Global Change and Our Common Future Papers from a Forum (1989) / Chapter Skim
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17. The Global Environment: A National Security Issue
17. The Global Environment: A National Security Issue
Pages 177-186
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From page 177... ...
Many have come to share the belief that humankind has suddenly entered into a brand-new relationship with the planet Earth and that human civilization is, in its current pattern, causing grave and, perhaps soon, irreparable damage to the ecological system that supports life as we know it. My purpose is to sound an alarm -- loudly and clearly -- of imminent and grave danger, and to describe a strategy for confronting this crisis, with changes in our collective behavior and thinking that, if made, can forestall and prevent the horrendous prospect of an ecological collapse.
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From page 178... ...
How do we deal with these immediate problems and at the same time confront the problems of the future? One of the philosophers of the environmental movement, Ivan Illich, in a recent interview explained the sudden environmental activism of Margaret Thatcher, MiLhail Gorbachev, and other world leaders previously uninterested in the global environment by saying, "What has changed is that our common sense has
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From page 179... ...
The political will that made possible the mass political protests against escalating the nuclear arms race came from awareness of a downslope toward a future we did not want to see. Many felt us being pulled toward a nuclear war that would crush human history forever into a black hole.
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From page 180... ...
And for environmental specialists, the steady flow of data from scientific investigation of the environment -- often ambiguous, but always menacing -- is eerily equivalent to intelligence collection against the more familiar Soviet threat. The U2 spy plane, for example, now is used to monitor not missile silos, but ozone depletion.
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From page 181... ...
However, the greenhouse effect and stratospheric ozone depletion fit the profile of national security issues of global significance. These phenomena certainly will in time produce effects big enough to threaten international order, even at the level of war and peace.
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From page 182... ...
My own belief is that perceptions must evolve simultaneously in both superpowers, keeping pace with changing technology, accompanied by conscious efforts to improve information each side has about the other and about the nature of the threat -- all aimed at increasing mutual confidence that the threat is in fact changing and receding. In similar fashion, the effort to solve the global environmental crisis will be complicated not only by blind assertions that more and more environmental manipulation and more and more resource extraction are essential for economic growth.
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From page 183... ...
In agriculture, we have witnessed vast growth in Third World food production through the Green Revolution, but often that growth relied on heavily subsidized fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and overall mechanization, sometimes giving the advantage to rich farmers over poor ones. We need a second green revolution to address the needs of the Third World's poor.
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From page 184... ...
Funds for this lending stream would be generated by institutions such as the World Bank, which, in the course of debt swapping, might dedicate new funds to the purchase of environmentally sounder technologies. Finally, the United States, other developers of new technology, and international lending institutions should establish centers of training at locations around the world to create a core of environmentally educated planners and technicians, in order to ''make the ground fertile" for sowing environmentally attractive technologies and practices -- an effort not unlike that which produced agricultural research centers throughout the world during the Green Revolution.
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From page 185... ...
Genetic engineering may pose the same dilemma all over again. In the effort to protect ourselves against disease, we are creating a new and more powerful technology that may ultimately confront us with the same historic challenge to human nature and the same hubristic relationship of our species to the limits nature has designed for us as part of the world ecological system.
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From page 186... ...
But even without defining the problem in religious terms, it is possible to conclude that the solutions we seek will be found in a new faith in the future of life on earth after our own, a faith in the future that justifies sacrifices in the present, a new moral courage to choose higher values in the conduct of human affairs, and a new reverence for absolute principles that can serve as guiding stars by which to map the future course of our species and our place within creation.
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