What follows are some further elaborations on remarks I made when I was invited to address the General Convention of the UNESCO on 9 November 2023 on the question of what humans shared in an otherwise fragmented world. The UNESCO, as is well known, was set up after the Second World War motivated by the recognition– as the website of this organization still proclaims – that only political and economic agreements between nations were not enough to bring about lasting peace between humans. It needed cultural and educational work to strengthen “the intellectual and moral solidarity of the humankind through mutual understanding and dialogue between cultures” (as the organization’s website puts it). My remarks here also pertain to the “Man and the Biosphere” program that was launched by the UNESCO about fifty years ago in 1971. But, most importantly, I wanted to honor the founding spirit of UNESCO, its mission to seek “objective truths” that could bring humanity together regardless of their religious and political differences.
What indeed do we still share in a world that sometimes appears to be so fragmented?
The irony of that question, of course, lies in the fact that it is often over what they already share that groups of humans fight one another: shared pasts, land, water, territories, animals, plants, resources and so on. The two wars in the shadow of which we think these days remind us of such conflicts. In the discussion here, I want to focus on some of the things that we do indeed share in this intensely globalized and connected world – but not as possessions that we can partition. I have in mind such things as the atmosphere, the oceans, the skies, the seasons, the sun and the moon, things that do make up some kind of commons but that cannot be divided in the way we divide land, for instance. They remain shared, simultaneously, as matters of shared benefit and concern. We have to share the air, for instance, as a very fundamental condition of our life but it is the same air that brings the pollution of one country or region to another. Much of Asia, for instance, has been covered over the last several decades with a brown cloud, a haze of particulate pollution that even India and Pakistan, divided on so many issues, cannot but share.For an early study of this phenomenon, see V. Ramanathan. P. J. Crutzen, A. P. Mitra, D. Sikka, “The Indian Ocean Experiment and the Asian Brown Cloud,” Current Science, vol. 83, no. 8, 25 October 2002, pp. 947-955. Or think of the more recent example of fires in Canada that made the air of the city of my residence, Chicago, the most polluted air in the world on June 27, 2023.
More recently, with rising awareness of anthropogenic climate change, a very large object has become a matter of such shared concern: this earth itself, the planet we share both as the ground on which we live and as the very condition of our existence. I do not mean the earth as an abstract planetary and astronomical body, but the earth as the condition for our life and existence, and not just human life, but the condition for the possibility of all forms of life that are interconnected. While this concern may have once been shared by some specialist scientists, it has assumed more general proportions with information about the environmental degradation of the whole planet – plastics in the oceans, holes in the Ozone layer, excess greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the warming, acidification, and changing levels of the seas, increasing deforestation contributing to the rising frequency of zoonotic infectious diseases, striking losses of biodiversity, not to speak of global warming as a general phenomenon – entering our daily news cycles in the last fifteen or so years. As consumers of daily news, we have increasingly become aware of our own actions that threaten the geobiological processes that connect and support all forms of life including, of course, ours.
Even a couple of decades ago, most humans would have simply taken the life-support system of the planet for granted. How many of us would normally stop to think about the origins of oxygen in the atmosphere? Yet without that oxygen we would choke to death. We would simply take this oxygen or other features of the planet that help keep life going as integral parts of how the world is given to us. And we would assume that whatever we humans did, this all-bearing, accommodating earth, “the mother of all mothers” – as Tagore once celebrated the planet - would continue unchanged with all the indulgent and forgiving affection that only a mother can feel, allowing us to keep doing what humans did. The planet, we assumed, was too large an entity to be changed by humans. This is why most of us never stopped to think where the mountains and the rivers or the oxygen in the air came from. As the great philosopher Wittgenstein once observed, “we see men building and demolishing houses, and are led to ask: ‘How long has this house been here?” But how does one come on the idea of asking this about a mountain, …?”Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed., G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Dennis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972; first pub in English, 1969), p. 13e. The answer must be, as Wittgenstein himself, says, that the mountain, like the earth, is part of our “inherited background” (überkommene Hintergrund) “against which” we make other distinctions like that between true and false.Ibid., p. 15, 15e. Wittgenstein continues to discuss this question of “inherited background” or “givenness” on pp. 16e, 28e, 30e, 31e, 34e, and 52e.[3] Mountains are, in that sense, a part of the givenness of the world, the kind of “mere givenness” that Descartes and Kant attributed to objects, a proposition that Arthur Schopenhauer began to critique in his classic 1819 book, The World as Will and Idea.On this later tradition, see the very helpful essay by Babu Thailath, “The Givenness of the World: The Problem of Directionality in Modern Epistemology,” Philosophy International Journal, vol. 5, no. 4, November 15, 2022, DOI: 10.23880/Phil-16000276. Mountains until now were a part of the givenness of the world, the world as we humans find it, endowed with trees and plants, insects and animals, water and land, ready to serve all our human needs. This “given” world seemed big, very big compared to us puny humans. Nothing called for a rethinking of this relationship – until, that is, the news of anthropogenic climate change or global warming broke into our everyday lives, and scientists began to speak of humans and their high-tech, energy-consuming civilizations as constituting some kind of geological or planetary force changing, often to our own detriment, not only the history of life on this planet but also aspects of its “givenness,” especially when we became capable of killing rivers and “demolishing,” in addition to buildings that Wittgenstein had in mind, hills and mountains as well.
