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Anthropocene Formations: Environmental Security, Geopolitics and Disaster

Simon DalbyWilfrid Laurier University

Maritime traffic is increasing in Canada’s Arctic waters while development remains stagnant in regards to maritime infrastructure. Only 10% of Canadian Arctic waters have been charted, while the charts that do exist have been deemed dated, and unsafe. Support services such as oil spill response plans, navigation aids, and telecommunications required for safe resource development and shipping in Canada’s arctic waters are minimal. Bandwidth capabilities are currently not adequate to accommodate safe and reliable maritime and aviation communication. Currently there is not adequate human resources to support further infrastructure development due to low population, lack of skilled persons and poor living conditions. This paper presents and evaluates three policy options addressing the issue of maritime infrastructure in Canada’s North.

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415598629

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Special Issue: Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene

AnthropoceneFormations:Environmental Security,Geopolitics and Disaster

Simon DalbyWilfrid Laurier University

AbstractThe discussion of the Anthropocene makes it clear that contemporary social thoughtcan no longer take nature, or an external ‘environment’, for granted in politicaldiscussion. Humanity is remaking its own context very rapidly, not only in theprocesses of urbanization but also in the larger context of global biophysical trans-formations that provide various forms of insecurity. Disasters such as the Fukushimanuclear meltdowns and potentially disastrous plans to geoengineer the climate incoming decades highlight that the human environment is being remade in theAnthropocene. Humanity is now a geological actor, not just a biological one, andthat insight, captured in the term Anthropocene, changes understandings of bothsecurity and environment in social thought, requiring a focus on production of envir-onments rather than their protection. Disasters help clarify this key point and itssignificance for considering geosocial formations.

Keywordsdisaster, ecology, security

Geosocial Formations

To a growing degree human insecurity is now a matter relating to theglobal economy, its economic entitlements, and the technological systemsin which those are enmeshed. In the modern cities of the global north,economic activities and the mundane practicalities of everyday life aredirectly related to the supply of electricity to homes and workplaces.While disasters and insecurity are not new in the human condition,and volcanoes in particular have seriously disrupted agriculture dramat-ically in recent centuries, what is now clear is that disasters and humanvulnerability are increasingly artificial matters in an urbanized biosphere

Corresponding author: Simon Dalby. Email: [email protected] material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

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(Hannigan, 2012). The meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant in theaftermath of the 2011 earthquake emphasized that natural hazards aremediated or enhanced by technological innovations. Simultaneously therapidly expanding discussion of the possibilities of artificially engineeringthe climate through ‘solar radiation management’ to prevent the worsteffects of global heating suggests new forms of potential environmentaldisaster given the largely unknowable consequences of such efforts.

Insecurity is related to disaster in numerous ways. Clearly the nuclearfallout from Fukushima and the expense of trying to deal with the con-tamination caused by the radioactive materials that escaped the confinesof the nuclear facility are disastrous. Ironically, part of the response tothe Fukushima plant’s failure has been the increased use of fossil fuels tosubstitute for the off-line nuclear plants; viewed from a climate changeperspective this is contributing to a potential global disaster as climatedisruptions cause further insecurities. But these disruptions, and the fail-ure of political elites to respond rapidly to climate change, are preciselythe arguments that support advocacy of climate engineering experiments.If political innovation can’t manage climate change, so the argumentgoes, then perhaps solar radiation management might provide at leasttemporary conditions of environmental security by holding global tem-peratures somewhere close to what humanity has known for the last fewmillennia.

As carbon dioxide levels rise inexorably in the atmosphere, reachingover 400ppmv on average for a whole month for the first time in April2014, this is increasingly a key theme in the discussions of environmentalsecurity. This rising level of carbon dioxide is a direct result of the use offossil fuels to power contemporary urban systems and the global econ-omy. Arctic ice is receding and the polar climate is changing rapidly;Antarctic ice sheets now seem certain to follow. The potential for dra-matic disruptions has hastened the recent discussions of geoengineeringto artificially adjust the temperature of the planet (Burns and Strauss,2013). The prospect of rapid environmental change and related disrup-tions to many human modes of living suggests the need to secure societiesfrom such disasters.

To environmentalists the fact that we are even contemplating suchthings is a disastrous situation already, one that renders the future ofall humanity very insecure (Hamilton, 2013). Whichever way environ-ment, technology, disaster and insecurity are linked leads to numerousambiguities. At least some of these can be resolved if the assumptions ofa stable environmental backdrop to human affairs are suspended and amore dynamic and explicitly geophysical contextualization introducedinto the discussion, as is now frequently done in the more thoughtfulinvocations of the present in terms of a new geological epoch, theAnthropocene. None of this solves the political difficulties of our time,but as the rest of this paper suggests, taking geosocial formations

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seriously does re-contextualize current politics in potentially useful waysby challenging its environmental assumptions. Questions of who decidesthe future configuration of the biosphere, and how, are only beginning tobe considered. But clearly geopolitics is now about geological politics,and as such, about geophysics. Security too now needs an update!

