VANCOUVER (CUP)—It’s bad enough that Canadians are dying from third-world diseases in their drinking water and that untamed wilderness—the cornerstone of Canadian identity, more so than even universal health care or multiculturalism—is being destroyed at a dismally high rate. But can environmental degradation lead to war?
A growing number of analysts say it can and it has. It has already led to Canadian military action in the North Atlantic and may eventually require the nation to take strong steps to defend the Northwest Passage, the defining feature of the Canadian northern frontier.
Environmental awareness has traditionally dealt with the economic and human health impacts of pollution and unsustainable development, a desire to preserve our natural heritage and a respect for the ecological integrity of the natural world. However, environmental activists, social scientists and security analysts from organizations as diverse as Greenpeace and the CIA are increasingly worried about a new face to this now-familiar problem: environmental security.
Economic, social, political and military upheaval arising from the destruction of natural resources, including farmland, forests and water, already affects Canadians through its impacts on world trade, foreign relations, and the international flow of migrant populations. However, environmental degradation also compromises Canadian national security in more direct ways, and may ultimately threaten the sovereignty of our arctic borders.
“Environmental refugees are, for the first time in the history of the world, more numerous than refugees from war,” says Olav Slaymaker, director of the Environmental Security Program at the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s Liu Institute for Global Studies. Slaymaker cites this as “evidence of a new reality.”
It is a global-scale problem, and it comes in many varieties. These include military conflict between Israel and Syria over freshwater resources, which are scarce in the region and growing scarcer due to overexploitation and pollution; guerrilla warfare in the Mexican state of Chiapas resulting in part from deterioration of arable land and deforestation that threatens the fuel supplies of aboriginal inhabitants; and diffusion of radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which threatens the already precarious livelihood of indigenous Lapp reindeer herders in northern Sweden. Given the diversity of these issues, Slaymaker cautions, “It is very difficult to put precise numbers to the nature and scale of the problem.”
Environmental security threats are typically defined as environmental problems which compromise national security in some way, either domestically or internationally. Slaymaker takes a somewhat broader view, saying, “Environmental security is a field of study that is parallel to the field of human security and concerns ways of determining the sensitivity, resilience and vulnerability of the environment to imposed change.”
Ken Green, director of the Centre for Studies in Risk and Regulation at the Fraser Institute, places a greater emphasis upon deliberate environmental destruction as a weapon of warfare or terrorism. He regards environmental security as “protecting your environmental systems from being an avenue of attack through chemical or biological warfare,” and suggests that “attacks on the environments of one’s opponents are actually common,” though historically ineffective.
Although skeptical about broader definitions of environmental security, Green allows that a nation could jeopardize its own security through gross environmental mismanagement. “Can you so overstress an environmental system, like water, that you render yourself insecure on any basis—health, safety, ability of a government to protect the well-being of its population, the ability to sustain markets and international trading? Historically speaking, I think some countries have come close to doing that,” he says. With growing populations and economies, and the attendant increases in demand upon natural resources and the environment, that threat grows ever-larger.
Of course, competition for limited natural resources has always been a source of military conflict, and environmental degradation and resource depletion have been linked to the declines of numerous civilizations. What’s different now?
“It was not until 1990 that the scale of human interference with the environment had achieved the same level of impact as the geophysical changes,” says Slaymaker. “That human impact is accelerating.”
This is particularly important for Canada, given that the impacts of global warming, be it natural or anthropogenic, are known to be most acute at high latitudes, such as in the Canadian arctic. As well, awareness has increased of both environmental and, since a year ago last September, security matters.
“The war on terrorism has become the new razor by which you parse policy issues,” notes Green, with what seems to be a hint of distaste. This heightened emphasis upon security evidently spans the full spectrum of policy matters, including environmental policy.
Canada is already subject to direct environmental security threats. The decades-old controversy about selling Canadian freshwater resources to the more heavily populated and water-poor U.S. is intensifying, largely out of concern about NAFTA’s Chapter 11. This portion of the North American Free Trade Agreement effectively prohibits governments from stopping the flow of a commodity across the border.
This means once any bulk economic export of water to the U.S. begins, the entire nation is obliged to follow, and exports cannot be discontinued regardless of the environmental consequences or Canada’s own water needs. Some argue, however, that the cost of transporting bulk water long distances would stimulate entrepreneurship and public- and private-sector research, resulting in low-cost desalinization or recycling facilities in the U.S. and reducing demand for Canadian water. Indeed, purification of sea water and “used” water, although expensive, is already common in some parts of the world, and the American demand for Canadian freshwater resources would clearly depend in part upon the cost-effectiveness of the various potential solutions. Nevertheless, water is the lifeblood of both ecosystems and economies, and Canadian sensitivity to the prospect of losing control of its water resources is growing more acute.