Arguably, there was a time when the planet was indeed not a matter of shared anxiety or concern and when many groups of humans all over the world stood in awe of it and revered it. This time was when humans were smaller in number, had fewer possessions, consumed less, and had much less developed technological capability, which is indeed how they were for most of their three-hundred-thousand-year-old history. But all that changed with the onset of industrialization across countries and changed very fast in the last seventy years. Climate scientists now say that with our growing numbers, the rush towards urbanization and global mobility, unprecedented increase in disposable wealth (despite many inequalities and more than two billion people without access to clean water), increased lifespan, revolutionary changes in scientific, military, and medical technologies, and intense globalization of lifestyles and patterns of consumption, humans have become a geological force impacting negatively – though unevenly - the entire planet: its land surface, its seas, its atmosphere, and life on it. To be sure, with some landmark inventions to their credit such as the steam engine, electricity, modern agriculture aided by artificial fertilizers and pesticides, antibiotics and other ways of dealing with bacterial and viral infections, humans have collectively lived so well in the last several decades as they never have in the past.For more on these propositions, see my One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Waltham, MA: Brandies University Press, 2023). The average life-expectancy in the world in 1950 was under fifty years, today it is well over seventy or even eighty in many countries.See, for instance, the figures given in Samira Asma, “Autopsy of the Conditions of Death Across the Globe,” in E. A. Seaman ed., In Finite: Living with Death (Berlin: Humboldt Forum, 2023), pp.122-135. As a result of the spread of industrialization and demographic changes, historian John McNeill has pointed out, the twentieth century became “a time of extraordinary change” in human history. “The human population increased from 1.5 to 6 billions [now standing at eight billion but poised to go up before it declines], the world’s economy increased fifteen fold, energy use increased [by] … thirteen to fourteen fold, freshwater use increased nine fold, and the irrigated areas by fivefold.”Cited in Andrew S. Goudie and Heather A. Viles, Geomorphology in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 28. See also the larger discussion in J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014). McNeill and his colleague Peter Engelke’s sense of historical irony is palpable, for instance, when they comment: “… after 1945 human demography entered upon the most distinctive period in its two[sic!]-hundred-thousand-year history. In the span of one human lifetime, 1945 to 2015, global human population had tripled from about 2.3 billion to 7.2 billion. This bizarre interlude, with sustained population growth of more than 1 percent per annum, is of course what almost everyone on Earth now regards as normal. It is anything but normal.”McNeill and Engelke, The Great Acceleration, p. 41. Technology and the availability of cheap and plentiful energy have been the key to this “success.” But this has also meant that humans are now a “planetary force” - the “carbon dioxide levels are rising faster than any time known in Earth’s history;” that “changes to the Earth’s nitrogen cycle (through the Haber-Bosch process for the production of artificial fertilizers that keep us alive) may be the greatest in two billion years:” and “the scale of trans-continental and trans-oceanic species transfer is a phenomenon without compare in Earth history.”Jan Zalasiewicz, “The Human Dimension in Geological Time,” in Nina Möllers et al eds., Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands (Munich: Deutsches Museum and Rachel Carson Center, 2014), p. 17.
