Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
Box 6.1 Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson is, correctly, widely feted as having launched environmentalism as a
political ideology in the early 1960s with her hugely influential magnum opus Silent
Spring. The title of the book forewarns of a future world without the songs of birds and
it is best remembered for highlighting the harmful effects of DDT on wildlife. The book
also, however, pioneered awareness of the human health repercussions associated
with the use of DDT and other chemicals.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1907, Carson became a marine biologist in an age when
women scientists were extremely rare. Her determination to succeed against the odds
saw her publish Silent Spring in 1962 despite a long-standing fight with cancer and
attempts to block its publication by a hostile chemical industry. The book had been
serialized in the New Yorker magazine prior to its release and caused such interest
that chemical companies began fearing a consumer backlash against their products
and mounted vitriolic attacks on the scientific authenticity of the work. The attacks
failed to prevent the book becoming a major success commercially and politically, both
in the USA and across the developed world. Carson succumbed to cancer just two
years after the release of the book; a disease the causes of which she had done so
much to increase the understanding of. She was at least able to witness before her
death the beginning of legislation being passed to curb the use of polluting chemicals
and the birth of a new political era.
their own territory but charged them with the responsibility to exploit them with
regard to the effect of this on the environment of other states. The parties to the
Conference also agreed to acknowledge the concept of a ‘common heritage of mankind’
whereby resources located outside territorial borders (such as minerals
on the deep sea bed) should be considered as belonging to the international community
collectively, rather than being subject to a ‘finders-keepers/losers-weepers’
approach to their ownership. Stockholm, too, had a direct institutional legacy,
with the creation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) giving
a degree of permanence to the policy area on the international stage. Overall, the
conference’s most significant legacy was in putting environmental questions firmly
on the political agenda by prompting many governments to create new Ministers
and Departments of the Environment and greatly deepening and widening a global
network of environmental pressure groups.
Although Stockholm did not securitize environmental change and put it at the
top of an international political agenda, that was still, in spite of détente, dominated
by the Cold War and impending global recession, some ‘high politics’ was witnessed
at the Conference. Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme denounced the use of herbicides
in war as ‘ecocide’. Palme made no explicit reference to the recent American
use of the infamous jungle defoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam, but the implied
criticism caused grave offence to the Nixon administration, who responded by
withdrawing the US ambassador from Stockholm. Full diplomatic relations between
the two countries were suspended for over a year (January 1973–May 1974).
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