This paper first turns to a brief discussion of the history of security, thento the discussion of environmental security as well as contemporaryhuman insecurities. Then, given the increasingly artificial conditions ofhuman insecurity, the argument turns to a couple of the key points inthe discussion of the Anthropocene, and the explicit re-contextualizationof humanity that it implies. Insecurity is now a geological matter, not amatter of just biology or ecology in a given set of natural circumstances,but rather in the new contemporary geophysical processes that are humanactions. Engineering and ecology are now inextricably interconnected indiscussions of security and disaster in the new period of geological politics.

Security

The emergence of security as a key focus for policy discussion and politicallegitimation of many things is part of the intellectual and political historyof modernity (Neocleous, 2008). It relates to the provision of the condi-tions for particular forms of life, the conditions for commercial life, thelegal and social arrangements that perpetuate both private property andstates. Security is much more complicated when linked to national, inter-national and global security, and since the end of the Cold War, economic,human and environmental security (Rothschild, 1995). Now geoengineer-ing promises possibilities for providing the conditions that allow the per-petuation of fossil fuel powered neoliberalism further into the future.Or rather it might, if security continues to be formulated in terms of theperpetuation of the existing political order, precisely the order that hasgenerated such dramatic ecological disruption in the first place.

National security as a term of overarching importance to state gov-ernments is relatively recent, and related to the United States in particu-lar and to its growing relative power and its relationships to the rest ofthe world in the middle of the 20th century (Latham, 1997). In a world ofnuclear weapons and superpower rivalry, numerous matters that mighthave upset the political order of American modernity were incorporatedinto surveillance techniques, spying and military preparations, all underthe rubric of national security. This geopolitical imagination becameembedded in American culture, one of domination, control and engin-eering projects designed to shape the future in many ways (Farish, 2010).Technology, especially related to aerospace and nuclear issues, was cru-cial to this formulation, a subject that runs through concerns with weap-ons, missiles, satellites, attempts to work through how strategic missiledefenses might be constructed and, most recently, global surveillance

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systems and networked warfare to fly drones from the other side of theworld. Indeed the term security is so pervasive and apparently so much amatter of common sense that it frequently passes without much com-ment. Security is crucial to the formulations of strategic studies, effect-ively the conceptual infrastructure of the American alliance systemcoordination in the Cold War period and since (Klein, 1994).

Security in the Cold War was also about coordinating modes of eco-nomic activity, and in that sense Fukushima is an industrial artifact thatis both part of a larger American-driven engineering project to buildnuclear infrastructure as a spinoff from nuclear weapons programsand, as critics of the industry have long argued, a mode of governancethat shapes the societies that adopt such technology (Jungk, 1979).Reactors are a key part of the production of fissionable materials neces-sary for nuclear bombs, and they are also part of the larger industrialknowledge system that was designed for war and the extension ofAmerican power in shaping a petroleum-fueled global economy and elec-trically-powered consumer societies that facilitated the exercise ofAmerican power (Panitch and Gindin, 2012).

In the 1990s the repeated invocation of the term security to shapepolicy domains on such matters as environment, and the use of theterm to stipulate priorities that transcended the routine matters of‘normal’ politics, suggested that the term was one that related to emer-gencies, and pressing necessities that might require the suspension ofpeace time normality (Buzan et al., 1998). The term environmental secur-ity involves both the emergency and the routine versions of ‘security’.Both senses are now informing the increasingly urgent discussions ofclimate security (Mayer, 2012). Fukushima is the immediate disasterthat requires security in terms of emergency measures. Fukushima isemblematic of ‘environmental’ dangers in that its radioactive isotopesare a hazard, but one that is transmitted by ‘natural’ phenomena –wind, waves – and also through hybrid entities in food derived fromcontaminated land and water supply systems. While the electricalpower that the facility used to generate was key to security in variousforms, once it was compromised by the tsunami, the reactors became animmediate threat to security because of the dispersed radioactive mater-ials that are a potential health concern. They were indirectly a matter ofsecurity in terms of the provision of social order because of their failureto supply much needed electricity to the Japanese economy. Security andenvironment are enmeshed in numerous ways in this episode.

Environmental Security

Environmental security is a term that refers to the discussion thatemerged as such a quarter of a century ago in the Anglo-Americanworld relating changing ecological matters and numerous social



consequences, some of which, it was feared, might be new causes ofwarfare (Floyd and Matthew, 2013). Then, as the Cold War wounddown, security thinkers, concerned to rethink geopolitics once the super-power rivalry ended, linked their ideas with those of environmentalistswho were then worried about the scale of the transformations to the‘natural world’. The possible consequences of a nuclear winter, first dis-cussed in 1983, were followed by the Bhopal industrial disaster in 1984,and then the Chernobyl reactor meltdown in 1986 that provided power-ful impetus to this coincidence of intellectual and political concerns.These three episodes added to the discussion of deforestation in theAmazon and concerns about climate in the very hot American summerof 1988 when the Mississippi nearly dried up just as the first climatemodels suggested that global warming was underway. The WorldCommission on Environment and Development in 1987 clearly raisedan alarm about conflict over scarce resources in ways that informedthe then nascent discussion of environmental security.