On all sides, we hear warnings about the gathering crisis of climate change or global warming. The reader may recall that in July 2023, with southern Europe and some other parts of the world experiencing intense, unbearable heatwaves, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, spoke, not of “global warming” anymore but of “global boiling.”https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/07/1139162 accessed on 20 December 2023. The earth’s hottest month was recorded that month. More recently, towards the end of October 2023, the BBC commented on the speed with which human-induced climate change was accelerating. Recent research published in Nature Climate Change suggests that if humans were to avoid the scenario of the average rise of global temperature going over 1.50C compared to the average before industrialization, global emissions of carbon dioxide would have to reach net zero by 2034, and not by 2050 as is currently expected.https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67242386 accessed on 28 October 2023. On November 2, 2023, The Guardian reported a study by the famous climate scientist James Hansen that supported this finding and predicted that by 2050 the world will be, on average, 20C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. If that happens, a Rubicon set by the IPCC and United Nations will have been passed. The Guardian quotes Professor Hansen as saying, “we are in the early phase of a climate emergency. Such acceleration [of warming] is dangerous in a climate system that is already far out of equilibrium. Reversing the trend is essential – we must cool the planet – for the sake of preserving shorelines and saving the world’s coastal cities.”
The 1.50C figure (agreed upon in Paris in 2015) is seen as particularly important for developing states and small island nations who fear that going beyond this level of warming would see the oceans rise to swallow their homes. This not only reinforces the talk about climate justice – the argument that global warming is a consequence of uneven capitalist (and gender- and race-inflected) development that now denies the less developed nations the “carbon space” they might need to develop their economies – it also leads to talk about a “climate emergency.” We may have already caused the beginning of a sixth great extinction of life.See Matthias Glaubrecht, “On the End of Evolution: Humankind and the Annihilation of Species” in Seemann ed., In_Finite, pp. 162-167. To continue to act as though humans were still too small a force to affect the planet, to take the mountains and the rivers for granted, may indeed be like cutting down the branch of a tree one is sitting on. The planet is set for now on a practically irreversible path of warming that affects the very life-support system of the planet, imperiling in turn our own lives. A hotter planet will be inhospitable and make many places in the world uninhabitable. This message is now repeated many times over. I recently got the announcement for a conference planned for next year in Germany. This how it describes the human condition today: “The rapid and intense fashion in which humanity is changing the very foundations on which our existence and well-being on this planet are resting, is starting to attain a magnitude that …threatens to put the future of humanity on Earth in peril.” A looming existential crisis for humanity is making the planet a matter of deep concern.
What wars assume
In light of the observations above, it seems to me that the lesson that is crucial to draw but seems very difficult to learn in practical terms is this: the aspects of the world we take for granted as simply constituting a mute background to human affairs – the glaciers, the rains, the seasons, the sea, the coastlines, the mountains, the continents – cannot be so treated any more, thanks to anthropogenic climate change and other major environmental changes. Yet the opposite assumption appears to reign over our actions. Whether you look at the recent pandemic or wars, we still act on the assumption of a stable world that we can always retrieve after a spell of disastrously bad behavior on the part of humans. What better examples can I give of this irony than the two contemporary wars under the painful shadow of which we think today?
I mention wars not only because of the irony that humans often fight over what they share, but because wars allow us to see a profound and probably innate or evolved capacity that humans have to shelve, bracket, or suspend – for the time being – the question of what they may share with the people they have gone to war with. The long-held assumption that the world could be thus shelved for the duration of a war was once probably justified by facts on the ground, but I submit to you that it is not so justified anymore. The damages that modern wars – and even being prepared for wars - do our environment are less and less reversible. Modern wars are bad for the environment, particularly for the problem of global warming, as they are based on massive firepower as we see every day. The very expression “firepower” tells the story – there is the literally firing of missiles and cannon balls, but fossil fuels are part of war logistics and fires are what the havoc and destruction of wars cause. We don’t usually think of this aspect of wars, what wars do to nonhuman forms of life, let alone the greenhouse gases they may be putting into the atmosphere. David Henig, a scholar at the University of Utrecht who works on wastes of modern war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and other places reports on how “soil erosion combined with [climate-caused] floods are increasingly dislodging landmines and creating new deadly spaces [of war] in the ‘peacetime’” - developments of which, he says, “we don’t have a good understanding.”Personal communication dated 3 November 2023.
A bracketing of the question of what sworn enemies may share in the long run is enabled by a particular sense of emergency that we see combating groups mobilize for war. A sense of emergency that is expressed through various totalizing oppositions: us versus them; we are not responsible, they are; good versus bad; just versus the unjust; humans versus “human animals” – all familiar figures of Self and the Other. A corresponding sense of totality arises from a crisis that seems not only existential – one speaks as though one’s entire existence were at stake - but also moral. Such totalizing inevitably requires the mobilization of affect. Which is why under-currents of hatred – oftentimes explicit – push wars along. The affective axis of this sense of emergency – the sense that I would not survive without killing my enemy – is constituted around questions of difference. Difference that is amenable to moralization, something around which a moral boundary can be created. A talk that soon lapses into the talk of the evil.
