2 Human security in the Anthropocene
The implications of earth system analysis
The anthropocene and security
The accelerating transformation of the globe by human action has meant that earth scientists now frequently refer to the present period of geological history as ‘the Anthropocene’. Although this is not yet the official term for the present geological era, there is a widespread sense among those scientists who study the earth and its lengthy history, that we do live in times where the transformation of natural processes set in motion by humanity is ‘on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2010: 2228). The construction of major cities and their infrastructures is new in terms of the sedimentary patterns on the planet; concrete and asphalt are effectively new rocks in the earth system. The chemical and biological transformations in the atmosphere, the rise in temperatures especially in the Arctic, the rapid acceleration of species extinction, and the acidification of the oceans that will soon cause major changes to marine ecosystems are all new too. ‘Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2010: 2231).
While the terminology used by geologists and other earth scientists is rarely a matter of much concern to social scientists and policy makers studying the human condition, the fact that earth scientists, who in turn are usually relatively unconcerned about the human present, are seriously discussing a new historical designation for the planet, suggests clearly that something momentous is afoot (Steffen et al., 2004). We are, albeit mostly inadvertently, changing the context for humanity both directly by building an artificial infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, pipelines, dams, power-stations, computer networks and numerous other artefacts that make our increasingly urban life possible, and indirectly by setting ecological perturbations in motion, precisely because that infrastructure and the waste products of the vehicles and fuels used to run it are changing how the biosphere operates.
These changes are on a large enough scale, and are beginning to have such far-reaching consequences for life on earth that most earth scientists have come to recognize that we are indeed now living in a new geological era. The rest of human history will unfold in these new circumstances, whether we like it or not. This is the context within which we now have to face global environmental change (Scheffran et al., 2012). The past is not a good guide to what is coming; things are in motion that will change the context for our lives, shifting storm tracks, precipitation patterns and hence agricultural possibilities among many other things. Species and humans are already on the move responding to environmental changes; they will continue to do so, but in conditions that we can help to shape in coming decades. Analogies with previous civilizations don’t help much given the extraordinary capabilities of current technology and the global scope of our economy.
We can no longer take for granted something called the environment ‘out there’ as the backdrop to the human drama (Wapner, 2010). Culture is no longer separate from nature, but the cultural choices we make, by deciding what we build and what we buy, are shaping nature in profound ways. Ecosystems and species in turn will attempt to adapt to these changing circumstances, and will frequently do so by migrating. How we respond to these changes will be at the heart of what security means in the coming decades – including human security; how we think about linking ecological change and what we feel is important enough to need securing will soon shape future human prospects profoundly. The Anthropocene really is a new era, and we need to work that key insight into all our analyses and policy prescriptions.
Traditionally, security has often been about trying to keep things the same so as to preserve the political and economic status quo. Trying to prevent change may be, in our new circumstances, the wrong thing to do, especially if it is a matter of trying to prevent species and people migrating. The contrast between Indian and Bangladeshi perspectives on security in the face of people fleeing storms in the Bay of Bengal, ‘distress migration’ as it is sometimes called, suggests what is at stake now in rethinking security. While building a fence round Bangladesh to control migration might look like an excellent way to deal with a threat to national security from refugees in New Delhi, precisely that fence is seen as an obstacle to reaching safety on the part of those forced to flee their homes as storm surges inundate the Bengal coast (Ahmed, 2009).
Security thinking needs to be substantially updated to be relevant to the new era of the Anthropocene, although this new agenda requires much more theoretical work than can be discussed in this short chapter (see Brauch et al., 2011). What this chapter does argue is that putting people and their changing ecological contexts at the heart of the analysis, rather than modern territorial states and assumptions of nature as merely a backdrop to human activity, is a necessary step to formulate a human security agenda adequate to cope with the changes we are starting to live through. At least it is necessary if anything more than the short-term prerogatives of the rich and powerful are to be considered as a matter of security.
Global environmental change
The Anthropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, when the steam engine in particular started both the widespread use of coal as a fuel for industry, and subsequently when these engines were put in motion, both as railway locomotives and ship propulsion units, to move huge quantities of materials around the world (Steffen et al., 2011). In place of forests, grasslands, and many other ecosystems we have built cities, farms, highways, and numerous industrial and agricultural systems. Rivers have been dammed, valleys flooded, water diverted and whole new artificial hydrologies created by using pipes and pumps. The steam engine powered by coal combustion set this all in motion, and the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere started to rise.
