What does it mean to move ‘global warming’ into the domain of security? – Here is an article in today’s New York Times.
April 15, 2007
Global Warming Called Security Threat
By ANDREW C. REVKIN and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
For the second time in a month, private consultants to the government are warning that human-driven warming of the climate poses risks to the national security of the United States.
A report, scheduled to be published on Monday but distributed to some reporters yesterday, said issues usually associated with the environment — like rising ocean levels, droughts and violent weather caused by global warming — were also national security concerns.
“Unlike the problems that we are used to dealing with, these will come upon us extremely slowly, but come they will, and they will be grinding and inexorable,†Richard J. Truly, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and former NASA administrator, said in the report.
The effects of global warming, the study said, could lead to large-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water. All could lead to direct involvement by the United States military.
The report recommends that climate change be integrated into the nation’s security strategies and says the United States “should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate changes at levels that will avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.â€
The report, called “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,†was commissioned by the Center for Naval Analyses, a government-financed research group, and written by a group of retired generals and admirals called the Military Advisory Board.
In March, a report from the Global Business Network, which advises intelligence agencies and the Pentagon on occasion, concluded, among other things, that rising seas and more powerful storms could eventually generate unrest as crowded regions like Bangladesh’s sinking delta become less habitable,
One of the authors of the report, Peter Schwartz, a consultant who studies climate risks and other trends for the Defense Department and other clients, said the climate system, jogged by a century-long buildup of heat-trapping gases, was likely to rock between extremes that could wreak havoc in poor countries with fragile societies.
“Just look at Somalia in the early 1990s,†Mr. Schwartz said. “You had disruption driven by drought, leading to the collapse of a society, humanitarian relief efforts, and then disastrous U.S. military intervention. That event is prototypical of the future.â€
“Picture that in Central America or the Caribbean, which are just as likely,†he said. “This is not distant, this is now. And we need to be preparing.â€
Other recent studies have shown that drought and scant water have already fueled conflicts in global hot spots like Afghanistan, Nepal, and Sudan, according to several recent studies.
This bodes ill, given projections that human-driven warming is likely to make some of the world’s driest, poorest places drier still, experts said.
“The evidence is fairly clear that sharp downward deviations from normal rainfall in fragile societies elevate the risk of major conflict,†said Marc Levy of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, which recently published a study on the relationship between climate and civil war.
Given that climate models project drops in rainfall in such places in a warming world, Mr. Levy said, “It seems irresponsible not to take into account the possibility that a world with climate change will be a more violent world when making judgments about how tolerable such a world might be.â€
Here is a a posting made today on the radical interpretations of disaster website about this very topic- what might it mean to move such “global crises” as global warming into the explicit domain of international, national, and human security?
please look here: http://www.radixonline.org/cchs.html
This is a very exciting post for me as my own dissertation research on biocomplexity investigates the development of these very problems.
Here is a quote from the post which explicates the current problematization and expansion of the vital which I have been tracking in the realms of conservation biology and environmental research:
“These linkages are complex in many ways. To begin with, climate change involves the interactions of many systems such as the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere that are immensely complex in their own right. Thus, a recurrent theme in IPCC reports is the significance of thresholds and non-linearities. When human systems are added to the mix, complexity escalates. Livelihood security and other aspects of human security interact with geo-strategic (or “hardâ€) security issues because of the national and regional upheavals that climate stress may put on livelihood systems already vulnerable and incapable of adapting.”
There is also an interesting figure labeled, “Matrix of Possible Climate Change/Security Interactions over Time.”
Amelia — this is very helpful and the link is great. Could you say more about what you mean by “vital”? It sounds like it is something close to “ecological systems” (but including humans and human things). I am curious also about the use of “vulnerable” or “vulnerability” as a technical term in ecology discussions. Is something like “vulnerability assessment” acknowledged as a distinctive domain?
My thoughts on “the vital” are new and fairly simple at the moment. I had been thinking about biocomplexity research (http://www.nsf.gov/news/priority_areas/biocomplexity/index.jsp) as an expansion of biopolitics, as a sort of “global” reorientation away from strictly human centered medicalized, bodily concerns ( a la Rose) to something along the lines of a growing scientific attention to planetary (as in a system of systems) bio-geo-chemico-physical processes which require a repositioning or internalization of forms of individual and collective human life as well as a rethinking of the organic and inorganic. But then, as I think about the present uses or over-uses of the term biopolitics, I wonder if it can be conceptually applied to such things as contemporary transnational environmental research or the political work which An Inconvenient Truth, the power point presentation seen round the world, has done to influence thought about climate change. I don’t think that the bio in biodiversity or the bio in biocomplexity is the bio of biopower or biopolitics, and the notion of life itself which Foucault tied so well to state concerns over human bodies and populations, and the notion which Rose takes up in The Politics of Life Itself is not this same bio. And its certainly not Agamben’s zoe. So now I think that “the vital” may be an alternative signifier for this “ecological” view of life, though perhaps not as you use it to describe vital systems. I take your use of “vital” to refer to “essential” systems relating to this “anthropocentric” bios- the bios of human life itself, the governance of which is still a problem, though a different sort of problem today than in the 18th and 19th Centuries. I want a term that can encompass the remediations brought about by complexity research, ecological, molecular, and biogeochemical, which points to the way in which natural and human systems are increasingly conceived of as “coupled.” I just heard Rosi Briadotti speak today on her vision of a post-human, post-biopolitical, Nietzschian and Deleuzian vital politics, and while I think she is too quick to refer to Rabinow’s concerns with figures of anthropos as anthropocentric (and maybe this is a veiled critique of anthropology too), I think she may be on to something. I’m sorry if this answer is too long and confusing.