I do not minimize the importance of these emotions at times of war. The question I ask is: What do modern wars assume about the nature of the physical world we inhabit and are those assumptions still valid? One could turn to the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s classic essay of 1795 on “To Perpetual Peace” in which he teased out the assumptions of war-making that were also the assumptions that underwrote the temporary truces of his time.
In isolating this text or its famous author, I am not losing sight of the fact that Kant’s thoughts about war and peace turn up in several of his other writings as well, especially in his “Ideas toward a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784) to Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Theory and Practice (1793), Conflict of the Faculties (1798), and the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).See, for example, Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s Theory of Peace,” in Paul Guyer ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 478.s I mention these other texts to underscore the point that I will not be treating Kant’s thoughts here either in their evolution over time or in their relationship to other texts, both his and those authored by others. Adam Lebovitz has, in addition, recently drawn attention to the fact of how obsessed, in a manner of speaking, Kant was with the metaphors of war and peace, by pointing out that “[i]n the First Critique, the “Conflict of the Faculties,” and in particular in his neglected essay, “Perpetual Peace in Philosophy,” Kant repeatedly draws on the language of sovereignty, war, and international law, in order to describe how the critical philosophy will bring peace to what he terms “the battlefield of metaphysics.”Adam Lebovitz, “The Battlefield of Metaphysics: Kant’s Perpetual Peace Revisited,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 327-355. Also important are the facts that Kant belonged to a long line of European philosophers of war and peace and was often in conversation with them. The celebrated American political scientist, the late Kenneth N. Waltz, pointed out a long time ago that the ideas about enduring peace that Kant put forward in his essay on “perpetual peace” were “one of a succession of peace plans going back to Dante and Dubois in the early fourteenth century, encompassing the French monk Crucé and the abbé St. Pierre, and culminating in the League and the United Nations.”Kenneth N. Waltz, “Kant, Liberalism, and War.” The American Political Science Review, vol.56, no.2, June 1962, p. 331. Similarly, William Ossipow’s meticulous research has now ferreted out the presence of other scholars in Kant’s essay on perpetual peace to show how much Kant was in conversation with texts written by his predecessors and contemporaries such as Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) and the American Federalist Papers, especially articles 10, 14, and 51 written by James (check) Madison as well as Rousseau’s The Social Contract.William Ossipow, “Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Its Hidden Sources: A Textual Approach,” Swiss Political Science Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 2008, pp. 357-389. Murad Idris’s recent and remarkable book, War for Peace, that puts many European thinkers of war and peace in conversation with scholars and activists in the Islamic tradition – ranging from Al-Farabi, Ibn Khaldun, to Sayyid Qutb – also informs my discussion here.Murad Idris, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
But for reasons of time and space, I will not engage in a deep conversation with this literature that I mention here. Suffice it to say that what I say here does not contravene what I have learned from Kant scholars on questions of war and peace. Yet I ask of Kant’s text on “perpetual peace” a question that I have not seen raised in the literature I mention above. What I try to do here is to tease out of Kant’s essay some particular assumptions that seem to underpin Kant’s and interlocutors’ philosophical discussions on war. Some of these assumptions, I will argue, still seem to be operative in wars that we see in our time. These are assumptions about the nature of the world, about what Kant called “Nature.” Clearly, Kant’s “Nature” is not the same category as our “environment” or “earth-system;” it was too purposive or teleological to be like what we today call the “earth-system”, referring to the geological and biological processes that together sustain life on this planet. Kant’s “Nature,” as many have shown, was more like the Christian idea of Providence, though Kant’s idea of Providence was different from that of Hegel in being, ultimately, unfathomable.See the discussion in Waltz, “Kant, Liberalism, and War,” p. 335. See also the fascinating discussion in Idris, War for Peace, pp. 272-273. But the category “Nature” may be seen as a precursor of later ideas such as that of the earth-system.