While the term nature is ubiquitous too, it is not accidental that secur-ity has been appended to environment rather than nature most of thetime. Environment is a complicated terms that loosely relates to thatwhich surrounds an entity. With roots in the term environs, as in thatwhich surrounds, it has become an entity that usefully specifies some-thing outside a human entity, but which is often confused by the link to anatural environment, or sometimes to a built environment, and fre-quently without much reflection on the matter, a conjunction of both.The ambiguity about its meaning allows for both ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’elements to constitute the ‘surrounds’ that become a matter of politicalconcern should they impinge on or constrain human actions in ways thatendanger security, understood usually as the provision of relatively safeconditions of routine human life.

While earlier environmental arguments gradually shifted from focus-ing on themes of population, parks and pollution in the 1960s throughdiscussions of limits to growth and resource constraints in the 1970s andto a focus on themes of sustainable development in the 1980s, climatechange has gradually come to dominate the discussion in the 21st cen-tury. This is the context in which discussions of environment and inse-curity are now being transformed into a rapidly expanding formulationof climate security (Webersik, 2010). The earlier discussions of environ-mental security have been reinvented in the last decade, but the contra-dictions at the heart of the debate have been perpetuated rather thanalleviated because the implicit contextualization in most of the discussiondraws much more heavily on traditional thinking about security with itsassumptions of a given geographical context than on the novel insights ofthe Anthropocene, which suggest a geological framing is now moreappropriate (Clark, 2013; Dalby, 2014a).

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Humanity has long been a geological agent in the biosphere, althoughthis has only become obvious in the last few decades as earth systemsciences began to understand some of the key interconnections betweenparts of the earth system that had previously usually been understood tobe separate. The implications for this in terms of practical discussion ofsuch things as the Fukushima nuclear disaster emphasize that social for-mations are very much geological formations too, and understandinggeopolitics in these terms is now unavoidable. The Fukushima meltdownis of course a mixture of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ in that the earthquakeand subsequent tsunami damaged the reactors prior to the dispersal oftheir radioactivity. But as the official report of the Japanese Diet makesclear, it was an accident that could have been foreseen and prevented,and hence one that was more artificial than natural (National Diet ofJapan, 2012). The meltdowns added to the difficulties in dealing with theconsequences of the ‘natural’ disaster of the earthquake, one that wasaccentuated by the construction of towns and infrastructure in areasknown to be vulnerable to tsunamis. They had occurred before, butwarnings from earlier generations about the dangers of coastal lifewere ignored. Coastal facilities were constructed literally in harm’s wayin environments that are very insecure in multiple senses.

How environment is invoked in the environmental security discussionmatters greatly. Much of the original discussion in the late 1980s and1990s simply assumed a given environment that was being disrupted andhence was a source of danger. On the contrary, as this paper suggests, thevery notion of environmental security, of a planetary system in need ofsecuring, only arises in the context of the technologies that both providethe risks and the modes of knowing and measuring what we have of latecome to understand as the environment. In many ways technologicaldisasters are part of what constitutes ‘environmental in/security’ in thefirst place; material and social are interconnected all the time (Beck,2009). These fears of technological disruptions have been repeatedlylinked in to other metropolitan fears of the instabilities in the peripheries,of environmental refugees, conflicts over resources, the destruction offorests, and possible wars caused by such disruptions.

In recent years, spurred on by the increasing alarm about climatechange, questions of the environmental sources of conflicts, if not out-right warfare, again grace the pages of scholarly journals as researcherstry to make links between climate change and insecurity (Gleditsch andNordas, 2014). Environmental threats supposedly compromise nationalsecurity we are repeatedly told. The theme has been distilled into text-books on both sides of the Atlantic (Chalecki, 2013; Hough, 2014).However, the correlations between conflicts and climate change that sup-posedly prove environmental causations are at best suggestive, at worstsimply misconstruing interconnections (Selby, 2014). Recent research isincreasingly emphasizing the point that matters of the global economy,



structural violence and the frequent failures of policy initiatives to dealwith the root causes of insecurity are more important in explaining whatis happening than exogenous environmental factors (Zografos et al.,2014).