In the process of doing all this we have taken our fate into our own hands, even if we have been slow to realize that this is indeed what we have done. Petroleum-powered economic activity has effectively set in motion a second phase of the Anthropocene where the transformations are more dramatic and which now present us with the climate change crisis (Steffen et al., 2011). These new circumstances require that we seriously think about what kind of a biosphere we are making for future generations. Rising sea levels are inevitable in coming decades as glaciers and icecaps melt (Church and White, 2011), but more severe weather events, droughts, floods and hurricanes are also hazards we face in the immediate future (IPCC, 2012). If we continue the dramatic changes to natural systems that we have set in motion we may end up facing much larger, abrupt disruptions of the conditions necessary for human security. While the rich may be better equipped to adapt in the face of these disruptions the poor and marginal will become even more endangered unless policies actively devoted to their safety are put in place (Brauch et al., 2008).
The point is not that humanity has recently started changing the biosphere; we’ve been doing that for thousands of years (Ruddiman, 2005). Earth system science, the study of the planet as a single system, has come to the realization that life has been much more important as a driving force in shaping the earth’s surface than was until fairly recently widely realized (Steffen et al., 2011). While traditional views of geology suggested that the large forces that moved the continents, and responded to the radiation from the sun, were fundamental, and life was merely a superficial addition to this given planetary context, recent research has made it increasingly clear that the atmosphere in particular is partly a result of life processes. The oxygen that we all breathe is a product of life, and the carbon dioxide that is of concern in the discussion of climate change is likewise a key part of the living forces of the planet. Suddenly, in geological terms, there is a new dominant life form loose in the biosphere and it is changing numerous facets of life rapidly. What matters now is that the scale on which we are now doing this and the pace of contemporary transformation is new; so too are the likely disruptions as climate change accelerates in coming decades.
The discussion of the Anthropocene focuses attention on the largest scale phenomena, and the behaviour of the earth climate system in particular, but numerous other parts of the biosphere are being transformed by human action simultaneously. As rising levels of carbon dioxide and methane show very clearly, the whole earth system is now being changed. The planet is now undergoing one of the most dramatic extinction events in its geologic history due to human activity, and the dramatic decline in the world’s biodiversity started well before climate change had a major impact (Pereira et al., 2012). Few ecosystems in the oceans are untouched by the voracious fishing practices of the industrial harvesting machines that we now use on an increasingly acidified ocean (Anticamara et al., 2011). Deforestation not only reduces the potential for absorption of carbon dioxide, it simultaneously eradicates habitat for many species; this too has had a dramatic impact on changing the biosphere and is a central issue in contemporary discussions of conservation (Phelps et al., 2012).
A quick glance at the fifth edition of the United Nations publication, Global Environmental Outlook (GEO5) makes this point clear (UNEP, 2012). Numerous earlier UN documents repeatedly invoked themes of environment or development, of environmental constraints as a limit on development, or tried to suggest either some notion of balance between the two. In GEO5 and elsewhere these formulations are gradually being superseded by the realization that humanity is an active change agent in the environment. This insight has shifted the discussion of development so that having a functional environment is now understood as a necessary precondition for development; this precondition is what has to be secured if civilization in a form that we recognize is to continue into the future. In case the significance of their findings isn’t obvious, the GEO5 authors added a pointed subtitle: ‘Environment for the Future We Want’.
Securing what future?
Not only are we living in a new geological era, we have also become an urban species, and in many places a coastal dwelling species, while setting these transformations of the biosphere in motion. We are increasingly living in artificial structures and are dependent on long commodity chains, as well as the infrastructure that allow food, fuel, clothing and other essentials to get to where we live. Anthropocene vulnerabilities are about both the increasing severity of hazards, and the fact that we are vulnerable because these hazards disrupt the infrastructure that makes urban life possible. In these circumstances human security is now about simultaneously slowing the rate of change by reducing carbon and methane emissions into the atmosphere and planning infrastructure that is much more robust in the face of storms, droughts, heat waves and other hazards, as well as securing lives and livelihoods in a changing climate.
