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21.4: Resources and References

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    Review

    Key Points

    • Many of the most pressing challenges to human security in its various dimensions arise from the lack of environmental security.
    • At the global level, environmental security can only be ensured if humanity manages to extricate itself from the condition of overshoot. Two major challenges arise from this imperative: (1) increasing the equity of environmental impact and (2) halting (and then reversing) population growth as quickly as possible.
    • The lack of international consensus and political will, as well as ideological blind spots, render timely success against overshoot unlikely at the global level.
    • At the regional, national, and local levels impressive progress in all pillars of human security is evident in some cases; in other cases the lack of progress causes apprehension.
    • Opportunities are more numerous and realistic at those levels because the obstacles are more manageable and solutions more feasible. They fall into the four categories of efficiency gains, restraint measures, adaptation and structural flexibility.
    • One essential requirement for sustainable human security is that new educational policies and practices lead to a restructuring of the cultural foundations that inform people’s ideas about progress and modernity.
    • Some important challenges and opportunities towards human security arise independently of sustainability issues. They include many aspects of health security, political fragmentation and unification, limitations to the rule of law and the crisis of governability in democracies.

    .Extension Activities & Further Research

    1. Consider a concept map summarising the book. Incorporate as many chapters as possible. Where do you see agreement? Where do you see possible disagreement?
    2. In the impoverished island nation of Haiti, 58% of the population lacked access to clean water even before the 2010 earthquake. Determine the number of people that could sustainably live in Haiti, based only on the availability of fresh water. You will need to find data on annual precipitation and the minimum per capita requirement. Compare your finding with the existing population (estimated by the CIA World Factbook at 9,801,664 for July 2012) and propose some major agenda for sustainable development in terms of adaptation, efficiency, restraint, and structural changes. Explain why the import of potable water is not part of those agenda but other technology (of what kind?) might be.
    3. On 17 October 2018 the cultivation, possession, acquisition, and consumption of cannabis was legalised in Canada. What would the legalisation of some (or all) recreational drugs do for human security? Would it endanger more users to a greater extent and facilitate their progression to ever harder drugs? On the other hand, could it help eliminate gang violence, assure quality control of the products, allow users to openly access medical care, facilitate taxation of the industry, free up resources for other areas of law enforcement? In your view, to what extent is current drug legislation in your country influenced by considerations of human security?
    4. (Refer to Section 21.3.3.) Common examples representing this moral grey zone include someone stealing food because they feel unable to feed their family by other means; soldiers deserting their units because they consider their orders inhumane; a passer-by feeding water to cattle on a parked truck, and trespassing in the process; and demonstrators defending themselves against police brutality. In such situations it does not seem so clear with whom the moral authority rests. But if we concede that at least in some cases both the moral authority and the weight of IHL rests with the individual and not with the state, as in the case of the holocaust examples, then the authority of the state becomes subject to ad hoc confirmation by the individual citizen. Where should we draw the line between what is acceptable and unacceptable?Beginning with the examples mentioned above, create some criteria, discuss them with peers, then compare your ideas with the endnote. [21]
    5. The challenges for human security under the present circumstances call for drastic policy changes at all levels. The necessary measures could be enacted by a democratic government or by a benign dictator, but to what extent is each side up to the task? In other words, what we are asking you is the following: Will democracies necessarily lose out in favour of ecologically benign dictatorships – or are they indeed the only form of government that has any hope of surviving in the long run? Or might the answer depend on the scale (global / regional / national / local)?Two opposing viewpoints exist on this question.Their main points are represented in the two text boxes below, in the form of an organised moot debate. We encourage you to compare them and decide which side appeals to you more; we suggest that you do this in teams. You might also wish to consult Chapter 14. Discuss your view with your peers.If you would like to follow a discussion among academics on the future of democracy, read M’Bokolo, Touraine & Walzer (2001).
    6. George W. Bush’s first executive order after taking office was to stop all funding for programmes designed to put a break on the explosive population growth in Third World countries. This amounted to cancelling all US development aid, as well as US participation in international aid, that was in any way associated with family planning. This single decision noticeably hindered international efforts to help African women reduce their reproductive rates (which are still among the world’s highest) in subsequent years.Taking into consideration the definition of crimes against humanity given in Chapter 7, discuss the pros and cons of a hypothetical prosecution of G.W. Bush for crimes against humanity.
    7. “In My Canada …”Compile a wishlist of developments that you would like to have seen happen in your country, state or province in order to facilitate a Great Transition towards sustainable human security. Our suggested examples, naturally biased, are:
      • Our newly elected prime minister would have returned from the Paris COP21 summit with an explicit plan for the phased disappearance of all recreational fossil fuel-driven motor vehicles.
      • None of our remaining old growth forests will ever see another chain saw again.
      • No billionaires should exist in my country – what little good they contribute to the commons is arbitrary and unaccountable. Taxation should take care of it, won’t it?
      • The packaging industries and the recycling industries would have been amalgamated by law shortly after many plastic consumer articles appeared on the market in the 1950s.
    8. The two statements below argue in favour of democratic governance and in favour of benign autocracy, respectively. Take issue with their arguments and choose sides, if you feel so inclined. Be prepared to propose further arguments to support your position and/or to refute the alternatives.

