ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY: THE SEARCH FOR STRATEGIC LEGITIMACY.

It has now been more than two decades--well before the end of the Cold War--since the Worldwatch Institute's Lester Brown first issued a plea to adopt a new and more robust conception of national security attuned to the contemporary world. The threats to security, he argued even then, now may arise less from relations between nations than from man's relations with nature--dwindling reserves of critical resources, for example, or the deterioration of earth's biological systems:

 
   The military threat to national security is only one of many that 
   governments must now address. The numerous new threats derive directly or 
   indirectly from the rapidly changing relationship between humanity and the 
   earth's natural systems and resources. The unfolding stresses in this 
   relationship initially manifest themselves as ecological stresses and 
   resource scarcities. Later they translate into economic 
   stresses--inflation, unemployment, capital scarcity, and monetary 
   instability. Ultimately, these economic stresses convert into social unrest 
   and political instability.(1) 

Stewards and students alike of relations between the armed forces and society would do well to take Brown's entreaty to heart. He reminds us that, now more than ever, security encompasses not just military affairs but much more as well. He forces us to the realization that environmental conditions may underlie and contribute to political, social, and economic conditions having strategic and even military consequences. He underscores the general recognition that the state of the environment inevitably and invariably affects human well-being (and feelings of security). Finally, therefore, he implies two important things: (1) that, in the years ahead, militaries could be at least part of the national and international response to situations stemming from environmental decline; and (2) that the public's sense of well-being, a function in no small measure of environmental quality, may contribute materially to public trust and confidence in the institutions of government, to societal cohesion, and thus to the national will necessary for the state to act effectively, at home or abroad, militarily or otherwise.

Brown has been followed--cautiously at first, now more boldly--by others who have recognized the need not only to expand the bounds of national security thinking and discourse, but to take particular account of environmental concerns in such deliberations. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, currently president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued over a decade ago, for example: "Global developments now suggest the need for ... [a] broadening definition of national security to include resource, environmental and demographic issues."(2)

One of the most powerful observations made to date--one that could be judged, in equal measure, as either visionary or hyperbolic--is that by writer-analyst Milton Viorst, who has argued that "population and environment ... seem the obvious sources of the next wave of wars, perhaps major wars."(3)

Whether or not, as Viorst contends, the groundwork for a wave of environmental wars is already falling into place, there is growing acceptance today of the proposition that the environment and security are indissolubly linked. The term environmental security is, in fact, now an established, if persistently nebulous, part of the argot of national security affairs. Two issues, however, continue to divide experts on the subject and, more importantly, to thereby undermine the legitimacy of environmental security as a worthy object of major national-security policy emphasis: the definitional ambiguity of the concept itself and the causal relationship between the environment and security. Both require elucidation and understanding by anyone attempting to grapple with the environmental security implications of any major international development--be it China's rise to great-power status, the spread of globalization, the expansion of NATO, the anticipated demise of the nation-state, or whatever.

Coming to Terms With Environmental Security