Perhaps a clearer, and certainly more dramatic, example of direct environmental security threats is the so-called Spanish-Canadian Turbot War of 1995. Overuse of the East Coast fisheries, which had already caused a cod stock collapse, was also threatening turbot populations. The failure of diplomatic efforts to end further decimation of these stocks by a large Spanish fishing fleet stationed just outside Canada’s 200-mile economic exclusion zone led to more drastic action by the Canadian government.
On Mar. 8, 1995, after a four-hour chase through dense fog that ended with a shot fired across the bow of the fleeing Spanish fishing vessel, the Canadian Coast Guard boarded the trawler Estai, arrested its captain, and impounded the ship. Spain responded by sending naval frigates to the area; Canada in turn dispatched the HMCS Terra Nova, a destroyer with ship-to-ship missile capability. The incident was ultimately resolved through negotiation and without serious injury. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the first shot ever fired by post-Confederation Canada in direct defence of its own sovereignty was taken in the context of environmental security.
Canadians may have to grow more accustomed to such gunboat diplomacy if a commercially viable Northwest Passage—the dream of explorers and empires from the 16th century onward—finally becomes a reality due to climate change.
“You’re (currently) looking at a very small window of around eight weeks when you can possibly get through,” UBC oceanographer Trish Amundrud says of the Northwest Passage, an ice-laden maritime route through the Canadian arctic that, when open, dramatically shortens the trip between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Global warming may open that window much wider.
“The general historical trend everyone’s talking about right now is that we have a decrease in ice thickness and a decrease in ice extent,” says Amundrud. She cautions that the results are quite controversial because of the complexity of the phenomena involved and limited data availability, and that future trends may be complicated by simultaneous increases in the amount that ice cover fluctuates year-to-year. Nevertheless, Amundrud acknowledges that a majority of scientists regard the opening of a commercially viable Northwest Passage as, in the post-9/11 vernacular, a credible threat.
This potential opening of the Northwest Passage—which follows a circuitous route often passing within a few kilometres of Canadian shores—constitutes a pressing national security issue because the passage is not recognized by either the United States or the European Union as sovereign Canadian waters.
“An American ship went through this year without Canadian permission,” Amundrud notes. This is not a rare occurrence. If the ice clears sufficiently to permit substantial marine traffic and sovereignty is not forcefully asserted over the passage, Canada will have no control over what goes through it—be it dangerous chemicals or dangerous people—or what is dumped from ships into ecologically-sensitive arctic waters.
In contrast, if the passage is recognized as Canadian rather than international waters, Canada will have a great deal of legal authority to prescribe and enforce codes of acceptable conduct. And while Canadian ownership of the arctic archipelago is not currently in question, loss of the Northwest Passage might set a dangerous precedent.
This issue could present the most severe challenge ever to the country’s independence, because Canadians would have no one to turn to but themselves: for the first time in history, neither Britain, France nor America would be on Canada’s side. Canada might, therefore, need to back away from its traditional preference for cooperative internationalism—and a dependence upon the goodwill of powerful allies—in favour of a more unilateral and self-reliant approach.
Effectively addressing the underlying environmental degradation is obviously crucial. In addition, Slaymaker notes, “If we had a better national record of respecting our environment, we would be able to argue from a position of greater strength than that which we presently have. The last decade has seen a precipitous decline in Canada’s record as an environmentally-sensitive nation.”
Yet successful defence of Canadian environmental security might ultimately require something with a bit more punch. Russia, for example, is evidently not perturbed by the prospect of an ice-free Northeast Passage across the arctic shores of Siberia. Why not?
“The Russians have a little more balls than we do,” says Amundrud, only partly tongue-in-cheek. To be sure, dealing with the causes of environmental degradation is absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, environmental issues are increasingly synonymous with national defence, and may need to be addressed in that light.
This is most clearly apparent in the case of Canadian claims to internationally-contested maritime areas, such as the East Coast fisheries and the Northwest Passage. If foreign ships can travel for thousands of kilometres through the Canadian arctic, for example, without seeing any convincing signs of Canadian presence—military presence being the most convincing of all—they may feel little motivation to recognize Canada’s sovereignty over the region.
While Canada will likely never have an arctic battle fleet to rival that of the still self-assured former Soviet Union, the nation may nevertheless need to cowboy up a little—if only to ensure a reasonable position at the bargaining table.