Human Insecurities

The global financial crisis of 2008/9 emphasized the fact that numerouspeople are vulnerable due to the vagaries of the global economy.Precarious livelihoods, fears of unemployment, and the persistence ofbillions of people living in extreme poverty makes the human conditionan insecure one in many ways, matters aggravated by the removal ofsome of the social safety mechanisms of the welfare state and the dra-matic fluctuations in economic fortune which render employment pro-spects in particular places increasingly unpredictable (Feldman et al.,2011). On the other hand, those who either through luck or birthrightlive longer and more affluently than previous generations do so in partbecause that global economy has remade so much of the planet in produ-cing goods, building roads, electrical grids and buildings of all shapes andsizes that are the increasingly artificial condition of modern life directedand shaped by the global economy (Stiglitz and Kaldor, 2013).

The extreme poverty of part of humanity is not unconnected to theaffluence of other parts, or from the transformation of environments bythe production of food, fiber and raw materials that feed and fuel therapidly expanding urban systems that are now where the majority ofhumanity resides (Dauvergne, 2008). We are, after all, living in a worldwhere development is supposedly the key to providing security.Development is all about modernization, changing people and environ-ments to provide the commodities for metropolitan consumption. All ofwhich suggests that traditional notions of an external environment that isthe context for humanity is no longer a useful formulation for any dis-cussion of the human condition, and the politics of either preventingdangers or facilitating human flourishing. Indeed this geography isnow being turned on its head as people start to demand climate justiceand compensation for the disruptions modernity has inflicted on poorpeople, most obviously now in terms of climate impacts and forcedmigrations (International Organization for Migration, 2014).

The scale of these processes is transforming matters at an acceleratingrate, one that raises new modes of vulnerability, only most obviouslythose caused by the misfit between contemporary infrastructures andincreasingly severe weather events. In the new parlance of earth systemsscience we now live in the epoch of the Anthropocene, the new geologicalcircumstances of a biosphere that is being reshaped rapidly by humanactions (Steffen et al., 2007). This doesn’t mean that geophysics is nowentirely artificial or that humanity is in control of plate tectonics,

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earthquakes or volcanoes; it does mean that humanity is an increasinglylarge player in how the future of the biosphere is configured. In particularthis is so because of the rapid speed at which the burning of fossil fuels isturning rocks back into air with all the climate consequences that arenow upon us.

While this may be disastrous in the sense of causing events that endan-ger and kill on a large scale, disaster is also a social condition that chal-lenges ways in which people make sense of their worlds. Nigel Clark(2014: 21) invokes Maurice Blanchot’s (1995) discussion of disaster tosuggest that it can be understood as a ‘crisis of such severity that itundermines our very capacity to make sense of the world’. While muchof the earth system science accentuates how difficult it is to know theworld in meaningful senses, it is also the case that the Anthropoceneformulation involves reimagining humanity’s place in the cosmos. Itrequires understanding ourselves collectively as a substantial geophysicalpresence in contemporary earth history, not as separate passive victims ofa capricious nature (Yusoff, 2013). This crucial ontological reframingsuggests simply that we are not apart from earth; we are part of earth.That said, nonetheless the lack of clear understanding of precisely howthe earth system operates also suggests forcefully that preemptive actionssuch as attempts at geoengineering may potentially be very dangeroustoo (Cooper, 2010). Nonetheless, extensive evaluations of its possibilitiesare part of the contemporary climate change discussions (Committee onGeoengineering Climate, 2015a, 2015b).

The earth system science discussion of the Anthropocene poses ques-tions of how to think the artificial circumstances of the present beyondthe emphasis on risks that financial planners can accurately stipulate andinsure against (Grove, 2012), and for which security planners can sup-posedly anticipate or prepare resilient societal responses within the par-ameters of existing political economies (Amoore, 2013; Cooper, 2006).The focus on terrorism and the militarization of policing that attempts toconstrain emergent threats by interfering with political phenomena, thebiopoliticalization of security, focuses on potential future disruptions tothe global economy and at least to its affluent residents (Dillon and Reid,2009). The interconnections between human and non-human elements ofthe planetary system and their circulations are thus also key to rethinkingsecurity in the Anthropocene if potential future dangers are to be pre-empted (Dalby, 2013a).

The Anthropocene

The discussion of the Anthropocene emphasizes the transformationshumanity has already caused to the biosphere while emphasizing thepoint that these transformations are pushing the planetary system out-side the biophysical parameters that humanity has known over the last



ten millennia (Steffen et al., 2015). Historically, human actions includinghunting, forest clearing and the early stages of agriculture may have hadeffects on the climate system despite the relatively small human numbersand low level of technology. If the early agricultural activities of human-ity generated small but significant amounts of methane from farm ani-mals and fields, might this have been enough to prevent the earth slippingback into another ice age (Ruddiman, 2010)? While the answer may notbe certain, the very fact that geologists are asking such questions suggeststhat humanity is a factor in the biosphere that is much more significantthan has been realized until recently (Ruddiman et al., 2014). This raisesprofound questions for traditional notions of ‘nature’ and more recently‘environment’ that have assumed a fairly stable given context forhumanity.