    Democracy and Human Security: Two Opposing Viewpoints

    The much acclaimed spread of democracy around the world is mostly a matter of superficial appearance, much less one of substantial democratisation. In fact, the globalisation of markets and finance hinders democracy everywhere.Democratic states are obliged to facilitate their citizens’ exercise of their rights as individuals and in associations. However, this does not allow effective and timely policy changes as are necessary at this time to ensure a sustainable future. Those new policies will include a new understanding of progress in terms of efficiency, restraint and adaptation, and follow the precautionary principle. In other words, democracies are powerless to prevent the kind of environmental vandalism that is endemic in many countries. Therefore they are doomed. It is the very capacity of democracies to persist ‘at the edge of chaos’ that alone allows for sufficient flexibility in a future characterised by rapid and sudden environmental change. This capacity is thought to arise from a propensity of truly democratic societies to spontaneously reorganise and adapt in response to external challenges. We have seen this confirmed in recent history since the authoritarian regimes in South America were replaced with democratically elected ones. Once that happened, those countries were able to develop; there is no true development without the democratic participation of all groups of society. In other words, only democracies can live up to the challenges ahead that demand a new kind of development and resilience.
    In contrast, a benign dictatorship could succeed where democracies failed. A benign dictatorship in this context is one that pursues as its ultimate goal not its own perpetuation but the sustainable well-being (‘acceptable survival’) of humanity in terms of ecological limits (but not in terms of human rights) and the ‘creation of wealth’ as described in Chapter 14. If it helps African countries, why not others? It is a dictatorship insofar as it does not consult with its citizens on whether or how they wish to be governed. But most people prioritise their day-to-day quest for survival and for happiness over issues of government. A democratic government by definition engages in periodic consultation with the citizenry, usually through elected representatives. Even though the mechanisms of consulting may be indirect and include delays, any substantially new policies will thus have to be approved by the electorate sooner or later, either directly or through delegates. This is the central principle of political representation. It makes governmental decisions defensible.
    A global market economy in the current undisciplined form is unlikely to allow for such drastic changes in a timely fashion. One reason lies in the counterproductive definition of progress that this system relies on. The free market model may serve humanity much better under a radically reformed world order with equitable distribution of resources. But radical redistribution is unlikely to come about by a democratic consensus unless a majority is moved by the certainty of impending cataclysm, by which time it would be too late. Dictatorships tend to be encumbered by many handicaps. Firstly, any authoritarian system is likely to elicit non-compliance to a greater extent than a system based on consensus. Many of those citizens who disagree with a particular policy, seeing no way to influence it, would be moved towards civil disobedience. The likely outcomes are black markets, an illicit ‘shadow’ economy, widespread apathy, and possibly more deliberate environmental vandalism. People feel disempowered because local authorities do not represent local governance, only an extension of the central authority. In other words, the door towards liberalism remains firmly closed.