Both truce and wars, Kant showed, were based on the implicit or explicit thought that “Nature” was constant and unvarying in its relationship to human beings, no matter what humans did to her and to each other. Wars, Kant thought (and one cannot blame him, given the war-making history of Europeans of his own time) “was ingrained in human nature and even valued.” What made wars affordable for humans was, Kant argued, the fact that Nature, i. e. external nature, distributed humans all over the world, and that she made sure that even in the roughest of terrains humans could survive. Nature saw to it that whole world remained, despite human actions, inhabitable. A completely inhabitable planet, Kant implied, was thus one of war’s assumptions. Indeed, one could argue that it was the unstated assumption of an always-habitable world – for what else could God design for humans? – that allowed Kant to think of human “development” as the goal of history.For a sharp and critical discussion of this point, see Idris, War for Peace, pp. 277-279. And, as a corollary, he would also assume that human beings would always afforded the amount of time they needed for this development, something I have called elsewhere the assumption of “indefinite time.”See the discussion in my The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 12-13.
Let us take a moment to read what Kant wrote. “Nature’s provisional arrangement,” wrote Kant, “consists of the following: 1 She has taken care that men can live in all regions of the world. 2. Through war she has driven them everywhere, even into the most inhospitable regions in order to populate them. 3. Also through war she has constrained them to establish more or less legal relationships.” But even in these inhospitable regions, nature had ensured that humans would not go without shelter, clothes, and food. “It is truly wonderful,” wrote Kant, “that moss grows even in the cold wastes by the Arctic Ocean and that reindeer can dig it from beneath the snow so that they can become food or transportation for the Ostiak or Samoyed or that the salt deserts are inhabited by the camel, which appears to have been created for traveling over them so that the deserts do not go unused.” Further on, he writes: “But the purpose is even more clearly evident when one realizes that not only do furbearing animals exist on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, but also seals, walruses, and whales, whose flesh provides food and whose blubber provides warmth for the inhabitants. However, what most arouses our wonder is nature’s care to bring (in what way we do not really know) driftwood to these barren regions, for without this material the natives could have neither canoes and spears nor their huts to dwell in. In these regions they are sufficiently occupied with their war against animals that they live in peace among themselves. But it was probably nothing but war that drove them there.”Immanuel Kant, “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in his Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. with Introduction by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), pp. 121-122.
While Kant’s exact narrative about war and peace has not held and his distinction between the animal and moral aspects of the human does not bear critical examination, the idea that a stable nature, more-powerful-than-human, and roughly invariant with regards to humans remains in the background of human action, providing a stage on which humans act, - all this still seems to be an active assumption of wars. The idea that we can always recover our “worlds” from the destruction and damage we cause to the earth. Regardless of our actions, the earth always stays as it was given to us. This seems to be the first assumption.
The second one of Kant’s assumptions, as we have seen, was that, independent of how human acted, the planet (as we would want to think about it today) would always remain habitable for them.
The scientific facts and narratives of anthropogenic climate change have rendered both these assumptions questionable. As we now know from the pandemic, we do not get back to the same world as before the pandemic; if anything, deforestation and other environmental problems have ushered us into a different world, a world caught, as infectious disease specialists say, in an era of pandemics. Similarly, if the planet is on a presently irreversible trajectory of warming, we only contribute to that process through that greenhouse gas emissions that wars and military mobilizations entail. This warming, as I mentioned before, is making the planet inhospitable with some places becoming positively uninhabitable over time. This is already contributing to food crises, migration, and conflicts. Consciously or not, wars today can only accelerate that process.
As already discussed, Kant had a third and quasi-religious assumption: that while Nature had her own ends, Nature was purposed to serve humans. We need not go into this assumption, for this has become completely untenable. Climate scientists have driven home the simple point that we are not the reason why the air has oxygen or why rivers flow. We are simply the beneficiaries of these biogeological processes.
Divided worlds on a shared planet
The sluggishness of the human response to what is often called a “climate emergency” stands out in contrast to the speed with which societies mobilize for wars. I have neither space nor time to discuss the reasons for this difference. But it is clear that however much scientists or the UN Secretary General raise their voices about a “climate emergency” or “global boiling,” for most of our political and institutional leaders, planetary climate change seems to be a very different kind of problem from wars. It is not a problem that galvanizes human affect and action in quite the same way as a war does or our divisions do. For all the one-ness ascribed to the earth-system by scientists, humans experience climate change as episodic, not as so many individual battles in some totalizing narrative of a war but as so many related but localized episodes, moving different groups of humans from one “extreme weather event” to another. The individual episodes of a war blend into an overarching narrative. Something similar happens to climate scientists when they join the dots on their graphs and see different extreme weather events in the world not as separate, isolated instances of warming but as belonging to and expressing the larger and one narrative of the warming that is happening to the planet as a whole. But the “whole” planet, a scientific abstraction, does exist as a political site for humanity. True, the planet has emerged as a matter of shared concern, but there is no planetary humanity to respond to it as One. And there may not be.This idea is elaborated on in my One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2023).
