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September 26, 2007
Robyn Eckersley's elegant and eloquent argument concerning the limits of
"ecological intervention" is constrained by the scope of what is included
in her definition of environmental emergency, by what might be in need of protection,
and also by what is conventionally understood by notions of intervention related
to states and sovereign territory. This exploration of the limits of intervention
as conventionally understood raises in an especially pointed way the related questions
of who can legitimately intervene, where and in what circumstances, and the matter
of precisely who it is who might be capable of actually conducting such interventions.
As such, her own intervention in the debate is a most useful extension of the
discussion of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
(ICISS) framework, not least because it highlights the ethical dilemmas but also
because it explicates the limits of the framework itself.While Eckersley's
case is clear and to the point, the larger questions hanging over this discussion
relate both to harms that cross borders and the agents empowered to act to prevent
these harms. The additional arguments that Daniel Deudney made back in the 1990s
implied that taking environmentalism seriously required rethinking the assumptions
of the state system as an effective provider of an ecologically sustainable future.1 The 1990s literature on human security, with its important
point that people are frequently endangered by the unintended consequences of
actions undertaken without hostile intent, is an important precursor to the responsibility
to protect principle. These are not necessarily what Eckersley suggests would
fit the criteria of immediacy that could, she argues, justify intervention on
the basis of the right to "ecological defence." But if they endanger
people in particular places, is some mode of defense justifiable? Might there
be other modes of intervention by actors other than the military? Where
Eckersley draws attention to fairly narrow terrestrial environmental phenomena
and poses the question of interventions to deal with these matters, the larger
environmental "emergency" that we collectively face is not obviously
amenable to interventions of the sort she discusses. Taking ecology seriously
as a science requires a larger and more encompassing view of what might be in
need of ecological defense. In the last couple of decades science has made dramatic
strides in understanding the biosphere and the dynamics of planetary systems.,2 Earth system sciences have made clear that humanity
and the rest of the biosphere are interlinked much more closely than the normal
assumptions of life in territorial states suggests. This science has also suggested
that the most important drivers of the biosphere are in many way not terrestrial
but, rather, the atmosphere and the oceanic system, which between them determine
the climatological conditions for land-based species. The most important mechanisms
shaping our biosphere are oceanic and atmospheric systems that we have already
altered to such a degree that it is now commonly asserted that we live in a new
geological period, which has been named the Anthropocene. All of which
raises the important point that the international system of states, granted responsibility
for ensuring protection to its peoples can be judged to have fairly systematically
failed to act in a prudent manner to head off the worst imminent effects of these
changes. The Kyoto protocol, for all its faults, is an international agreement
under which some states have obligations to reduce their carbon emissions. Failure
to do so is fairly directly leading to changes that will, in the foreseeable future,
have consequences for the territorial integrity of many states and even the physical
survival of a few. While this may, as Eckersley argues, be a more gradual process
than a nuclear reactor melt down, or perhaps, although this is really unlikely,
a more reversible process than the elimination of a species closely similar to
humans, as in her Rwanda example, the sheer scale of the changes in the biosphere
and its fundamental challenge to the survival of low-lying atoll states in the
Indian and Pacific oceans is surely a much more compelling case for emergency
action to prevent their inundation and elimination as states and peoples. The
atoll states in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and the low lying littoral states,
only most obviously perhaps Bangladesh, have no military options to intervene
in this threat to their physical survival, now knowingly exacerbated by the affluent
states (the Annex I countries under the Kyoto Protocol), which disregard their
international commitments. What then is to be done, and by whom? How might a responsibility
to protect be acted upon by the poor and marginal states in response? Those directly
subject to sea level rise, the possibility of more severe hurricanes, and other
possible hydro-meteorological hazards surely have a compelling ethical argument
for recourse to "ecological defense" in the face of the profligate use
of fossil fuels in developed states that indirectly, and probably unintentionally,
endangers their populations and territory. By way of an illustration for
comparison purposes with Eckersley's two examples, let us consider the following
scenario involving Canada. It is apposite to use a Canadian example both because
this comment is being written in Ottawa, the same town where the ICISS report
formulating the responsibility to protect was written, and secondly because Canada
is in clear violation of its Kyoto emission commitments and seems unlikely to
try to use either drastic curbs on energy production or dubious international
carbon trading mechanisms to attempt to in some way offset its profligate ways.
