THE PATH TO SECURITY

I want to address security, environment, and human rights, and how they are connected. Since 9/11 the United States has devoted enormous resources and intense attention to identifying, forestalling, and, ultimately capturing or destroying those bent on harming us or our friends. Generally that is what "security" means in the current debate. Now rising tension over war in Iraq and awareness that a U.S. led attack on Iraq will almost certainly provoke increased efforts by terrorists to injure Americans, and American interests, have heightened concerns about short term security.

Those concerns are real and we are compelled to act to confront them. But military strength and homeland security are not enough to make the world secure. I want to make a case for fighting poverty, protecting the environment, and in particular protecting people's rights as the path to human security, and the foundation, in the long term, for global security.

Neither violence nor hatred is a pathology only of the poor, nor does violence flare only in the presence of poverty, but poverty is volatile when compounded with misery, powerlessness, and injustice. Although the terrorists we know most about were not recruited from among the poor, they seem bent on provoking a war in which the poor would be soldiers. We cannot create security only by striking at the flint; we must deal with the tinder.

What if we capture the leaders of terrorist groups, seize their resources, disrupt their networks, and deter their state sponsors, but act with narrow focus, treating terror as a crime without a cause that we can address, will our world be secure?

The squalid slums of the sprawling cities in the poorest parts of the world are growing explosively, expanding by a million people a week � a million people a week. Why?

Three-fourths of the world's agricultural lands are degraded, and the cities are filling with people driven from rural areas by expanding population and failing lands. In the Indus River basin of Pakistan some 40,000 hectares goes out of production every year due to salinization and sodification.

There are about a billion teenagers in the world, most of them poor, jobless and struggling for shreds of hope. Within a decade or so, if trends continue, there will be 27 cities in the developing world that are bigger than New York. If they are full of jobless young men with nowhere to turn, they will be tinderboxes of anger and despair.

Close to half of all jobs worldwide depend on fisheries, forests, and agriculture. In one-fourth of the world's nations natural resources produce more income than industry. The condition and management of those resources affects people's lives directly.

Many of the most insecure and poorest regions of the world are also the least democratic. People are not only poor, they are voiceless. Dependent directly on natural resources they have no say in how those resources are used, but suffer the consequences when the decisions are corrupt and the use is destructive.

The notion that security, stability, and sustainability are linked is by no means novel. For millennia refugees have been driven from the land by population growth and the collapse of natural systems. Nations have fought for access to scarce natural resources. What is different now is our opportunity to achieve security by improving lives and protecting the future. The question is whether we will use these capabilities as an alternative weapon in our war on terror.

Imagine if we determined not only to root out terrorism, but also to deprive it of soil in which to grow. With only modest increases in aid, we could enable vast improvements in education, health, agriculture, and microcredit to launch small businesses. We could support private sector investments to bring electricity and telecommunications to rural areas. We could assist in the dispersion of practical technologies to use water many times more efficiently.

We could support programs to educate and empower women, protect their health, and enable them to plan their families.

We could find a way to join the allies whose help we now seek in confronting terrorism, to combat global climate change, using our immense technological capacity to reduce our use of fossil fuels and diminish our dependence on foreign oil.

We could work to ensure people's rights to information about natural resources and environmental decisions that affect them. We could give people the tools to make better decisions.

This last point-the creation of "environmental democracy" and the vindication of human rights-deserves more attention than it ordinarily gets from environmentalists. It offers a great lever for change-a weapon against corruption and a catalyst to stir action by governments immobilized in the face of the complexity of global problems of sustainability.

One characteristic of the global era is the emergence of environmental problems that are big, global and irreversible. Consider global warming.

Climate change is real, it is underway, the emissions that cause it are increasing rapidly, and warming is happening more quickly with more significant consequences than previously anticipated. Arctic Sea ice is rapidly thinning, and glaciers are retreating worldwide. Scientists are also beginning to see biological and ecosystem effects that had been predicted as a consequence of global climate change. Trees are budding a week or two sooner in the spring, birds have been laying eggs earlier, butterflies have moved up mountains and toward cooler polar regions, and vectors of disease-like malarial mosquitoes-have extended their range.

Climate change is the quintessential global environmental issue: emissions from one area of the globe affect the climate everywhere, although not equally. All countries contribute to the problem, although again, not equally. Countries differ in their vulnerability to climate change, and in their capacity to adapt. Low-lying coastal areas, such as those of Bangladesh, and islands, such as those of the Pacific, face the greatest risks from rising sea levels and more severe storms. Industrialized countries are in a better position to protect, or rebuild infrastructure destroyed by storms, to adjust agricultural production to new conditions, or to avoid the spread of epidemics through adequate healthcare provision.

Although every country has emissions of carbon dioxide, most of the emissions come from industrialized countries-and the United States with less than 5% of the world's population is responsible for nearly 30% of carbon dioxide emissions. Emissions from U.S. power plants alone exceed the emissions of 146 countries with roughly 75% of the world's population. The emissions from India and China combined are 60% of U.S. emissions, and the average American is responsible for 20 times the emissions of the average Indian, 10 times the average Chinese. Two billion people have no access to electric power, and another two billion have limited access to electric power and motorized transport. Their lives have little impact on warming, but warming will have a significant impact on them.

This raises some interesting questions about justice and rights. Whose rights? Justice for whom? When an American drives an SUV and causes emissions that will contribute to the sea level rise that will submerge Vanuatu is that his right or a human rights abuse?

When our generation makes choices-or more importantly-fails to make choices that create irreversible environmental changes for our children to deal with, what principle can we articulate for our allocation of rights between current and future generations?

Whose rights should be protected, and how do we persuade our fellow citizens?

I do not believe that sustainability or security can be achieved against people or their interests. To make progress we must embrace the vindication of rights as a strategy for change. The mechanisms we create to deal with global problems must be built on the principle of fairness. For example, we have to create means and incentives to achieve biodiversity conservation by creating sustainable livelihoods.

But in the alliance for human security, rights advocates must endorse the notion that rights alone also are not enough, because the laws of nature are not negotiable. The campaign for rights will be immeasurably strengthened by association with the great obligation of stewardship that the number and power of our races imposes.

Jonathan Lash is President of the World Resources Institute, based in Washington, DC. This article is taken from his keynote address to the National Conference on Science, Policy and the Environment, sponsored by the National Council for Science and the Environment, January 30, 2003.