Abstract
The basic logic of the environmental security discourse is that humankind is living beyond the carrying capacity of the earth’s local, regional, and global ecosystems. Essence is how to evaluate environmental stress in relation to political stability: is this a matter of ordinary politics or a matter of exceptional politics, i.e. security politics? The debate is dominated by an intriguing paradox: in order to preserve the political-economic and social-cultural structures of local, national, and world societies it is necessary to change them fundamentally, given their un-sustainability. The warning reads that either the structures are changed voluntarily and in a controlled manner, or structural change will be enforced violently and randomly by environmental crises. Much of the debate boils down to the question ‘who is to pay a price today to avoid that others have to pay a higher price tomorrow?’
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See, e.g., the agenda presented in MacNeill/ Winsemius/ Yakushiji (1991:131), Böge (1992); Brauch (2005: 64), and on websites of organizations like Earth System Science Partnership, <http://www.essp.org>; Global Environmental Change, <http:/www.gecko.ac.uk>; and the World watch Institute, http://www.worldwatch. org)
See:WCED 1987; Adams 1990; MacNeill/Winsemius/ Yakushiji 1991; Myers 1993, 1993a, 1993b; Williams 1993; Smith/Okoye/de Wilde/Deshingkar 1994; Najam 2003.
About the fallacy of the techno-fix see: Porter/ Brown (1991: 28–29); Myers (1993: 227, 245); Williams (1993: 15); Okoye/Smith (1994: 5–6) and Homer-Dixon (1999).
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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de Wilde, J.H. (2008). Environmental Security Deconstructed. In: Brauch, H.G., et al. Globalization and Environmental Challenges. Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, vol 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75977-5_45
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75977-5_45
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