Militarizing the Environment

A Future without Prisons? From Economies to Ecologies of Incarceration

“…Environmentality is less taken up with circumventing environmental disaster and loss of human and other forms of life than it is with managing this so as to continue to privilege a minority elite. 27 As such it both assumes and perpetuates global social inequality as a means of justifying a whole plethora of security and containment measures of which incarceration cannot but play a key role. What this means is that any attempt to counter the strategies underpinning environmentality such as the radical changes to human production and consumption patterns posited by Naomi Klein, Adrian Parr, and others must include widespread closure of prisons and detention centers.…”

Climate change and security: towards ecological security?

“…Finally, rejecting security is also a recommendation of recent posthumanist accounts of ecology with which this paper shares common philosophical and normative ground. Cudworth and Hobden (2013, 664), for example, warn against approaching environmental issues 'within the existing frameworks of securitization and governance' (on this point, see also Buxton and Hayes 2015;Marzec 2015;Fagan 2017).…”

“…In this context, Copenhagen School theorists and theorists working in the post-structural tradition are right to suggest we should not assume that securitization amounts to effective and progressive mobilization. In a range of settings, not least as invoked by national governments and their militaries, securitization seems to limit political deliberation or enable illiberal sets of (exceptional) practices (Marzec 2015).…”

Securing the future in the anthropocene: A critical analysis of the millennium ecosystem assessment scenarios

“…For instance, since the publication of the MA and the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report the United States Department of Defense and security institutions such as The Center for a New American Security have been more vocal about climate change and other environmental problems-organizing conferences, producing colloquium briefs, issuing extensive reports and strategic communication plans, and publishing volumes in order to coordinate "public awareness" of Anthropocene threats (Marzec, 2015). National and international defense departments and security councils have begun to explicitly characterize climate change as a "threat multiplier" capable of generating a more expansive war on terror (Burke and Parthemore, 2009), and military and security institutions have staged climate change war games (Tollefson, 2008;Aton, 2017).…”

“…In fact, as Frederick Taylor himself pointed out over a hundred years ago in his seminal Principles of Scientific Management (1911) the impetus for his great assembly line idea came from observing military camps and their maneuvers and drills. This general diffusion of a militarized focus on security across a larger cultural spectrum-what I have termed elsewhere "environmentality"-has been gradually developing over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Marzec, 2015). 7 We must ask ourselves what might happen if security becomes the fundamental basis of narrative, or even the reigning feature of imagination itself.…”