History
The Copenhagen School defines the referent object of environmental security as the environment as such, or some strategic part of the environment.
Historically, the definition of international security has varied over time. After World War II, definitions typically focused on the subject of realpolitik that developed during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
As tensions between the superpowers eased after the collapse of the Soviet Union, academic discussions of definitions of security significantly expanded to encompass a far broader range of threats to peace, including, particularly, environmental threats associated with the political implications of resource use or pollution. By the mid-1980s, this field of study was becoming known as "environmental security". Despite a wide range of semantic and academic debates over terms, it is now widely acknowledged that environmental factors play both direct and indirect roles in both political disputes and violent conflicts.
In the academic sphere environmental security is defined as the relationship between security concerns such as armed conflict and the natural environment. A small but rapidly developing field, it has become particularly relevant for those studying resource scarcity and conflict in the developing world. Prominent early researchers in the field include Felix Dodds, Norman Myers, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Richard Ullman, Arthur Westing, Thomas Homer Dixon, Geoffrey Dabelko, Peter Gleick, and Joseph Romm.
Read more about this topic: Environmental Security
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)