    This consensus handicap is the main reason why a dictatorial system would be better able to restrain capitalism and to curb individual freedom to the extent necessary to maintain ecosystem health. While democracies can legislate to impose limits and incentives (e.g. render fuel cells economic by taxing alternatives, fix the price of eco-toilet paper, etc.), their dependence on consensus renders them evidently ill-suited to impose unpalatable but necessary reforms on a consumption-drunk public. This includes problematic decisions about non-economic variables in the crisis, such as population growth. A dictatorship could impose a system of parent licensing without it becoming watered down through a parliamentary process. Secondly, in order for the required policies to have their beneficial effect they would have to be enforced and perpetuated globally. That requires an Orwellian degree of complexity, reach and thoroughness unprecedented in dictatorial regimes. Few prospects of the future seem as daunting to the humanist as that of a single global dictatorship leaving no place for the dissident to escape to. The consolation lies in the likely inherent instability of such a system. Dictators tend to claim that dictatorial measures would only be necessary for the brief historical interlude until the citizenry recognise the beneficial outcomes, whereupon they would cease to object and begin to actively support the regime, which in turn would no longer necessitate dictatorship. However, this argument often flouted by communist rulers was never borne out by history. Invariably those dictatorships toppled before they could convince enough of their citizens.
    Another handicap of democracies lies in their disposition towards political see-saws. Any radical initiative that does manage to pass through the parliamentary process is likely to elicit opposition from powerful lobby groups who perceive it as threatening their interests, economic or other. Those lobbies might well succeed in getting an opposition party elected into government which would promptly reverse those reforms – the net effect being no political change. That would not happen under a dictatorship. We cannot afford to remain stuck within the confines of the Left – Right continuum and its squabbling. The real strengths of democratic decision making lie at the local and regional levels, where a centralized power would likely err out of ignorance. Therefore a push to decentralise democratic structures may help. The challenge of a democratic regime then becomes the proper coordination of many local initiatives. This is where educational reform could make a crucial difference. The currently dominating value system that prioritises the maximisation of personal property and consumptions is entirely counterproductive. The transition from this value system to one that facilitates sustainability will have to rely on formal and informal education which focuses on values directly.
    Thirdly, democracies in their present forms appear ill-suited to meet the challenge because of the almost obligatory short term view of elected decisionmakers focusing on legislative periods. Even if they manage to introduce and enforce benign but radical laws (e.g. on packaging or advertisement) they are frequently obliged to rely on short-term crowd-pleasing measures to survive into the next legislative period. A more ideal democracy where long-term benefits are openly and widely prioritised might do better but we no longer have the time to build it. Dictators, on the other hand, are free to act on the long term view (as illustrated by Lenin’s reforms), and their benignity would dispose them towards that view. A dictatorship is only truly sustainable if the possibility of effective resistance not ever emerges, which means it cannot last forever (keeping in mind Wilmer’s points about conflict resolution in Chapter 19). This leaves us with the likely prospect of a temporary dictatorial regime enacting the necessary changes towards a sustainable future for humanity, whereupon they are promptly overthrown and democracy takes over. Can’t you just see the movie now?
    A transition to a benign dictatorship may be easier than is generally believed as in many respects the present systems of governance already resemble more a dictatorship (of corporations) than a democracy. Such a transition can be furthered through the universal influence of electronic media. A sufficiently catastrophic global environmental event might provide the last straw.

    List of Terms

    See Glossary for full list of terms and definitions.

    • akrasia
    • Conventional Development Paradigm (CDP)
    • crisis of governability
    • cultural capital
    • kakistocracy
    • natural capital
    • precautionary principle

