Environmental Geopolitics by O'Lear Shannon

Author:O'Lear, Shannon [O’Lear, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2018-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Climate Change and Security

Most readers of this book will be familiar with issues surrounding climate change. No longer confined to the shrouded halls of scientific institutions, climate change is a topic that appears frequently in the popular press. For instance, Rolling Stone magazine’s October 2015 front cover was devoted to “Obama’s Climate Crusade.” Just over a year later, after Donald Trump was elected as US president, Rolling Stone headlined climate change again with a new battle plan that began: “Calling the Trump energy and environment squad ‘climate deniers’ is like pointing out that your local crew of meth heads has bad teeth. It’s true, and it also confusing the symptom with disease” (McKibben 2017). Most Americans’ understanding about climate change is based on exposure to media and news coverage, the Internet, and videos of distant places rather than on personal experience. That may be, at least in part, why polls in the United States indicate increased polarization in public understanding of climate change despite the fact that scientific consensus is becoming more aligned (Weber and Stern 2011). Concern about climate change by the US public competes with other issues, such as the economy and political events (Capstick et al. 2015). Meanwhile, the US government—and the military in particular—has been paying increasing attention to climate change and implications for national security. How has climate change become a security issue, and what does that mean?

This chapter examines how climate change is linked to security and risk and examines how themes of territorial geopolitics play into these discussions. Following the theme of environmental geopolitics that is the foundation of this book, this chapter focuses on climate change and security discourses with a focus on US climate security discourse to consider how:

The role and meaning of the environment are rarely specified.

Humans’ role or agency in these situations tends to be considered selectively. In particular, dynamics of power remain invisible and uninvestigated.

Insufficient attention is paid to spatial dimensions of human-environment relationships that occur unevenly in different places and are intertwined with local, political, and cultural geographies.

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