America's Defense Monitor Interview with

Dr. Jessica Mathews

President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

DR. MATHEWS: The concept of national security has gone through a couple of changes int the last fifteen years. First it broadened to include economic conditions and that began to happen in the early 70's, then in the 80's it broadened again to include environmental concerns a variety of things, in particular those that provide the resources that people can't live without - which is basically food and water - and which if they are not provided either lead to conflict or create big flows of what are now being called "environmental refugees" -- Or those which are external threats such like ozone depletion was and climate change in particular, which can drastically effect a territory, where people live, whether they even stay alive. And finally I think the third phase of the evolution of the concept is some notion o a condition that is created by the state and comes sort of top down from the phrase national security, to the beginnings of the thought that security is perhaps what comes in the conditions of peoples daily lives..it comes in an effect sort of bottom up. Whether they have food, whether they have jobs, whether they have a place to live, wether they are free from extreme health effects, and so that this notion of "human security" is starting to get some exposure some credence and being talked about. And what it reflects in addition to the changes in the much lesser of traditional of external conflict - war - it reflects the changing nature of the threat obviously, but also maybe the recognition that maybe nation states are less likely able to provide the key component of security at least acting alone as they ever have before...."

INTERVIEWER: How has the notion of environmental change become intertwined with the traditional notion of a country's security?

DR. MATHEWS: I think that .. The question of environments role in a country's security has gotten a little mixed up, it's a maybe triggered by the Gulf War and Iraq's attack on the Kuwaiti oil wells and the big mess in the Gulf and stuff, so a lot of attention has been paid to direct threats to the security through environmental resources through creating environmental havoc, which is not the most important it is very minor.. it's got an old history, it goes back to the Romans salting the fields of the Carthaginians, very ancient history, but and its not un- relevant, but it is very minor compared to the threats created to economic growth and political cohesion through massive environmental degradation.

INTERVIEWER: Should we characterize severe environmental problems as threats to security?

DR. MATHEWS: There are certainly some environmental problems that will create threats to security in my view, now there are people who feel that anything that you talk about that is not a military threat so confuses the issue that it degrade the currency that you shouldn't consider that...I think that's just wrong because if you look at what countries are worried about to day and you look at the connections that you can certainly trace between environmental resource degradation through severe economic decline to political instability and fracturing... you see it in Haiti, in Rwanda, and Somalia.....there's no question that these are at heart in part environmental threats. They have different manifestations it may be soil erosion in one place, salizination and land degradation in another, it maybe water shortages in another, but they are environmental. And they..by the time you recognize them as conventional threats by political and very often we tried to deal with the political problems without recognizing that at the heart the only way that you can correct it ... The only way in Haiti that they will ever be stable is when its reforested period...There is no other way to make Haiti politically sable, no that's not all that you have to do, but you can't ignore it, and that's what usually happens is it gets ignored.

INTERVIEWER: How has the traditional security establishment reacted to presence of environmental factors in defining security?

DR. MATHEWS: The traditional establishment has more or less ignored these problem until Somalia...I mean there was this period, a few years ago, when we had troops either fighting in, preparing for , or coming home from four of these places where the environmental component was a major one and I include there the Middle East, because a big part of the conflict over the West Bank has not to do with the land, Land for Peace is hard enough, but the water for peace, it's the water resources under the West Bank that's really the issue about who gives back what. I think that is just beginning to sink in..

For the military, however, the real issue has been and will continue to be clean up. There is an environmental cleanup bill leftover from the Cold War that is staggering....maybe on the order of a half trillion dollars..a trillion dollars. And is hard as it is for us the Russians just do not have the funds to pay for it, and so to my mind at least that is the overwhelming environmental security problem for our military for the foreseeable future.

INTERVIEWER: As the Pentagon sees environmental security they are talking about cleaning up the waste leftover from producing weapons. And this is not just here in the United States, but it is in Russia too..

DR. MATHEWS: It is a huge bill made as acute because partly we didn't know at the time all the risks, B, there was a big sense of urgency in the early years of the Cold War and waste was handled in ways that makes your hair stand on end ..literally thousands of gallons poured into canyons in New Mexico and just left there, barrels rusting things that could now explode both in Russia and in the US and these have hideous potential health effects. And I think that there are places where that probably that the only cost effective thing to do is just to put a fence around them and leave them alone for many decades if not years because the cost is going to be too high to clean up. The problem with this is that it doesn't seem like a very interesting agenda, to the extent that this is starting to become a sexy agenda to deal with environmental security, nobody really wants to think about clean up.