The history of agriculture is about changing species and the gradualtransformation of land use in the more fertile parts of the planet. Eventhe supposedly ‘natural’ tropical rain forests have had their species mixchanged quite substantially by human activities that frequently favourcertain tree species that can regenerate more rapidly. If even tropical rainforests have been changed then assumptions about a pristine nature intowhich humanity recently intruded are fundamentally misconstruing theenvironmental context. Romantic premises of an untouched nature aresimply wrong, a European colonial era projection that obscures the moreprofound transformations we are living through (Grove, 1995). Ifhumanity has been changing its habitat effectively since the end of thelast ice age then the question of precisely what ‘physical sustainability’ –to use the terminology from Our Common Future (World Commission onEnvironment and Development, 1987) – means is much more compli-cated than has been assumed until recently. In fact this discussion sug-gests that humanity has been shaping the conditions of its own existencefor a long time, much longer than the recent period shaped by the per-turbations set in motion by the industrial revolution. Nonetheless, theindustrial revolution marks the beginning of the large-scale use of fossilfuels and the growth in trace gases in the atmosphere that are nowcausing rapid climate change.

Given this geological scale transformation, the earth system scienceliterature on the Anthropocene often suggests that the first phase of theepoch is that beginning in the late 18th century (Steffen et al., 2007). Thetransformations set in motion by the industrial revolution, and subse-quently the enhanced communications made possible by railways andsteamships, facilitated the rapid expansion of European power in the19th century, incorporating many of the ecosystems of the planet muchmore directly into the global economy (Hornborg et al., 2007). Theseecological transformations, and the spread of modern agriculture in theAmericas in particular, are part of the industrial revolution phase of theAnthropocene too. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose slowly

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from pre-industrial levels close to 280ppm to around 320ppm in thisperiod.

In the aftermath of the Second World War industrial productionquickly expanded, and once the European economies had recoveredfrom wartime disruptions, the spread of automobiles and suburbanhigh consumption lifestyles powered by petroleum in addition to coalbecame a global phenomenon (Mitchell, 2011). This period, which hasseen the rise of carbon dioxide to 400ppm, and the rapid expansion ofhuman population to seven billion, is also marked by the construction ofhuge cities, and effectively the urbanization of humanity. To feed andsupply these burgeoning cities resources have been extracted from allover the planet and rural transformations to feed and fuel the citieshave proceeded apace (McNeill, 2000). The unprecedented transform-ation of the human condition has meant dramatic changes to many eco-logical systems, both directly in terms of land use change and indirectlyas a result of fishing, hunting, deforestation, and infrastructure construc-tion. The ‘great acceleration’ has transformed global ecologies and led towidespread extinctions in the process of constructing what is an increas-ingly artificial world.

The rise of Asian economies, and China in particular, in the last fewdecades has added hugely to the productive capabilities of humanity, butmade the term acceleration especially apt for our current circumstances.While the global economic disruptions following the financial problemsof 2008 slowed the economies of Europe and North America and tem-porarily slowed the emissions of carbon dioxide, in the aftermath of theseevents the upward trend continues. Acceleration has resumed, and with itthe alarming concern that planetary boundaries that have marked therelatively stable conditions of the Holocene are being rapidly transcended(Rockstrom and Klum, 2015). While such trends raise numerous sugges-tions that the Anthropocene is the prelude to a massive crash in eco-logical systems and that disruptions of catastrophic proportions arelooming (Potsdam Institute, 2012), some earth scientists at least areexamining the possibilities of a third phase of the Anthropocene, onethat will hopefully be a period when humanity takes seriously the possi-bilities of a ‘sustainable earth’.

Sustainable Earth?

If such a prospect is to unfold then thinking about the global ecosystemas a single entity that cannot be transformed endlessly without hugelydisruptive consequences is essential. While there are obviously some‘limits to growth’, as the 1970s discussion suggested, given the abilitiesof technology to innovate and make new things and materials in newways, resource constraints are now much less of an issue than the earlierneo-Malthusian frameworks suggested. In the case of climate change the



problem is too much fossil fuel, not too little. Humanity is now effectivelymaking the future, but has no effective governance mechanisms in placeto shape it. To create such institutions requires numerous social andpolitical innovations obviously, but also some clear indications of whatthe ‘safe operating space’ for humanity is and what thresholds we need toavoid crossing if the nightmare scenarios of ecological catastrophe are tobe avoided (Rockstrom et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015).

What is clear from earth system science is that the geological condi-tions that humanity has known for all of recorded history are nearlyover. What replaces them will be a world substantially remade byhuman actions. The consequent geopolitical question is whether contem-porary civilization can quickly morph into something that simultan-eously slows the rate of ecological change while effectively coping withthe perturbations already set in motion. No longer is this a matter ofenvironmental changes causing human insecurity, but rather geopoliticsis now about the global economy and how decisions as to what getsproduced will shape the future configuration of the planet and hencewho is insecure where (Dalby, 2014b).