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    Footnote

    1. In fact, numerous heads of government insist most fervently, at no cost to their reputation, that further economic growth counts among their most important policy goals. The 2020 pandemic showed how much economic de-growth is actually possible within a short time frame.
    2. This limit, which represented a doubling of the orginal safe limit recommended by the UN Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, was acknowleged in the Copenhagen Accord. Estimates by UNEP and the University of Oxford’s UK Climate Impacts Programme were 3.5 amd 4 °C, respectively. These thresholds are placed where scientists suspect critical ‘tipping points’—such as the entire Western Antarctic Ice Shelf sliding into the sea within a matter of months or weeks. There is a further concern based on a phenomenon called global dimming: During the three days following the 9/11 attack, when all US passenger flights were grounded, the levels of particulate pollution in the atmosphere dropped dramatically, and temperatures increased by 1°C (because more sunlight reached the surface) in addition to the 1°C by which we have already exceeded the preindustrial level (BBC 2005). This could spell a disastrous extent of further warming when the particulate level drops for any reason in the future, e.g. from emission reductions. This is the programme transcript.
    3. Those scenarios correspond to the ‘Eco-communalism’ and ‘New Sustainability Paradigm’ scenarios described by Raskin (2016), as discussed in Chapter 1.
    4. Narrow definitions of poverty contribute to the inefficiency of this ‘fight’ against poverty. A common definition is earning less than the equivalent of two US dollars a day, and for ‘absolute poverty’ less than one dollar (Bindé & Matsuura, 2001, p. 359). Readers of Hawkins’ Chapter 11 will not miss the irony in the image of a starving person being handed two small pieces of green paper.
    5. A typical definition of food security is “permanent access by all to the foodstuffs necessary for a healthy and active life” (Collomb, 2001). This rightly excludes the kinds of malnutrition that predominate in overdeveloped countries. However, it only hints at the necessary quality of a person’s diet, the lack of which does not lead to starvation but to ill health from malnutrition. The proposed EAT-Lancet diet would be healthier but it remains neither universally affordable nor sustainable (Hirvonen et al., 2020).
    6. See the summary and read the data published in O’Neill et al. (2018). The authors point to the challenge that countries performing well with respect to the environmental boundaries tend to under-perform in the sociopolitical and cultural areas, and vice versa. The same conundrum is causing some of the SDGs to clash with others.
    7. The unit is global hectares (gha). It is useful to distinguish between two kinds of equity in this context. One is the average per capita footprint in 2008 (2.7 gha); when multiplied by the total 2008 population, it gives the equivalent of 1.5 Earths and thus represents our overshoot in 2008. The other is the average sustainable per capita footprint; its estimates vary about an order of magnitude, around a median of about 3.6 gha (WWF, 2018; Ehrlich et al., 1995). That is the minimum amount of biocapacity that needs to be allocated sustainably to every living person in order for them to survive under acceptable conditions. The Earth’s biocapacity can sustain this for only about 3 billion people.
    8. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo the goal of fertility reduction was dismissed in favour of women’s empowerment. Instrumental in this outcome were the international women’s movement, the US government, and the Holy See (McIntosh & Finkle, 1995). A reference to reproductive rights was deleted from the Rio+20 report.
    9. In the US alone, between one and two thousand untreated ‘superfund’ sites of toxic waste deposits are leaking pollutants into the water table with catastrophic consequences for local cancer incidence. In some island states such as New Zealand, water pollution is now considered a primary security threat.
    10. Some publications still measure a country’s ‘development’ by its number of millionaires, simultaneously ignoring the problems of socioeconomic inequity, capital flight, local resource scarcity, and global overshoot, as well as moral objections to the implication that the exorbitance of a tiny elite somehow renders tolerable the squalor among the rest. The trends towards increasing inequity refute all claims about economic ‘trickle-down’ effects.
    11. Widespread denial of moral responsibility is commonly evident in post-genocide situations, e.g. post-WWII Germany (Jaspers, 2001). In many cases of heroic altruism, the acceptance of moral responsibility made the crucial difference (Oliner & Oliner, 1988).
    12. The hidden curriculum includes knowledge, beliefs and ideals that are not explicitly addressed or referred to in formal teaching at educational institutions but that students do learn about through informal and implicit channels such as peer interactions during schooling. It represents a powerful driver for the cultural reproduction of dominant patterns of thought and behaviour. The null curriculum consists of themes that are officially taboo or traditionally ignored (e.g. the ethics of reproductive behaviour).