Vulnerability assessment, as far as I can tell, is not an explicit domain, but social assessment is, and within that there are assumptions about the vulnerability of people, usually described as poor, usually described as local and living in communities, who base their livelihoods around natural processes. People like Bahamian fishermen, the subjects of social assessment in the biocomplexity project I study, become construed as vulnerable when they are believed to be in a coupled natural and human system, and that system is considered vulnerable- the long term viability of the Bahamian coral reef system is the concern of the project. So coupled systems, ecological, economic, and social, are vulnerable, or are becoming increasingly more so. And an analysis of these systems requires an attention to complex and vital processes beyond the closed an “reductive” analysis of single disciplines.
I hope my descriptions elucidate more than they obfuscate.
Thanks, Amelia, this is very helpful. Here are some idiosyncratic comments on the vital that may well be completely irrelevant. My comments come from recent work on ‘emerging infectious diseases’ and things might look very different in the context of biocomplexity.
There is certainly a trend towards articulating something like a Deleuzian vital politics today. By now, I have seen several papers that are trying to move in this direction. Bruce Braun, in his piece on “Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life†does it explicitly in form of a critique of Rose’s work. In Braun’s piece, the vital refers to “an unpredictable molecular world characterized by exchange and circulation and full of emergent risks.†According to Braun, this has led to a resurgence not of biopower but of sovereign power. The Deleuzian concept of the vital (emergence, differentiation, unpredictability, mutation, recombination, contingency, plasticity, etc.) fits so nicely to what you can read about biological things in the New York Times these days that it comes as no surprise that we now see scholars like Braun, Cooper, and Dillon beginning to work with it. As an anthropologist, I neither want to start nor end with a philosophy of life.
I have come to realize recently that I want to get as far away from this approach as I can get. I think the vital fits all too nicely to things you can read in the newspapers as a distant observe of the world, and it doesn’t actually get us to do much work in the end. At least that’s my impression at this point. Furthermore, the way scholars use Deleuze’s concept it ultimately simply replicates a discourse that they want to criticize. We are not given a new language for new thoughts, on the contrary. The form that their critique takes is denunciation (especially in the case of Cooper). Finally, and not surprisingly, their work is not based on an engagement with informants.
Given the use of the concept of the vital that I have seen so far, and my own difficulties in getting this concept to do any substantial work (in the context of ‘emerging infectious diseases’) beyond the replication of a certain discourse that is already all too familiar, I have decided that the challenge for me is to get away from it as far as I can. Quite surprisingly, this is possible by simply returning to biology and take a second look.
Anyway, this is just my idiosyncratic reaction to some of the pieces that I’ve read recently.
Carlo, you make a strong case for being cautious about replacing biopolitics with vital politics. Can you provide citations for the pieces you mention so that I may look at them? Also, can you explain more about your “return to biology?” I have read your brief “Life- After Canguilhem” in Theory, Culture, Society, but I see the concern for rebiologization therein as a response to Rose’s molecularization of biopolitics, not as a critique of the concept of biopolitics itself or of anything like vital politics. I am very interested in this project of finding a new conceptual language.
I have posted the Braun piece on the biopower blog as a separate entry. I would be very interested in knowing what you and other people think of it. Again, my comments come very much from an ‘emerging infectious diseases’ perspective, and things might well look very different in other domains. You will also find all other references in the Braun piece, including the two relevant books by Ansell-Pearson.
The ‘return to biology’ idea grew out of a sense that maybe the ‘molecularization of life’ was not the entire story. Significantly, Braun doesn’t question Rose’s idea of the ‘molecularization of life’. He just adds another, more Deleuzian, layer on to it. At this point, I think it still is an idea that waits to be developed. What does this return entail? All help appreciated!
This is all really interesting stuff, especially considering the proposal to use military forces in future ‘complex emergencies’ (Bush’s idea post-Katrina) such as avian influenza …
I’m wondering if anyone has thought of the connection between biopreparedness policy post-Katrina, which seems to me to have institutionalized a kind of incorporation of emergency response into a non-conventional security apparatus (ie FEMA is now part of the Department of Homeland Security) and the incredible push behind the faith-based initiative as emergency relief. I’m writing an article on this at the moment and the connections between post-cat reconstruction and the project of moral regeneration. I’m wondering if the political alternative to this kind of alliance doesn’t need to involve sexual/racial politics, as well as an anti-securitarian, ecological politics.
I’d be interested in hearing any thoughts as this is all very tentative.
Amelia I’d be really interested in hearing more about your ideas on biocomplexity. I’ve just published an article in Distinktion called Life, Autopoiesis, Debt: Inventing the Bioeconomy which is an attempt to think through the political economic implications of the complexity approach in both theoretical biology and recent economic theory. Its not the whole version which includes a much longer consideration of complexity theory inspired economics and its relation to Hayek, but it definitely intersects with some of the ideas you’re raising. Do you have anything forthcoming on the topic? Would love to see it.
The Distinktion issue is here – http://www.distinktion.dk/d14.htm