Given the looming possibilities for humanity to dramatically alter howsome key parts of the surface of the planet function, and in the processinitiate a phase shift in the biosphere, much bigger questions of how thefuture will be shaped are coming to the fore (Barnosky et al., 2012). Nolonger is it a matter of a given set of physical parameters within whichhumanity operates. Pollution may be a matter of poison or ecologicaldamage, but the larger issues of climate change and the whole-scaleeradication of many species in the process of ecological conversionrequire a serious discussion of what kind of a planet current policiesshould facilitate a transition to. All this follows from the fundamentalreorientation set in motion by earth system science that suggests thathumanity is now an active participant in the geological scale processesthat shape the future of the planet.

Both the recent discussions of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and ofsolar radiation management have added urgency to the linkage betweenformulations of human security and vulnerability. They pose the role oftechnology in the human condition once again, and suggest that the senseof a global setting for humanity that is relatively new in historical terms isbecoming more urgent in political and intellectual discussions. On theone hand Fukushima reminds us that we cannot assume environmentalstabilities in the face of such things as earthquakes. While solar radiationmanagement might be disastrous in terms of making things worse forhumanity, it might also be a recognition that we are already in a climatedisaster to which it might be a partial solution in the sense that it mightbuy time to allow atmospheric carbon dioxide removal strategies to beworked out (Keith, 2013). Geoengineering can be understood as aresponse to climate change that requires emergency measures. It can

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also be read as security in terms of the provision of the conditions neces-sary to perpetuate the present geopolitical order. Of course miscalcula-tions might cause environmental disruptions attributed to geoengineeringactions by one state with adverse effects for another leading to preciselythe kind of conflict geoengineering is supposed to preempt (Urpelainen,2012). Geoengineering might well end up being worse than what it osten-sibly responds to (Cooper, 2010).

If the formulation of the Anthropocene is taken seriously, and human-ity’s role as a geological agent becomes the starting point for thinking,then the implicit contextualization for human action shifts. In this casethe future isn’t a matter just of environmental degradation, but one ofnew ecological assemblages and technologies that are increasingly amatter of human choice (Ackerman, 2014). Ecological arrangementswill be ones composed of dramatically fewer ‘natural’ species than therecent past; we are living through the sixth great extinction event of ourplanet’s history (Kolbert, 2014). There may be unforeseen synergies andthresholds in how new assemblages function or fail. None of this suggeststhat anything goes, and such crucial ecological transformations as theincreasing acidification of ocean waters due to elevated levels of carbondioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere cannot be ignored. Instead,the re-contextualization implicit in the Anthropocene is that such thingsare now the result of political decisions, albeit ones with unintendedconsequences. Geosocial formations are literally about what humanityproduces, both directly and indirectly.

The emergence of the Anthropocene as an overarching conceptualiza-tion for humanity’s present condition likewise suggests that the sheerscale of contemporary changes is now understood as being qualitativelydifferent from earlier discussions (Steffen et al., 2011). Thinking in termsof a new geological epoch suggests the increasing artificialities of ourcircumstances – hence these new environmental insecurities are nowwhat is made, built and produced. Volcanoes and earthquakes may per-sist, but the global economy is causing new, potentially rapid transform-ations of parts of the biosphere. Thus the Anthropocene raisescomplicated questions about when humanity might be understood tohave begun to do things that make possible such a formulation as envir-onmental security in the first place. The Anthropocene makes unavoid-able a discussion of how the future of the planet is to be shaped and whatenvironment it is that will be secured for whose benefit where.Geopolitics is now unavoidably about geophysics.

Geophysics

The knowledge practices of geophysics that have given us an understand-ing of the climate system also produce understandings of the world inways that make possible the serious discussions of geoengineering now



underway. This requires a reconsideration of the key ‘geo-metrics’ thatinform this geological politics (Dalby, 2013b). Climate change is a matterfrequently understood through the knowledge practices of physics. Theiconic ‘Keeling Curve’ that charts the rise of carbon dioxide levels inthe global atmosphere is a product of the international geophysics yearin the late 1950s. The remote sensing satellites that are now used to getsuch things as proxy measurements of atmospheric temperatures andpolar ice sheet dimensions started life as reconnaissance tools in theCold War. Concerns about ozone depletion, which emerged as a majorissue in the 1980s, also started as a consequence of investigations into theeffects of nuclear weapon detonations in the atmosphere. In the earlyCold War years the American military in particular were interested in thepossibilities of weather modification as a weapon of war. Geophysics andnascent climate science were interconnected with military concerns in thebirth of global ecology (Robertson, 2012).