    13. For example, one particular concept that needs to be deconstructed and abandoned is the concept of the environmentalist. It has polarised communities and societies into pro-nature and pro-economy camps, left versus right, conservation versus ‘progress’, and other anachronistic dichotomies that seem quite counterproductive (Scharmer, 2019). It has also provided some influential groups with tools for ‘brownlash’ propaganda (Beder, 2006). Such demonization and dividing the field into ‘us and them’ hinders progress in negotiations and results in stalemates (Haidt, 2012). In truth, anyone who cares for their own long-term welfare, if not the welfare of their family, cannot help but care for the integrity of the requisite ecological support structures. James Lovelock (1995) called this attitude ‘enlightened self interest’. There is no reason for anyone to refer to such a person as an environmentalist, for what should we call the other people – suicidal sociopaths? “We are all environmentalists now.” (Jones, 1993, p. 55)
    14. For instance, economic risks received generally high impact ratings while environmental risks were considered to generally have a low impact. The report does not mention overshoot or imply that it was taken into account.
    15. weapons of mass destruction
    16. See Onishi, N. & M. Fackler. 2011. Japan Held Nuclear Data, Leaving Evacuees in Peril. New York Times (Asia Pacific), 9 August, A1.
    17. For example, the artificial sweeteners aspartmae (a.k.a. Nutrasweet, Equal, Neotame, AminoSweet) and sucralose (Splenda) have been in use since 1981 and 1999, respectively, despite increasing evidence of severe health effects. Aspartame is used by 100 million people worldwide and is present in 5000 products in the US alone. Alleged effects include certain cancers and the mimicking of lupus and multiple sclerosis (Aspartame Consumer Safety Network http://www.aspartamesafety.com/). At the time of writing, the herbicide glyphosate (‘Roundup’) has attracted much public attention for similar reasons.
    18. Under the category of “Insane Trade” Keller (2019) describes practices such as countries simultaneous exporting and importing the same article, or re-importing goods that they previously exported. The associated waste of energy, packaging, emissions, and the destabilising of local climate-resilient agriculture are significant.
    19. A 2012 Gallup poll identified the ten countries with the biggest gap between genders in terms of how personally secure individuals feel when going out in their own communities at night. They are, in increasing order, Finland, France, USA, Australia, Albania, Italy, Cyprus, Malta, Algeria and New Zealand. What is striking about this list is that it includes some very affluent societies, with very high personal security ratings, but also with high incidences of violence against women. We can conclude that the causes for women’s insecurity are cultural and not socioeconomic, and that international monitoring and ‘shaming’ in a globalised world might do some good, as such societies tend to care about their international status. http://247wallst.com/2012/07/10/countries-where-women-do-not-feel-safe/ (8 Sept 2019)
    20. Witness this famous quote on succesful moviemaking by Samuel Goldwyn: “If you want to send a message, send a telegram!” Of particular concern to the human security of millions at one time were the numerous incidences of casual US media commentaries about the ‘impending strike on Iran’; equally unsettling to us is the paucity of protests against such blatant warmongering.
    21. Here are some suggested criteria in the form of critical questions that one could ask about a person’s proposed course of action: To what extent could disobeying the law serve the person’s own interests? Are those interests legitimate and strong enough to justify the proposed act of civil disobedience? To what extent could obeying the law result in unjustifiable harm to oneself or to others (human or non-human)? How reliably could such potential ‘harm’ be assessed? To what extent can the disobedience be excused on religious or conscientious grounds?
    22. Although most of its authors are thoroughly ensconced in the CDP, the scope and depth of this book and the range of high-profile contributors is impressive.
    23. This book, as well as its predecessor, The Coming Age of Scarcity, hardly dates; it is what the UN should have heeded two decades ago.
    24. Contains sections on sustainability, climate, water, biodiversity, food, population, culture & behaviour, energy, economy, cities, transportation, waste, health, education, resilience, action plans.
    25. His analysis is proving right.
    26. All of human security in the form of a single ingenious diagram.
    27. This is an excellent educational resource with authoritative academic credentials.

    21.4: Resources and References is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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