Description
Book SynopsisOffers an account of the challenges we face in responding to security and environmental change. This work argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries.
Trade Review"Through his profound knowledge of the environment and critical understanding of traditional approaches to security, Dalby provides an impressive account of the 'defining challenge of our time'."
Political Studies Review "A must-read for anyone interested in the security and environmental change relationship."
International Affairs
"(An) outstanding and original book. Dalby's message about sustainable security needs to be read widely in universities, and by activists and practitioners."
Times Higher Education
"Our competitive, hyperconsuming, and carbon-fuelled world is unfair and unsustainable. Bringing together geopolitics, ethics and earth sciences, Simon Dalby offers one of the best essays for rethinking security in the Anthropocene, this new human-made geological age. If the deadliness of past revolutions seeking to bring about a 'new man' calls for caution, security in the Anthropocene needs, literally, new ways of being human in our fast changing biosphere."
Philippe Le Billon, University of British Columbia and author of 'Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts'
"Simon Dalby has written a comprehensive and politically sensitive analysis of environmental security today. It takes the reader well beyond simply mapping how the environment is related to security questions, and whether securitizing the environment is politically desirable. The book makes a strong case for rethinking both the meaning of security in light of the human impact on ecology and the sustainability of modern distinctions between culture and nature, urban and rural, and science and politics. It is a most original and provocative read.
Jef Huysmans, The Open University
"Simon Dalby combines rigour and originality with impressive knowledge of ecological systems and a critical understanding of traditional approaches to security. The end result is an integrated analysis of the human predicament in an age of rapid environmental change. Security and Environmental Change is a seminal contribution to the development of the concept of sustainable security."
Paul Rogers, University of Bradford
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Abbreviations viii
Introduction: Change, Ecology, and Security 1
1 Environmental Fears: From Th omas Malthus to Ecological “Collapse” 13
2 Securing Precisely What? Global, Environmental, and Human Security 36
3 Environmental History: Conquest, Colonization, Famines, and El Niño 56
4 Global Change and Earth-System Science 78
5 Glurbanization and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene 105
6 Geopolitics and Ecological Security 129
Conclusion: Anthropocene Security 159
References 173
Index 193