Predicting precisely what the future holds in store for us is impossible, but some of the high profile disasters of recent years suggest the importance of thinking through this double logic of human security (Dalby, 2009). For example, Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent inundation of much of New Orleans in 2005 may be a precursor of things to come, and the consequences of Hurricane Sandy in the New York metropolitan region underscore this point. Unless careful planning and attention to infrastructure is a priority, and unless humanity seriously reduces the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions, such disasters may become the norm, rather than exceptions. Katrina was a disaster, not because of the immediate impact of the hurricane, but because the combination of land-use changes and inadequate maintenance of the flood prevention infrastructure, made the city vulnerable to a storm water surge. All of which was greatly exacerbated by the lack of effective evacuation routines, and the inability to deal with people who needed help once the flooding began. Human security clearly should now be about building cities that are not so vulnerable to extreme events, and simultaneously preparing to help people who, despite these precautions, still end up in harm’s way.
Many of the climate models that have been worked on for the last couple of decades suggest that a number of large problems will emerge in the coming century, and do so more quickly and more severely if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions soon. Among the large-scale changes of concern that caught the attention of the German Advisory Council on Global Change in their 2008 report on ‘Climate Change as a Security Risk’ are the melting of glaciers and the polar icecaps, possible disruptions of the monsoon climate, and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest. Each of these major disruptions of the earth system will have effects on agricultural production in particular; droughts and storms affect crops directly and the price of food on the world markets indirectly, a matter of major concern, especially to poor people in many places whose security is first and foremost a matter of gaining sustenance.
The nightmare scenarios, where failures to deal with greenhouse gas emissions lead to accelerated climate changes and abrupt reorganization of oceanic and atmospheric systems, loom in the more distant future. If the planet responds to substantially heightened greenhouse gas levels by switching to a new hotter and much drier arrangement, as James Lovelock (2009), who developed the Gaia hypothesis, has warned is a real possibility in the coming century, then all bets for human security are off. In such drastically altered circumstances humanity might be violently reduced from billions to at best millions of survivors trying to make crops grow in Greenland and Antarctica after the ice has gone. This worst-case scenario suggests that agriculture would only be possible at the poles in the new climate regime. Clearly such a runaway mode of climate change would be a situation where all the carefully worked out ideas for adapting to climate change (Adger et al., 2009) would be useless. Preventing such runaway climate change is obviously the first priority for any long-term consideration of the future of human security.
Towards a new human security framework
In its initial formulation, human security was understood as a universal concern, affecting all humans, and an interconnected one in the contemporary world where famines and social disintegration have consequences that travel the globe (UNDP, 1994). Prevention was key to the early formulation of human security, both in the medical sense of disease avoidance rather than treatment, but also in the more general sense of planning and putting measures in place to avert potential dangers. Human security also emphasized that dangers to people were often unintentional and had origins in distant places and in actions that had unforeseen consequences. This all obviously applies to climate change in particular, and to Anthropocene disruptions more generally. While the 1994 formulation suggested that human security was a narrower formulation than development, in that it focused on people’s abilities to safely enjoy the possibilities of development, now the changing ecological context of our times emphasizes the point that the dominant mode of economic development is itself a central concern in plans to build for the future (Scheffran et al., 2012).
If we are literally making the future of the biosphere by what we choose to produce, which is the key practical insight encapsulated in the term ‘Anthropocene’, then human security is now a matter of what we choose to make, build and use. It is about investment decisions, only most obviously in terms of energy choices and transportation modes. Clearly the petroleum-powered civilization we have built over the last century has to be redesigned to run on renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind energy, and rebuilt to accommodate the growing number of people born in the last few generations. The long-term shape of the Anthropocene isn’t yet decided; but focusing human energies on making ecologically sensible modes of living in the next few decades will probably determine both whether reasonable levels of human security are possible in the long run, and whether the Anthropocene will have a climate loosely similar to the conditions that have supported human civilization.
Getting this clearly in focus in both scholarly analysis and policy prescription is important if appropriate questions are to be researched and institutions empowered to deal with coming difficulties (Matthew et al., 2010). The focus on security in the Anthropocene is especially important because the contrasts with traditional notions of national security are frequently stark, not only in the case of India and Bangladesh but in many other cases too (Brauch et al., 2011). The shift from a perspective that takes rival territorial states as the key to global order to one that looks to low carbon modes of economy providing basic needs for all the world’s people is dramatic. But such are the requirements facing policy makers and scholars in rethinking security agendas in light of the scientific insights of earth system science. We have finally begun to understand that we live in the Anthropocene, a world that is increasingly quite literally of our own making, and whose future depends on what we make it.
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