Environmental Security Studies

Origin and Evolution of Concerns with Environmental Security

In the 1960s, the first efforts were directed toward articulating issues about the environment and security. They were generally concerned with the impact produced by humans on the security of nature, animals, and plants and also with the links between development and quality of life. These first interpretations of environmental security have shed light on the misuse of pesticides and fertilizers and the threats to the environment associated with nuclear energy. As in the cases of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962), Aldous Huxley's article “The Politics of Ecology: The Question of Survival” (1963), and Kenneth E. Boulding's notion of spaceship Earth (1966), these perspectives have emphasized the need to secure the integrity of ecosystems in order to ensure mankind's survival. Mercury poisoning associated with the Chisso-Minamata disease (1959) and the Torrey Canyon shipwreck off the western coast of Cornwall in England (1967), among other environmental disasters, have played a key role in this context.

In the 1970s, other readings analyzing the environmental effects of war and refugee movements developed, and research also tackled issues related to the link between the environment and development. This was the case with the “Only One Earth” report written by Barbara Ward and René Dubos, Edward Goldsmith's “Blueprint for Survival,” and the “Limits to Growth Meadows” report, all of them published in 1972. They all expressed an overreaction to some of the supposed dangers of environmental degradation to human [Page 783]security. The United Nations (UN) Conference on Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972), despite the fact that it ended with a largely dead minimalist consensus among states on 26 principles and 109 nonbinding recommendations, has paved the way for future environmental cooperation, led to the establishment of global and regional environmental monitoring networks, and allowed the creation of the UN Environmental Program in Nairobi. In its final declaration, there is not a single reference to environmental security, although its Principle 21 states that “States have … the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.” Herein resides the idea of environmental threats to the national interest of a state, which should eventually produce a change in the conception of foreign and defense politics.

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