These connections remain in the discourses of environmental security.The scientific knowledge used to grapple with the effects of nuclear weap-ons has spun off into the official stories used to calculate the conse-quences of nuclear radiation in many aspects of its uses. Dose ratesand exposures were initially modeled on the Hiroshima casualties, andsuch considerations continue to shape calculations about the hazards ofradiation. In contrast, epidemiological calculations use rather differentmethods and, as the Fukushima episode suggests yet again, repeatedlyraise concerns that the official physics-based models are drasticallyunderestimating the casualties (Mangano and Sherman, 2012). If this isthe case, residents of Japan may be in a much more insecure environmentthan official statements claim.

The consequences of global heating are frequently also measured inphysical terms, not only temperatures but in matters of ice volumes in theArctic and particulate matter concentrations as well as volumetric meas-ures of key gases in the atmosphere. Climate change researchers havegenerated vast amounts of data concerning physical measurements andfed these into ever more complicated models of global climate (Edwards,2010). These modes of knowledge are in turn generating serious discus-sion of the possibilities of artificially and deliberately changing theatmosphere to reduce global heating. All of which may become ‘neces-sary’ if extreme weather events, rising sea levels or rapidly changing cli-mate conditions are deemed by the rich and powerful to be so disruptiveto ecological systems as to require remediation by solar radiationmanagement.

This argument about geoengineering is among the most controversialtopics in the conversation about how to move towards a sustainableplanet. Under the loose rubric of geoengineering, these suggestionsinclude many novel technologies (Vaughan and Lenton, 2011). The sim-plest one is to mimic the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions by using

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aircraft to inject sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere. In theorythis would effectively provide a sun-shade for the surface of the earth andmarginally reduce the amount of radiation that will cause warming. Suchsolar radiation management schemes are complemented by ideas forcarbon dioxide removal, pulling it out of the atmosphere on a largescale by forestry plantation and other ecological or industrial methods(Royal Society, 2009).

All of these are controversial, but the more articulate advocates of thecase suggest that, given the trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions, thefact that, in Rockstrom’s (2009) terms, we have already crossed the cli-mate threshold and show little sign of slowing the use of carbon fuels,then temporary geoengineering is probably going to be necessary to buytime to build new energy systems that don’t further aggravate warming(Keith, 2013). In the absence of more effective political initiatives geoen-gineering may effectively become climate change policy (Luke, 2010). Ifthis is the case, the prospects for dealing with other planetary boundariesare bleak given that technical solutions are proffered instead of muchmore careful thinking about how to collectively live in a rapidly changingbiosphere (Hamilton, 2013).

What matters in terms of human life are the processes that supply foodand water and other ‘ecological services’. Without the transportationlinks and the industrial systems to process the agricultural produceinto what humans eat, the majority of humanity that now resides inurban places would not survive. Human systems are changing the eco-logical context dramatically, but that infrastructure is vulnerable to moreextreme events and rapid changes that are beyond its design parameters.This is now an artificial ecological context, a series of assemblages thatmake modern life possible in the global urban system. The biologicalchanges in the planetary system are noteworthy as a result of climatechange, but also very much as a matter of habitat conversion on terres-trial surfaces and the reduction of oceanic species as a result of fishingand coastal pollution, and now as carbon dioxide levels rise, oceanicacidification (Barnosky et al., 2012). Indirectly these threaten the viabilityof the infrastructure that has disrupted them in the first place, and this isa major theme in the current discourses of environmental security.

In contrast to the modern assumptions of a separate nature as simplythe background for the human drama, contemporary thinking drawingon ecology, complexity theory and post-humanist themes is a very dif-ferent mode of knowing the world (Connolly, 2013). Ecologists are nowworking with the whole-scale remaking of terrestrial ecologies. This ishappening to such an extent that biologists are discussing ‘anthromes’rather than the stable modern assumptions of a fixed geographical con-figuration of large natural ‘biomes’ (Ellis et al., 2010). Earth system sci-ence is one focused on life and its contexts, how species change and adapt



to their habitats and, crucially, how in the process species make theirliving conditions.

How ecosystems adapt to changing circumstances is key to geologicalsciences, but now science has turned its attention to the most recentgeological innovation. Homo sapiens has in the last few centuries, byburning fossil fuels, begun the systematic process of turning rocks backinto air, reversing the normal ‘natural’ geological processes of sequester-ing atmospheric carbon. Humanity has thus become a geological actor,and done it in part through the use of technologies that provide both ourincreasingly artificial lived ‘environment’ and simultaneously change thegeophysics of planetary systems. Life, now in technological form, is onceagain changing planetary processes, but doing so very rapidly by geo-logical standards. This is now the context in which we must understandefforts to secure the environment, the sine qua non for future humanbeing. No longer can environmental determinists suggest that naturecauses climate disasters; in part they are of our own making at the largestof scales as well as in terms of the practical infrastructural vulnerabilitieswe build into our economic systems. The formulation of theAnthropocene neatly encapsulates all these themes. Viewed hypothetic-ally from the perspective of many other species, the disaster at presentloose in the biosphere is industrial humanity wreaking havoc directly andindirectly on most other species, with the notable exception of those thatit has ‘domesticated’ and bred for its own purposes as pets and foodsupply.

