Abstract
Like all biological organisms, humans are vitally dependent upon their physical environment. Since the emergence of human life on earth, humans have been able simply to take as given the presence of some environmental conditions — for example, clean air and shielding from ultraviolet radiation — that are now in jeopardy. Other environmental elements — particularly fertile soil, water and earth minerals — have been subject to intense, often violent, intergroup competition.1 Over the last two centuries, the explosive progress in science and technology and the emergence of societies of unprecedented wealth seemed to have loosened the iron grip of natural scarcity upon human life. In the last several decades, however, alarming evidence has accumulated that human activities have begun to cause significant changes in the earth’s life support system.
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Notes
For an overview of the role of environmental factors in early theories of politics, see Daniel Deudney, ‘Earlier Theories of the Influence of Geography and the Environment Upon Politics’, Global Geopolitics: Materialist World Order Theories of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Politics Department, Princeton University, 1989) Chapter III.
For overviews of the global warming problem, see Dean Edwin Abrahamson (ed.), The Challenge of Global Warming (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1989).
William D. Ruckelshaus, ‘Toward a Sustainable World’, Scientific American (September 1989) p. 167.
See, for example, Ernst Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley, CA: Banyan Books, 1975)
Ernst Callenbach, Ecotopia Emerging (Berkeley, CA: Banyan, 1981)
John Stadler (ed.), Eco-Fiction (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971)
and Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka, Nature’s End: The Consequences of the Twentieth Century (New York: Warner, 1986)
At one extreme are those, such as Alan James, who define a state as ‘territory, people and a government’ in Alan James, Sovereign Statehood (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986) p. 13.
More narrowly, the state can mean the state administrative apparatus, as when Theda Skocpol defines the state as ‘a set of administrative, policy and military organisations headed, and more or less well coordinated, by an executive authority’ in Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 29.
For a penetrating review of these conceptual problems see Fred Halliday, ‘State and Society in International Relations: A Second Agenda’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 1987).
For a general analysis of the state’s complex role in contemporary politics, see John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry, The State (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Stanley Hoffmann, ‘International Relations: An American Social Science’, Daedalus (Summer 1977) p. 53.
James Rosenau, ‘The State in an Era of Cascading Politics: Wavering Concept, Widening Competence, Withering Colossus, or Weathering Change?’, in James Caporaso (ed.), The Elusive State (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1989).
Lester Brown, Redefining National Security (Washington, DC: World-watch Paper, No. 14, October 1977)
Michael Renner, National Security: The Economic and Environmental Dimensions (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Paper, No. 89, May 1989)
Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ‘Redefining Security’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 68, No. 2, 1989) pp. 162–77
and Norman Myers, ‘Environmental Security’, Foreign Policy (No. 74, 1989) pp. 23–41.
Richard Ullman, ‘Redefining Security’, International Security (Vol. 8, No. 1, Summer 1983) pp. 129–53.
Hal Harvey, ‘Natural Security’, Nuclear Times (March/April 1988) pp. 24–6.
Philip Shabecoff, ‘Senator Urges Military Resources Be Turned to Environmental Battle’, The New York Times (29 June 1990) p. 1A.
Quentin Skinner, ‘Language and Political Change’, and James Farr, ‘Understanding Political Change Conceptually’, in Terence Ball et al. (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
A particularly lucid and well-rounded discussion of security, the state and violence is found in Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1983) particularly pp. 1–93.
See also Arnold Wolfers, ‘National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol’, in Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962).
Arthur Westing, Warfare in a Fragile World: Military Impact on the Human Environment (London: Taylor & Francis in association with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1980).
Zhores A. Medvedev, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals (New York: Norton, 1979).
Michael Howard, ‘War and the Nation-State’, Daedalus (Fall 1979).
and Peter Gleick, ‘Global Climatic Changes and Geopolitics: Pressures on Developed and Developing Countries’, in A. Berger et al. (eds), Climate and Geo-Sciences, 1989 (Amsterdam: Kluwar Academic Publishers, 1989).
Arthur H. Westing, ‘Global Resources and International Conflict: An Overview’, in Arthur H. Westing (ed.), Global Resources and Environmental Conflict: Environmental Factors in Strategic Policy and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1986) p. 1.
For a useful survey of theories relevant for such analysis, see Tad Homer Dixon, Environmental Change and Human Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Working Paper, American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, 1990).
For discussions of resource autarky during the 1930s, see Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials (New York: Macmillan, 1934)
Norman Rich, Hitler’s War Aims: Ideology, The Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion (New York: W.W., Norton & Co., 1973)
and William Carr, Arms, Autarchy, and Aggression: A Study in German Foreign Policy, 1933–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972)
Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials (New York: Macmillan, 1934) p. 1.
James Crowley, Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942).
Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979).
And more generally, see Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
Ronnie D. Lipschutz, When Nations Clash: Raw Materials, Ideology and Foreign Policy (New York: Ballinger, 1989).
Among the most recent versions of the argument that war is of declining viability are: Evan Luard, The Blunted Sword: The Erosion of Military Power in Modern World Politics (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1989)
and John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989)
H.E. Goeller and Alvin Weinberg, ‘The Age of Substitutability’, Science (Vol. 201, 20 February 1967).
For some recent evidence supporting this hypothesis, see Eric D. Larson, Marc H. Ross and Robert H. Williams, ‘Beyond the Era of Materials’, Scientific American (Vol. 254, 1986) pp. 34–41.
For analyses of the vulnerability of energy infrastructure to contemporary means of destruction, see: Wilson Clark and Jake Page, Energy, Vulnerability, and War (New York: Norton, 1981)
and Amory and Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power (Andover, MA.: Brick House, 1982)
For discussion of authoritarian and conflictual consequences of environmentally-constrained economies, see: William Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco, CA: Freeman, 1976) p. 152.
See also Susan M. Leeson, ‘Philosophical Implications of the Ecological Crisis: The Authoritarian Challenge to Liberalism’, Polity (Vol. 11, No. 3, Spring 1979)
Ted Gurr, ‘On the Political Consequences of Scarcity and Economic Decline’, International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 29, 1985) pp. 51–75
and Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974)
See, for example, Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Bernard Brodie, ‘The Impact of Technological Change on the International System’, in David Sullivan and Martin Sattler (eds), Change and the Future of the International System (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972) p. 14.
For a particularly lucid argument that the nation-state system is over-developed relative to its actual problem-solving capacities, see George Modelski, Principles of World Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1972).
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Deudney, D. (1992). The Mirage of Eco-War: The Weak Relationship among Global Environmental Change, National Security and Interstate Violence. In: Rowlands, I.H., Greene, M. (eds) Global Environmental Change and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21816-5_9
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