Consider the following scenario. Sometime in the next few years, after facing
inundations by storm surges aggravated by rising sea levels, members of the Alliance
of Small Island States (AOSIS) meet in an emergency conference to ponder what
might be done. AOSIS passes a motion invoking the collective right of its members
to ecological defense. While obviously all fossil fuels are a problem, the delegates
decide that they should act against one of the worst sources of the threats to
their ecological and territorial integrity. The preamble to the motion notes that
Canada is not the only state in violation of its Kyoto commitments, but that it
is on a per capita basis among the worst offenders. It goes on to explain that
the continued exploitation of the huge tar sands oil shale deposits in Alberta,
which require large amounts of energy just to extract petroleum before it even
gets used, is an especially profligate use of fossil fuels. Finally the AOSIS
motion points out that subsidies and policies favoring the resource sector in
Canada persist while relatively few innovations have been taken to either improve
efficiencies or expand renewable energy supplies. Harkening back to the key distinction
between survival and luxury uses of energy, it also notes that no effort has been
made to constrain unnecessary luxury consumption.,3 Emergency measures require a strategy and, in
secret, AOSIS agree to pool some of their limited tourist revenues, and Tuvalu,
getting rich selling and leasing use of its "tv" internet domain name,
makes a generous contribution to hiring a cruise ship from an international tourism
corporation. With hundreds of citizens from the island states facing inundation
safely on board, the ship quietly sets sail for Vancouver. Once there the "tourists"
disembark and converge on the few major bridges into and out of the city. There
they calmly sit down in the middle of the roadways and block rush-hour traffic,
bringing the city to a halt and causing anger and panic among city officials,
who call for assistance from provincial and federal agencies. An emergency debate
is called in the House of Commons in Ottawa and … Of more concern here,
however, is the leaflet circulated by the protestors, and the internet version
that rapidly spreads from a series of sites with the "tv" domain name,
which justifies the action by quoting Dr. Robyn Eckersley's arguments concerning
the right of endangered peoples to ecological defense. It points out that the
traffic disruption in Vancouver is very much less damaging than the looming inundation
of their island states and that hence their action is much less than proportional
to the harm caused by Canada's violation of its international obligations. The
protestors vow to remain on the bridges until the provincial government in Alberta
and the federal government in Ottawa permanently cease oil production from the
tar sands. A later paragraph on the leaflet explains that Vancouver is after all
the place of origin of Greenpeace and non-violent international environmental
action, and expresses the hope that the citizens of the city and Canada will thus
rally to the cause of the islanders' ecological defense. This counter example
raises two key points that extend Eckersley's examination of the limits of ecological
intervention. First is that the existing discussion of intervention still remains
trapped within the contemporary logic of nation states; this scenario is of course
partly guilty of this limitation too. Climate change and such matters are still
considered a matter mainly for state action, and insofar as powerful states have
in many cases signally failed to live up to their obligations, the big political
question raised by climate change in particular is what other options there might
be for ethical action on this matter in light of the need to act to protect the
human security of island populations.,4 International affairs is no longer only a matter of
territorial states and military force, and discussion of ethical action needs
to consider other actors, including corporations, citizens, and all manner of
other communities not constrained by state boundaries. Second, and related
to this, is the question of the ability to act in the international arena. As
the scenario here suggests the actions of civil society might well be understood
as another form of "intervention" premised on other definitions of ecological
emergency. Suggesting that climate change is not an emergency, because it is not
immediate, as Eckersley does, avoids confronting the consequences of extravagant
consumption and once again points the finger of accusation at poorer and marginal
states as in need of interventions, rather than looking directly at the sources
of the biospheric disruptions in the Anthropocene. The inadequacies of the existing
state system to deal with these matters once again emphasizes the importance of
the broader human security agenda, but also suggests that ethical action in the
larger cause of ecological defense will have to overcome the limits of "intervention"
as defined in the ICISS framework.
1 Daniel Deudney, "Global
Village Sovereignty: Intergenerational Sovereign Publics, Federal-Republican Earth
Constitutions, and Planetary Identities," in Karen Litfin, ed., The Greening
of Sovereignty in World Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 299-325;
Daniel Deudney, "Environmental Security: A Critique," in Daniel Deudney and Richard
Matthew, eds., Contested Grounds: Security and Conflict in the New Environmental
Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 187-219.
2
W. Steffen, A. Sanderson, , Tyson, P.D., Jäger, J., Matson, P.A., Moore III, B.,
Oldfield, F., Richardson, K., Schellnhuber, H.J., Turner, B.L., Wasson, R.J.,
Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (Berlin, Heidelberg,
New York: Springer-Verlag, 2004). 3
On this longstanding debate see Wolfgang Sachs and Tilman Santarius, eds., Fair
Future: Resource Conflicts, Security and Global Justice (New York: Zed Books
2007). ). 4
Simon Dalby, "Ecology, Security, and Change in the Anthropocene," Brown Journal
of World Affairs, 13(2), (2007), pp. 155-164.
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