Securing Disastrous Futures?

Thinking in these terms suggests that the discussion of geoengineering,and solar radiation management in particular, might be understood bothas a response to a disaster and as potentially an exacerbation of thedisaster that has been the geophysical extension of human powers.Nuclear technologies are attempts to ‘dominate’ the world in some par-ticular ways as but one part of the engineering approach to makingfutures. Such technological innovations fascinate their adherents withpossibilities of remaking the world to better suit the short-term interestsof a few sections of humanity. In its early years, nuclear power wasjustified by the promise of a better life for all with electricity ‘toocheap to meter’, as its early American proponents promised.

Critics of geoengineering are quick to point out that it too involvestechnology rather than attempts to rethink societies; technical fixes tosupposedly technological problems rather than a more fundamentalrethink of human societies (Hamilton, 2013). It fits with the rise of neo-liberalism, with the remaking of state power to enhance profitabilityrather than social justice, as well as with the spatial tactics of controllingpeoples and dissidents by all sorts of technologies of ‘security’.

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The assumptions of a hostile and competitive world in need of engineer-ing protections all fit with the ethos of planetary management done bygeophysical engineering techniques. Such processes are once againbeyond any effective democratic control or public oversight and pre-sented in terms of necessity, as matters of security rather than someform of democratic deliberation (Swyngedouw, 2010).

Regenerating human societies rather than engineering the climateseems a better option to many commentators (Beck, 2010). The alterna-tive of rethinking human societies, of political and ecological rather thansolar radiation management, might be disastrous for the aspirations ofplanetary engineers, the putative geophysicists of the future. This wouldseem to be an altogether more promising way of avoiding the potentialfailure of the geoengineers’ technologies should they either miscalculatein how to calibrate the routine operation of their machines or shouldthose machines malfunction in the kind of spectacular failure thatFukushima’s multiple meltdowns now symbolize. The counter argumentthat it is too late, and that if at least temperature (disregarding otherecological parameters) is to be controlled, then more technological inter-ventions will be needed, drives the case for geoengineering.

For environmentalists anxious to stop the proliferation of dangerousengineering schemes, the fact that there are serious discussions of solarradiation management underway suggests very clearly that we are livingin a situation that is already disastrous. For engineers concerned thatenvironmental change may already be reaching dangerous levels, notactively planning geoengineering schemes to prevent disasters is, well,disastrous! Either way, the Anthropocene formulation makes it clearthat humanity is determining the future of the planet in many ways thatwe are only beginning to comprehend. It is tempting to overdraw adistinction between ecological and engineering views, but which kindof ‘engineering’ is used in future, one focused on using ecological meansof carbon dioxide removal and designing human habitats that don’t usefossil fuels, or one using solar radiation management in attempts toameliorate the disruptions caused by fossil-fueled economies, mattersgreatly in terms of how the next stage of the Anthropocene is shaped.This is the new context within which we have to make sense of ‘envir-onmental security’ and think politically about what to produce,and how.

There is no stable given environment that can be protected or secured;there are different pathways into what will be different futures, each withpitfalls and difficulties. Global heating as a result of elevated levels of firstmethane and now carbon dioxide has already postponed the next ice age,and perhaps the one beyond that; another disaster avoided in so far as aplanetary condition consistent with the relatively ice free conditions ofthe last ten thousand years is taken as the necessary benchmark condi-tions for securing humanity. But while inadvertently heating the planet



due to the invention of agriculture may have made civilization as weknow it possible, contemporary accelerations of the process may sooncause disruptions on such a scale that solar radiation managementbecomes politically irresistible to those whose priority is maintainingthe existing neoliberal political order, or to those who are either incap-able of imagining other human arrangements or how to rapidly adaptsocieties to deal with a changing climate.

Understood in these terms, the disasters that are geoengineering andFukushima are but two ways of probing the security politics of theAnthropocene. This in the long term is a geopolitics that is about geologyin the sense that what we are making is what will be the sedimentaryrecord of humanity in future eons (Clark, 2012). But that geologicalrecord is open to being shaped by a security politics that thinks seriouslyabout how to construct a future for humanity in a world that has alreadybeen remade by many technologies. How that future is shaped will inpart be about trying to avoid disasters, but political judgments aboutwhich ones deserve priority are now unavoidable if the focus is onmaking an earth that can sustain humanity in the long run in theAnthropocene.

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Simon Dalby, formerly at Carleton University, is now CIGI Chair in thePolitical Economy of Climate Change at the Balsillie School ofInternational Affairs and Professor of Geography and EnvironmentalStudies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario. He is authorof Creating the Second Cold War (Pinter, 1990), Environmental Security(University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Security and EnvironmentalChange (Polity, 2009).

This article is part of a Theory, Culture & Society special issue on‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’, edited by Nigel Clark andKathryn Yusoff.



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