Reading about theory has never been an easy endeavor for me. Attempting to understand the author’s use of big words and convoluted ideas and then translating those ideas to real life scenarios is extremely challenging, and I found reading about environmental security theory from Floyd and Matthews book no different. Nonetheless, I do see the value in learning theory, and found several of points in each school of thought to be compelling. However, generally one point from the Copenhagen School struck me the most.
The Copenhagen School theorizes that security is based on survival. Further, it also concludes an idea or an issue cannot be considered a security threat unless it poses an existential danger to a “referent object” (23). Only in this case can securitization take place. Several questions arose as I considered these ideas by the Copenhagen School. First, who determines what this existential threat is? From an international standpoint, will states/countries with more power (i.e wealth and military power) determine what the most pressing environmental issue will be? Additionally, what does this existential threat entail? To give a small example, when George Bush decided to pull out from the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, during his presidency, much of the agreement’s goals were not achieved. Countries such as Canada followed Bush and pulled out as well. Why was this? As a leading international power and one of the largest polluters in the world at the time, the U.S didn’t want to be primarily responsible for cleaning up the emissions of other countries, specifically underdeveloped countries. In essence, the United States told the world that climate change wasn’t an urgent problem for them, thus stinting international movement regarding climate change. In this way, the U.S became the decision-maker in the urgency of the existential threat.
From what I can comprehend, I am not sure I agree with the theory of the Copenhagen school. In retrospect, none of the concepts introduced in Floyd and Matthew’s book contain all the answers. Homer-Dixon with the Toronto Group and the Bern-Zurich Group theorize that resource scarcity may lead to violent conflict, further leading to environmental discrimination, ecological marginalization and resource capture (38-9). Indra de Soysa in chapter 3 argues that the problem isn’t about resource scarcity. Rather, the overabundance of goods and the lack of governance leads to the problem of violence (64), using Sub Saharan Africa as her case study. I think all the theories are correct in their own right and wrong at the same time, because environmental security theory isn’t just one size fits all. The specificities of individual countries must be considered (such as their economic or political situations), and only after determining these variables can a truly correct theory be created.