As the seriousness of planetary climate change becomes more acknowledged, American and global security institutions are responding by taking a prominent role in the governing of environmental concerns—engaging in “climate change war games” and ramping up efforts to militarize the future of the planet’s ecosystems. This aggressive and combat-oriented stance, Marzec argues, stems from a self-destructive pattern of thought that has been influencing human-environmental relations from the seventeenth century to the present. Militarizing the Environment traces the rise of this pattern of thought, no ... More

As the seriousness of planetary climate change becomes more acknowledged, American and global security institutions are responding by taking a prominent role in the governing of environmental concerns—engaging in “climate change war games” and ramping up efforts to militarize the future of the planet’s ecosystems. This aggressive and combat-oriented stance, Marzec argues, stems from a self-destructive pattern of thought that has been influencing human-environmental relations from the seventeenth century to the present. Militarizing the Environment traces the rise of this pattern of thought, now an accepted and highly influential geopolitical attitude supplanting ideas of sustainability with the demand for “adaptation.” In this extensive historical study of scientific, military, political and economic formations from the seventeenth century to the present, Marzec reveals how the discourse of environmentality has been instrumental in the development of today’s security society—informing the creation of the military-industrial complex during World War II and the National Security Act that established the CIA during the Cold War. Now an embedded part of human existence, these relations have thoroughly infiltrated new scientific endeavors like “natural security,” which transform Darwinian insights into a quasi-theology making security the biological basis of existence and political ground of life itself. To counter these efforts Marzec reveals the self-destructive nature of this worldview and in the process offers alternatives, in the hopes that fundamentally rethinking human-environmental relations can work against the dead-end restrictions and illusions of national and global security.