Simon Dalby 
Security and Environmental Change 

In the early years of the new millennium, hurricanes lashed the
Caribbean and flooded New Orleans as heat waves and floods seemed
to alternate in Europe. Snows were disappearing on Mount
Kilimanjaro while the ice caps on both poles retreated. The
resulting disruption caused to many societies and the potential for
destabilizing international migration has meant that the
environment has become a political priority.The scale of
environmental change caused by globalization is now so large that
security has to be understood as an ecological process. A new
geopolitics is long overdue.

In this book Simon Dalby provides an accessible and engaging
account of the challenges we face in responding to security and
environmental change. He traces the historical roots of current
thinking about security and climate change to show the roots of the
contemporary concern and goes on to outline modern thinking about
securitization which uses the politics of invoking threats as a
central part of the analysis. He argues that to understand climate
change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to
look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the
world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global
urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s
population becomes vulnerable in new ways. In a clear and careful
analysis, Dalby shows that theories of human security now require a
much more nuanced geopolitical imagination if they are to grapple
with these new vulnerabilities and influence how we build more
resilient societies to cope with the coming disruptions.

This book will appeal to level students and scholars of
geography, environmental studies, security studies and
international politics, as well as to anyone concerned with
contemporary globalization and its transformation of the
biosphere.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments vii

Abbreviations viii

Introduction: Change, Ecology, and Security 1

1 Environmental Fears: From Th omas Malthus to Ecological
‘Collapse’ 13

2 Securing Precisely What? Global, Environmental, and Human
Security 36

3 Environmental History: Conquest, Colonization, Famines, and El
Niño 56

4 Global Change and Earth-System Science 78

5 Glurbanization and Vulnerability in the Anthropocene 105

6 Geopolitics and Ecological Security 129

Conclusion: Anthropocene Security 159

References 173

Index 193

About the author

Simon Dalby, Professor, Carleton University, Canada