The one other area that is important on the traditional national security front is mining our classified archives for information that can help us understand long term trends that are going on in particular climate change...there is a huge archive of data collected for other purposes that can give us the capacity to look ahead further by looking extending our knowledge backwards so that we have a time schedule that goes extend longer and this comes from sampling all over the arctic, the Navy has huge records about arctic ice that tells us a lot about climate change, data that's collected by submarines in the arctic and by surface ships that tell us about ocean temperature, we still don't know nearly enough about the oceans, data collected by satellites, the problem that a lot of the stuff was collected for other purpose and was not filed in a very accessible way to get, but it is a diamond mine of information. And so that also is going to be a very important role.

INTERVIEWER: What other US agencies are possible higher profile as environmental security becomes a more accepted notion?

DR. MATHEWS: Beyond the Pentagon, I would guess that the Energy department, as the climate issue will be with us, it is the 800 pound gorilla out there, it is the principle issue, so Energy will have a major role to play. The intelligence agencies for mining the classified data that we've got, I think those are probably the key ones, and State Department because diplomacy will be more important.

INTERVIEWER: How are agencies like the Pentagon capable of dealing with issues that seem to be sustainable development issues?

DR. MATHEWS: More and more of the agencies in the government over the years have been dealing with sustainable development issues, it is not just the State Department and Pentagon that has foreign policy agenda now, the Environmental Protection Agency has a large one, the Dept. of Agriculture has a large one, the Dept. of Energy has a big one, so a great many of them do and as does Treasury for example in particular influencing how the World Bank spends its money and that is terrible important on what will probably be one of the key environmental issues of the next decade, which is water availability.

Of all the issues that has a history of generating conflict water scarcity and here we are not just talking about amounts but also quality, potable water, is probably the key one. The word rival actually comes from the Latin word that means people that share the same stream, so it is again a very ancient history,.... So Treasury although it has very little knowledge in this area has very huge role to play.

INTERVIEWER: What is human security and how does it relate to issues of the environment and security?

DR. MATHEWS: The new notion of human security is the concept that what most matters in determining the security of peoples lives is not what the nation state can provide from the top down, but the conditions of peoples lives on a daily basis. What people are thinking about when they talk about human security are the availability of jobs the availability of food, the availability of water, minimal conditions of health, of minimal levels of income and employment, freedom from extreme levels of violence and crime

....so this is a bottom up notion of security rather than a top down, and it reflects the fact that the incidence of external inter state conflict has declined drastically relative to intra state conflict in the last ten years, conflicts within a state wether they're ethnic, religious or resource generated, and that although the incidence of poverty have gone down there are actually more people living in poverty than ever before.

INTERVIEWER: What are some pro-active strategies of dealing with environmental problems before they become threaten peace?

DR. MATHEWS: The difficulty in dealing with the issues as security issues is that before you have a crisis the cost of actually dealing with an environmental problem may be very low, but the political barriers are very high. Once it has developed to the point that you have a crisis it switches and the costs become very high although the political barriers have become low. And that we have seen in all of these complex humanitarian emergencies of the past four years in Somalia and Haiti. By the time you actually got the crisis on your hands - tens of thousands of people dying, or tens of thousands of refugees, active shooting and conflict, by that time the costs of doing something about the underlying problems tend to be terribly high. Even if at this point now there is the political willingness to get going..

I don't think that anybody has a pat answer to this, I certainly don't, how do you fix that how do you correct it....accept perhaps learning from experience what the inevitable trend will be. When we get better a recognizing where things are headed - there is an old Chines proverb that says "If you don't the direction we're going we'll end up where we're headed." and it sounds silly yet we very seldom recognize its true and maybe its just a question of experiencing it enough times that we then say okay well we're ready to take action.

INTERVIEWER: In addition to trying to predict these trends what role will international treaties and conventions play in reducing the likelihood for environmental issues causing instability?

DR. MATHEWS: The good news is that there are a few examples where international agreements have shown that we can anticipate problems, which the most important by far was the Montreal Convention on Stratosphere and Ozone Depletion, where the world took action to deal with a problem not before the problem happened, because by that time we had a continent sized hole in the ozone, but before we really felt any direct impact. Usually you have to wait until you smell it, or step in it, or you have a lake that catches on fire, but in the case of ozone depletion the world said in a very important way said no we can see where this is heading let's act now, and lets develop alternatives so that the rest of the world which is not using chloro-floro-carbons can have alternatives to it.

I think that the big role for international agreements, well I think that there are two really... one is that they say lets make an agreement that the rest of the whole world will not make the mistakes that the developed world made and need not necessarily followed the same path of development. And that is part of the Cairo treaty although we still don't have the second step .... the sense that among the countries that have already created the problems the ability to act together rather than individually.

I think that some people might say well we haven't actually cleaned up anything, and solved any of these problems yet, but when you consider what's been done in the last decade vis a vis what's ever been done before I think it is quite striking and enough to take a great deal of comfort from.