Military emissions, however, contribute significantly to global warming. Not simply through active wars that, of course, entail the emission of greenhouse gases, but also through war-readiness and the supply chain logistics that such readiness implies. It is known, writes a group of scholars in an article published in Nature in 2022, that the “the world’s militaries are heavy emitters of greenhouse gases.” But “no one knows exactly how much” for militaries – after lobbying by the United States and others on security grounds – have been spared having to present mandatory reporting of their emissions., though this laxity of rules risks “mitigation measures becoming mere guesswork.”Mohammed Ali Rajaeifar et al, “Decarbonize the military – mandate emissions reporting,” Nature, vol. 611, 3 November 2022, p. 29. They further write, with reference to the United States, a leader in military technology and “the world’s largest military in terms of expenditure” : “if they were a nation, US forces would have the highest per capita emissions in the world, at 42 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2eq) per staff member. For each hundred nautical miles flown, the US Air Force’s signature F-35 fighter jet emits as much CO2 … as an average UK petrol car driven for one year. Each year, jet-fuel use by the US military alone generates emissions equivalent to six million passenger cars.”Ibid., pp. 29-30.
The idea of low-carbon warfare has been around for a while. Military establishments have been discussing the idea now for sometime. But there is the problem of path dependency: developing and purchasing fossil-fuel based military hardware commits armies to their use for a good part of their lifetime. And, as another commentator on the problem observes, “[a]dversaries also have a vote” in this matter. A game-theoretic problem emerges, pointing – as did the pandemic – to the question of global regulation or governance of problems that affect humanity by affecting the planet:
What happens if peer and near-peer competitors choose not to decarbonize their armed forces? The issue here is that the prospect of confronting high-carbon adversaries on the battlefield remains a daunting one. One recent study concluded that an electrified land force … would be unable to match the levels of firepower, protection, and mobility enjoyed by a fossil-fuelled force.Duncan Depledge, “Low-carbon warfare: climate change, net zero and military operations,” International Affairs, vol. 99, no. 2, 2023, p. 683. DOI: 10.1903/ia/iiad001
So, despite the growing awareness for the need for low-carbon warfare, the world’s militaries still prepare for battles to be fought for gains and losses whose imaginings are still governed by our picture of the planet as it existed before the facts of anthropogenic climate change became public knowledge. A prominent case in point, again, is the United States whose military was active, between 2015 and 2017, say, in 76 countries, “including seven countries at the receiving end of air/drone strikes, and 15 countries with ‘boots on the ground,’ 44 overseas military bases, and 56 countries receiving counter-terrorism training.”Oliver Belcher et al, “Hidden carbon costs of the ‘everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot-print of the US military,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geography, 2019, p.7. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12319 During the Second World War, “each US soldier consumed, on average, one gallon of fuel per day.” During the Vietnam war, that number jumped to nine gallons, reflecting “the increased use of airpower.” Since the Vietnam war, there has been a 175 per cent increase of that number. During conflicts in Iran and Afghanistan, the figure was 22 gallons used per soldier per day.Ibid., p. 6. Presently, by some estimates, the US military “consumes more liquid fuel and emits more CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) than many medium size countries.” In 2017, the US military bought around 269,230 barrels of oil a day and emitted 25,375 kt-CO2e by burning that oil.Ibid., p. 8. Thus, the use of fossil fuel has only increased over the last several decades, even as military establishment in the US has developed a growing awareness of climate and other environmental problems. Yet, as recent research has shown, the greenhouse gas emissions from the first two months of the war in Gaza “were greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.” And the projected carbon costs of rebuilding Gaza are “enormous,” “putting them on a par” with the annual emissions of New Zealand.Neimark, Benjamin and Bigger, Patrick and Otu-Larbi, Frederick and Larbi, Reuben, A Multitemporal Snapshot of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Israel-Gaza Conflict (January 5, 2024). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4684768 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4684768 accessed on 7 February 2024.
In Conclusion
Assuming, then, that wars will not cease to happen even when they are based on presumptions about the planet that no longer hold in the age of anthropogenic climate chance, and further assuming that modern wars cannot by definition be good for a planet getting hotter and inhospitable, how do we bring together our shared concern about the planet to bear on wars, an extreme instance of the divisions that mark our species?
