate change, then great shifts in human populations and in resource use
will take place. The forced migration of environmental refugees poses a whole
new set of questions for public policy and social justice.25 Indeed, the relationship between environmental change, climate-induced displacement and human
migration is already generating anxiety in some western government circles and
is reinforcing the development of a fortress mentality within certain jurisdictions
(whether among groups of countries such as the European Union or discrete
nation-states such as Australia).
Global warming, meanwhile, will continue to accelerate, given the privileged
position of the oil and coal industries, the advent of coal-seam ‘fracking’ and its
threats to prime agricultural land, the extensive use of deep-drill oil exploration
and exploitation, the reliance upon and preference for mega-mines and open-cut
mining, and changes in land use, such as deforestation in favour of cash crops,
23
Brisman and South, ‘Resources, wealth, power, crime and conflict’, p. 58.
24
Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, A climate of conflict: the links between climate change, peace and war (London:
International Alert, 2007).
25
See e.g. Refugees Studies Centre, Forced Migration Review, no. 31: Climate change and displacement (Oxford:
Oxford Department of International Development, Oct. 2008).
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biofuels, mining and pastoral industries. As the IPCC points out:
• The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have
increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years.
• Carbon dioxide concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times,
primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions.
• Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in
changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level
rise, and in changes in some climate extremes.
• Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all
components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and
sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Most aspects of climate change will persist for many centuries even if emissions of
carbon dioxide are stopped. This represents a substantial multi-century climate change
commitment created by past, present and future emissions of carbon dioxide.
• As indicated, climate change will likewise add further stress to specific environments
and general planetary ecological wellbeing that is already under pressure from overexploitation and systematic pollution of air, water and land.26
All this and more is built upon the backs of dirty industries and the scramble for
natural resources. In the process someone’s, indeed everyone’s, security is compromised.
Fortress Earth
As we modify, degrade and destroy the lifeblood of this planet, the tendency is to
retreat into a fortress mentality that is protective of immediate perceived personal
and community interests. From the point of view of international affairs we
appear to be looking at a future of scarcities and fortresses: of social conflicts over
resources, many of which are increasingly culminating in expressions of public
anger. These types of issues are cutting much closer to the bone than perhaps they
used to; they are affecting real people in our time, and real people are making their
voices heard, especially through street-level protest and social media. All this is a
consequence of the pressures that are collectively being put on the environment.
Climate change will only exacerbate these tendencies as supplies of food, energy
(i.e. oil) and water dwindle, and climate-induced migration increases as a result of
these and other pressures.
Using the analogy of the ‘gated community’, putting the fortress in place
frequently embodies the very thing that it is designed to prevent—namely, insecurity. Building the fortress opens the door to gross violations of human rights
within and between communities and societies and nation-states. It feeds into
and gives rise to extremist politics and bolsters the view that social and ecological
26
IPCC, Working Group I Contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2013: the physical
