generations.”
It was quite a remarkable moment. The president of a country that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol—the 1997 treaty in which countries pledged to reduce greenhouse emissions—was about to lecture Coast Guard cadets about the perils of climate change.
“Our analysts in the intelligence community know that climate change is happening. Our military leaders, generals, admirals—active duty and retired—know that it’s happening. Our Homeland Security professionals know that it’s happening and our Coast Guard know that it’s happening.
“The science,” the president said, “is indisputable.”
Obama told the cadets that the heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was higher than it has been in 800,000 years. He said that 14 of the hottest 15 years ever recorded have already happened this century. He told the cadets that NASA reported that the ice in the Arctic was breaking up faster than expected and the world’s glaciers were melting, pouring water into the oceans.
“Cadets,” Obama said, “a threat of a changing climate cuts to the very core of your service. You’ve been drawn to the water. Like a poet who wrote, ‘The heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me,’ you know the beauty of the sea. You also know its unforgiving power. Here at the academy, climate change, understanding the science and consequences is part of the curriculum, and rightly so. Because it will affect everything you do in your careers.
“You,” Obama said, “are part of the first generation of officers who begin their service in a world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us. It will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip, protect their infrastructure, their capabilities, today and for the long term.”
Obama addressed the future of conflict and instability. He talked about rising seas swallowing portions of Bangladesh and Pacific Islands. He talked about similar “vulnerable coasts” in the Caribbean and Central America. When he talked about people forced from their homes I imagined, for a moment, that he was talking about that father and son on that Marinduque coast.
Obama’s clear articulation of climate security doctrine, however, didn’t come out of the blue. More than 20 years before he spoke to the cadets, The Atlantic published an article titled “The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet,” by Robert Kaplan. Usually a single article, especially with such a loaded mouthful of a title, wouldn’t be worth discussing as a historic event, but The Coming Anarchy was immensely influential to the policy that led up to the Obama administration’s 2010 assessment that climate change posed a direct threat to national security. Obama’s speech was a sign that Kaplan’s 1994 article had finally arrived in the foreground of U.S. foreign policy, even in the context of possible Trump-generated speed bumps.
Kaplan predicted that the environment would be the “national security issue of the 21st century.”11 At one point in the piece, he described an apocalyptic future from the vantage point of his taxi window in West Africa, a world where “hordes” of young men with “restless, scanning eyes” surrounded his taxi and put their hands on the window asking for tips. “They were loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.” According to Kaplan, this was the mixture of environmental degradation and migration: people moving from untenable rural areas, afflicted with drought, to the cities, where “they join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process.”12 He was describing in 1994 the same “climate refugees” that Watson was talking about at the 2015 climate security conference.
Kaplan’s writing, a bizarre mixture of rancid Malthusian nativism and cutting-edge forecast of ecological collapse, anticipated much of today’s militaristic climate doctrine.
“The political and strategic impacts of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”13
In their book Violent Environments, Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts note that the speed in which policy makers and their advisers took up the security diagnosis from The Coming Anarchy was “astonishing.”14 Shortly after it was published, the undersecretary of state, Tim Wirth, faxed a copy of the article to every U.S. embassy across the globe. President Bill Clinton lauded Kaplan and Thomas Homer-Dixon, the environmental conflict scholar whom Kaplan featured in the article, as “the beacons for a new sensitivity to environmental security.”15 Vice President Al Gore championed it as a model for the sort of green thinking that “he assiduously sought to promote during the 1990s,” according to Peluso and Watts. The U.S. government created a senior post for Global Environmental Affairs and an environmental program, because “it was critical to its defense mission.” In 1994, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “We believe that environmental degradation is not simply an irritation but a real threat to our national security.”16
Describing these earlier models of environmental conflict, writer Betsy Hartmann points out that the “degradation narrative has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat.”17
That same year that Kaplan’s prescient article was published, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was using rust-colored landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars to build the first border wall in Nogales, Arizona, as a part of Operation Safeguard. This was part of a series of operations—such as Hold-the-Line in El Paso, Gatekeeper in San Diego, Rio Grande in Brownsville—that would remake the entire U.S. enforcement regime under a strategy called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Government officials called for a “strengthening of our enforcement efforts along the border,”18 anticipating the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on immigration from Mexico, among other things.
In 1995, the U.S. Border Patrol even created mock mass-migration scenarios in Arizona where agents erected cyclone fence corrals into which they “herded”19 people for emergency processing, then loaded them onto bus convoys that transported them to mass detention centers. The fake border enforcement scenarios included a makeshift border patrol camp with five olive green army tents, portable toilets, and water tanks that were bathed in floodlights—a drab futuristic lanscape that predicted free trade regime upheavals and perhaps, ultimately, ecological crises or even, in some places, collapse. Here Kaplan’s dire predictions were already beginning to meet a Trump-era border zone.
From this moment on, over the next 20-plus years, the dynamics of both climate change and border militarization would increase exponentially.
When mass migration surged after NAFTA, people trudged through the vast borderlands deserts often with not enough water, not enough food, and no medical aid for the incessant hazards of the journey, ranging from dehydration to heat stroke to rattlesnake bites. By closing off traditional crossing points with a concentration of agents, technologies, and walls, the strategy funneled prospective border-crossers to places that were so dangerous, isolated, and “mortal,”20 as the first “Prevention Through Deterrence” documents put it, that people would not dare to cross. This could be the Arizona desert, the Mona Strait, or, in Europe’s case, the Mediterranean Sea. This border policing strategy, in which the desert, the river, and the sea itself become metaphorical hostile agents, was still in place