In bringing this essay to a close, I propose to outline a possible politics of sharing that, going forward, can even be part of human conflicts. I shall use the example of the Himalayan glaciers that play roles that are both planetary and local. My point is to highlight how planetary concerns could inform our thinking about wars and battle-readiness even if we granted that the prospect of a world without armed conflict seems impossibly utopian in our times. I should explain that I turn to the Himalayas only because I know relatively more about their story, because I was born and spent the first twenty-seven years of my life in the Indian subcontinent, a land unimaginable without this mountain range and the rivers that flow out of it. But my purpose is not to blame any groups of humans. In theory, I could have worked with another example, the Amazon forests, say, which is considered world heritage. The forest is spread over Brazil and seven other countries. It is both common goods and bit and pieces of the “property” of different nations. The Himalayas raise a similar question. The mountains are geo-politically divided. But they also constitute a common good. How do we bring together - first in our concepts and then in action – their geopolitics and ecology or even geology? I only take the first step here, towards outlining the problem conceptually.
When I was about eleven or twelve, India and China fought a war on the Himalayas, a war whose consequences had a profoundly formative influence on my generation. Back then, while the geopolitics of the war were of avid interest in every household – with us children eagerly hanging on to every word of analysis that our seniors uttered – there was no talk, as Wittgenstein might have foreseen, of how young or old the Himalayas were. Our sacred sense of national geography was informed by the presence of the Himalayas to the north and the Indian Ocean to the south, a presence that, for all human purposes, seemed eternal. Today, thanks to dam and infrastructure building, population and urban growth, deforestation, both civil and military, undertaken by India, China, and in a relatively minor way, by Pakistan, the Himalayas stand as one of the most militarized mountain ranges in the world.
This is a site where geopolitics and ecology cannot be separated any more. This has been the topic of many studies. The Australian scholar Alexander E. Davis has recently come out with a book on the subject. I might simply draw on some of his observations to end with a few propositions of mine. One of the first things Davis mentions is the age of this range of mountains. The Himalayas, he reminds us, are “geologically as well as geopolitically active.” Being geologically active has something to do with its age. As mountains go, the Himalayas are young. Why would a political scientist mention this geological fact? Why, contrary to Wittgenstein’s question, even social scientists today should be interested in the age of the Himalayas? Because, it turns out, the development of infrastructure, cities, an ever-increasing war-readiness indicated by military installations, cannot but affect the ecology of the mountains. The blasting of the mountains can lead to landslides in the event of extreme rains or cloudbursts. This has happened several times in the last two decades. Besides, given its glaciers and biodiversity, the Himalayas play a crucial role in the maintenance of global climate. We change the planetary role of the Himalayas as nations get ready to deter each other on these mountains. To quote Davis again:
The Himalaya, though, is literally Asia rising. It rises each year by roughly ten centimeters, as the Indian continental plate crashes into the Eurasian plate, as it has done for the past fifty million years. This makes it even more difficult to measure the height of mountains that are used as important political borders. Of the ten centimeters, it loses five through erosion, with the rocks grating against one another. It is geologically as well as geopolitically active.”Alexander E. Davis, The Geopolitics of Melting Mountains: An International Political Ecology of the Himalayas (London: Palgrave, McMillan, 2023), p.3.
Davis further points out that “… roughly 240 million people [with diverse cultures and languages] live in the region.” But these people “are moved for growing infrastructure projects, roads, rail, and airports, many of which are built for military purposes.” A major concern is dam construction and the displacement of communities that such activity often entails. Davis writes: “Once the erosion of Indigenous knowledge around the region is added into this mix of global climate change and state-to-state conflict, the constant state of “frozen conflicts’ is more than enough to facilitate a catastrophic ending, without the need for border tensions to actually run into outright war.”Ibid.
Most importantly, these mountains sit “at the intersection of three biodiversity hotspots” and they also “constitute the headwaters” of many of Asia’s large rivers that, taken together, serve a number of nations between Pakistan and Vietnam. These rivers are the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Irrawady, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, Yellow Rivers, not to mention some of the minor rivers that also come from the Himalayas. They support about 47% of the world’s population.For more on this, see Kenneth Pomeranz, “Asia’s Unstable Water Tower: The Politics, Ecology, and Economics of Himalayan Water Projects,” Asia Policy, vol. 16, no.1, 2012, pp. 4-10. Many of these are glacier-fed rivers. The Himalayas, another group of researchers point out, represent “both the connection and collision of two processes emblematic for the early 21st century. The first is the surge of interest for hydropower development. While different figures abound, near to 200 new dams are planned in the Himalayas for the generation … of electricity…. The second is the recognition of, and debate over, climate change. Although data are limited and contested, there is significant scientific consensus that the Himalayas are particularly vulnerable to the effects of global climate change.”R. Ahlers et al, “Framing Hydropower as green energy: assessing drivers, risks and tensions in the Eastern Himalayas,” Earth System Dynamics, vol. 6, 2015, p. 195.
