The Environment as a National Security Issue

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 101-122

  Matthew, Richard A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0242455160     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.2000.0007     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Robert Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic Monthly 273 (1994): 61.
2. W. Ophuls, Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (San Francisco, 1976)
3. Lester Brown, “Redefining National Security,” Worldwatch Paper 14 (1977)
4. Richard UUman, “Redefining Security,” International Security 8 (1983): 129-53
5. and Jessica Mathews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs 68 (1989): 162-77.
6. For a discussion of the debate between those seeking to widen the concept of national security and those resisting this, see Bernard I. Finel, “What Is Security? Why the Debate Matters,” National Security Studies Quarterly 4.4 (1998): 1-18.
7. For a general discussion, see Richard A. Matthew, “Environment and Security: Concepts and Definitions,” National Security Studies Quarterly 4:4 (1998): 63-72
8. Richard A. Matthew, “A Clean, Secure Future,” Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy 13:4 (1998): 115-19; and
9. Daniel Deudney and Richard A. Matthew, eds. Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental Politics (Albany, N.Y. 1999).
10. For discussion, see Peter Marshall, Nature's Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking (London, 1989).
11. John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Indianapolis, 1989).
12. McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise, 1–24.
13. Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth (New York, 1972).
14. Sustainable development was then defined in the vague but accommodating terms of meeting “the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” WCED, Our Common Future (Oxford, 1987), 8.
15. Mathews, “Redefining Security”; Jessica Mathews, “Power Shift,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1997): 50–66
16. Norman Myers, “Environment and Security,” Foreign Policy 74 (1989): 23-41
17. Norman Myers, Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability (New York, 1993); and
18. Norman Myers, “Population, Environment, and Conflict,” Environmental Conservation 20 (1993): 205–16.
19. Portions of this section are adapted from Richard A. Matthew, “Rethinking Environmental Security,” N. P. Gleditsc, ed. Conflict and the Environment (Dordrecht, 1997), 71-90
20. Matthew, “Environment and Security: Concepts and Definitions”
21. Matthew, “A Clean, Secure Future”; and
22. Matthew, “Security and Scarcity: A Common Pool Resource Perspective,” Samuel Barkin and George Shambaugh, eds. Anarchy and the Environment: The International Relations of Common Pool Resources (Albany, N.Y. 1999).
23. Al Gore; Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose (Boston, 1992).
24. This speech is available with a brief commentary in Warren Christopher, In the Stream of History: Shaping Foreign Policy for a New Era (Stanford, Calif. 1998).
25. For a useful overview of how the U.S. foreign policy process has handled the environment since the 1970s, see Stephen Hopgood, American Foreign Environmental Policy and the Power of the State (Oxford, 1998).
26. For a debate on the significance of environmental threats, see Deudney and Matthew, Contested Grounds.
27. Peter Gleick, “Environment and Security: The Clear Connections,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 47 (1991): 17-21
28. Peter Gleick, Water and Conflict: Fresh Water Resources and International Security,” International Security 18 (1993)
29. Thomas Homer-Dixon, “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases,” International Security 19 (1994): 5–40
30. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Conflict (Princeton, 1999); and
31. Thomas Homer-Dixon and Jessica Blitt, Ecoviolence: Links Among Environment, Population, and Security (Lanham, Md. 1998).
32. Aaron Wolf, “International Water Conflicts and Conflict Resolution,” ISA Paper (1997). _
33. Daniel Deudney, “The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security,” Millennium 19 (1990): 461-76.
34. See Gareth Porter, “Environmental Security as a National Security Issue,” Current History (May 1995).
35. Deudney, “The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security.”
36. Marc A. Levy, “Is the Environment a National Security Issue?” International Security 20 (1995): 35-62.
37. Frederick, “A Realist's Conceptual Definition of Environmental Security.”
38. C. Boyden Gray and David B. Rivkin Jr. “A ‘Np Regrets' Environmental Policy,” Foreign Policy 83 (1991): 47-65
39. For this critical perspective, see Gray and Rivkin, “A ‘No Regrets' Environmental Policy”; and
40. Michel Fridirick, “A Realist's Conceptual Definition of Environmental Security,” Daniel Deudney and Richard Matthew, eds. Contested Grounds: 91–108.
41. For a sampling of more general arguments that tend to support this position see Herman Kahn and Julian Simon, eds. The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000 (New York, 1984).
42. Deudney, “The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security.”
43. An editorial in the magazine World Watch, for example, reviews the trend of using military assets to deal with unconventional environmental problems and concludes that this is a promising phenomenon: “it may be politically easier to shift spending inside the military [for environmental purposes] than to shift it out. It may be easier to reform military thinking by assuring the generals they’re needed than by informing them that the future has left them behind.” Ed Ayres, “New Missions for the Military,” World Watch (1999): 3-4.
44. For a disturbing account of the military's legacy in the former Soviet Union, see Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York, 1995).
45. Kent Butts, “Why the Military Is Good for the Environment,” in Jyrki Kakonen, ed. Green Security or Militarized Environment (Brookfield, 1994)
46. Kent Butts, “National Security, the Environment, and DOD,” Environmental Change and Security Project Report 2 (1996): 22-27.
47. Ronald Deibert, “Military Monitoring of the Environment,” Environmental Change and Security Project Report 2 (1996): 28-32.
48. See, for example, Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York, 1968)
49. Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (New York, 1990)
50. Norman Myers, Ultimate Security
51. Norman Myers, “Population, Environment and Conflict”
52. Matthew Connolly and Paul Kennedy, “Must It Be the West Against the Rest?” The Atlantic Monthly 274 (1994): 61-83
53. Homer-Dixon, “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict”
54. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence
55. and Homer-Dixon and Blitt, Ecoviolence.
56. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence.
57. Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. See Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate (New York, 1993).
58. Alan Dupont, The Environment and Security in Pacific Asia, Adelphi Paper 319. (Oxford, 1998).
59. Butts, “National Security, the Environment, and DOD,” 22.
60. The author's answer is offered in Matthew, “Rethinking Environmental Security.”