Environment and Security

I A. Levy Environment and Security To the Editors: Professor Marc Levy of Princeton University has lately published several critiques of recent scholarship on environmental security,including one in IntevnationalSecurity.' He gives particular attention to the results of a major research project on "Environmental Change and Acute Conflict" sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.As the lead researcher for this project and its successors, and as the sole or lead author of several articles that Levy cites: I respond to his comments here. I largely agree with Levy's contention that many commentators use "security" as a rhetorical device:by talking about the impact of environmental problems on "security," they make these problems seem like big issues in a highly competitivemarket for public and policymaker attention. In my writings, I have generally avoided using the word "~ecurity,"~ and instead focused on the links between environmental stressand violence. Violence is easier to define, identify, and measure; this focus helps bound OUT research effort. I also agree with Levy that ozone depletion and climate change could endanger core American values and are therefore direct threats to U.S. security interests? Unfortunately , though, Levy does not adequately acknowledge that these are unlikely to be near-term threats to the United States, whereas many regional environmental problemsincluding land scarcity, fuelwood scarcity, and depletion of water supplies and Thomas F. Homer-Dixon is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of Toronto. From 1990 to 1993, he was co-director and lead researcher of the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict. Marc A. L e y is Instructor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. 1. Marc Levy, "Time for a Third Wave of Environment and Security Scholarship?" Environmental Change and Security Project: Report, Issue 1 (Spring 1995),Woodrow Wilson Center, pp. 44-46; and Marc A. Levy, "Is the Environment a National Security Issue?" International Security, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995),-pp.3562. 2. Thomas F. Homer-Dixon. "On the Threshold: Environmental Chanees As Causes of Acute Conflict," International Security, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 1991),pp. 76-116; Hlmer-Dixon, Jeffrey Boutwell , and George Rathjens, "Environmental Change and Violent Conflict," Scientific American, Vol. 268, No. 2 (February 1993), pp. 3845; Homer-Dixon, "Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases," International Security, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Fall 1994),pp. 5-40, 3. Two exceptions are Thomas Homer-Dixon, "Environmental and Demographic Threats to Canadian Security," Canadian Foreign Policy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Fall 1994),pp. 7-40; and Jeffrey Boutwell and Thomas Homer-Dixon, "Environmental Change, Global Security, and US. Policy," in Charles Hermann, ed., American Defense Annual, 1994, 9th ed. (New York Mershon Center, Lexington 4. Levy, "Is the Environment a National Security Issue?" pp. 4647. Books, 1994), pp. 207-224. lnternational Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 Winter 1995/96), pp. 189-198 0 1995by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 189 International Security 20:3 I 190 fish stocks-are today affecting the core values of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world. Levy’s exclusive focus on U.S. security interests is parochial. In the Acute Conflict project and its successors, we recognize that such a focus would produce an impoverished research program. Moreover, Levy’s agenda would be unacceptable to the many experts in developing countries who contribute to our work. We therefore address the links between environment and violent conflict in the developing countries mainly as they affect those countries, not as they affect the United States. There are four points where I sharply disagree with Levy. CONVENTIONAL WISDOM First, Levy claims that our research findings from the Acute Conflict Project simply repeat conventional wisdom. The project’s results, he writes, “are virtually identical to the conventional wisdom that prevailed before the research was carried Moreover , by aiming to refute the null hypothesis that environmental stress does not cause violence, our research project ”lost the ability to say anything more than ’the environment matters,’ something . . .we knew before this work was...