Here then is a case of intense geo-political fragmentation over something that India, China, Pakistan, and many other nations besides, equally share as their ecological commons. But the rivers and glaciers that serve eight or nine countries are treated as national properties by nations that see their contested and militarized borders passing through the mountains. While some bilateral water treaties exist between particular nations, there is no multilateral treaty governing the health of the glaciers that are critical both for global climate and the supply of water to all the countries they service. It would be naïve to imagine that the conflicts of nation-states that mark the mountains will disappear anytime soon. But the receding glaciers and the consequent impact on the health of the rivers are causes of real concern.
How do we then bring together our shared concerns about the state of the planet – the climate emergency – and the geopolitical interests that may divide us? Beginning from my propositions that modern warfare is bad for the environment, and the point that the greater an army’s firepower, the greater are its ecological impact and responsibility, here are some thoughts about possible action. But these are thoughts about principles. I am illustrating them specifically with regards to the Himalayas, but the principles involved may be applied elsewhere.
First, it seems to me, there should be a regional, multilateral authority in which all nations serviced by the Himalayan rivers and glaciers buy in. This regional, multilateral body could be tasked to ensure that the glaciers and the rivers remain as protected as possible even in the middle of the geopolitical conflicts and developmental initiatives that affect the Himalayas. The most critical point is, of course, that this cannot happen without nation-states ceding - or sharing - some of their authority and sovereignty to/with such a multilateral and regional body. As the politics and experience of the pandemic showed, the more we become globally mobile and entangled, the more questions of global governance – at least on some critical environmental issues – come to the fore. I am not denying either the reality or the necessity of nation-states but their limitations in certain areas are increasingly becoming difficult to miss in a globally connected world. If climate change ends up making millions of humans refugees both inside and outside their countries, we will all have to learn to share the commons with people we would otherwise consider “strangers.”
Simultaneously, I want to suggest, work can proceed on yet another track. In the same way that we now have laws of war requiring warring parties to protect innocent civilians and especially children from being collateral damages of a armed conflict, we could imagine a similar requirement making the protection of planetary and local ecologies a part of the laws of war. Modern wars and climate change have a two-way relationship: wars add to global warming, and the warming in turn extends and redistributes the negative impacts of wars. Our shared knowledge of the geobiology of the Himalayas, to return to my example at hand, should perhaps inform the geopolitical strategies of nation-states. Alexander Davis, the specialist on international relations I cited before, speaks eloquently to this point: “This time period [the Anthropocene] is marked by rising seas, melting ice caps, mass extinctions and a massive global loss of biodiversity. If human behavior is shaping the planet geologically, it should follow that the planet is a key constitutive element in our politics. … geopolitical tensions in the Himalaya cannot be thought outside of their ecological context.”Davis, The Geopolitics, p. 4.
This will, of course, not be achieved in a day. But, as I said, making wars that only exacerbate the ongoing warming of the planet and compounds its ecological problems is like cutting off the branch of a tree one is sitting on. Modern warfare, however unavoidable, contributes to the destruction of the life-support system of the planet mainly because of their immense powers of destruction of human and nonhuman lives, landscapes, and property. Fragmentation may indeed be something humans cannot completely escape, for it is deeply tied to our very developed sense of fairness and justice (though we are very poor at delivering these), but the planetary environmental crisis calls on us to try and prevent further ecological damage to this beautiful planet that we not only share with humans and nonhumans but that is also the condition for our existence. We cannot any longer assume - as combatant nations still appear to do - that if we bracket the world while we are engaged in fighting our “mortal” enemies, we will recoup it fully once peace resumes. Sadly, in our times, at the end of each war we only get back a planet that is so much the poorer, ecologically speaking, for the violent human capacity for destruction that wars unleash. Kant’s interest in understanding the necessary conditions for perpetual peace is still timely and relevant. His answers may not satisfy us today, but his question – and the quest - remain.
Originally delivered as keynote lecture at the 42nd General Convention of UNESCO in Paris on 9 November 2023.