Critical Deconstruction of Environmental Security and Human Security Concepts in the Anthropocene

The end of the Cold War induced an important evolution in the field of security studies, in theory and in practice. The further development of theories initiated in the 1980s led to an integrative and multidimensional concept of security, supposed to be capable of facing emerging new types of threats characterized by their transnational and uncontrollable nature and by their dangerous impact on states, societies, and persons. The most discussed environmental threats, which in their totality are conceived as

Global Environmental Change

(GEC),2 are: environmental degradation, deforestation, desertification, biodiversity loss, climate change, temperature increase, soil degradation, urbanization, agriculture, land-use change, overfishing, increasing weather extremes, and natural disasters. The most striking and frightening characteristics shared by all of these are their interconnectedness, their increasing extent, the speed at which they are developing, and the understanding that they are to a high degree influenced and caused by human activity. The last characteristic is conceptualized within the assumption that humanity has pushed Earth’s history forward to a new ‘humanmade’ geological era: the Anthropocene.3 The premise that humans are in charge of their own fate now and have to learn how to manage their habitat leads to the necessity of addressing the root causes of GEC and revisiting the linkages between environment, security, and societal change.