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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Anthropocene geopolitics : globalization, security, sustainability / Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Names: Dalby, Simon, author.

Series: Politics and public policy (University of Ottawa Press)

Description: Series statement: Politics and public policy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Geopolitics. | LCSH: Boundaries. | LCSH: Globalization. | LCSH: Sustainability.

Classification: LCC JC319 .D35 2020 | DDC 320.1/2–dc23

Legal Deposit: First Quarter 2020

Library and Archives Canada

Printed and bound in Canada

Copy editing
Proofreading
Typesetting
Cover design
Cover image

Robert Ferguson
Heather Lang
Counterpunch Inc.
Steve Kress
Oil Fields #1, Belridge, California, USA 2002. photo(s)
© Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, and by the University of Ottawa.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The dedication for this book is to the memory of Neil Smith, a geographer, activist, and scholar whose critiques of the ideology of nature in the 1980s first peaked my intellectual curiosity on the themes that, three decades later, appear throughout this volume. I wish he had lived so that we could have had further discussions of all these themes, but nonetheless here, very belatedly, is acknowledgement of my intellectual debt.

In working out the arguments in this book I have benefited greatly from the Borders in Globalization partnership grant funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant number 895-2012-1022). My thanks to Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, the director of the program; Victor Konrad, the associate director; and Nicole Bates-Eamer, the ever efficient administrator who coordinated our various diverse investigations of contemporary bordering practices.

The Research Council has provided support to fund graduate student assistants who have helped in assembling the material that has gone into this volume. Thanks in particular to Alex Szaflarska, Derek Orocz, Masaya Llavaneras-Blanco, Clay DaSilva, Rupinder Mangat, and Alex Suen, graduate students at Wilfrid Laurier, and at the University of Waterloo for much useful research assistance in assiduously tracking down key sources in diverse scholarly literatures and, in Alex Suen’s case, helping compile the bibliography and index.

I have drawn inspiration and insight from numerous discussions at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Balsillie School of International Affairs, and from numerous students who have attended my seminars on climate, security, and environmental governance in recent years. Preliminary versions of many of the arguments in these chapters were presented as papers, seminars, and lectures to audiences in Ottawa, Boston, Greensboro, Oslo, Lund, Tucson, Atlanta, London (Ontario), Exeter, Milton, Toronto, Chicago, Eugene, Kitchener, Victoria, New York, La Paz, Newcastle, College Park, Miami, Linkoping, Los Angeles, Mayne Island, San Diego, and Waterloo. I am indebted to numerous colleagues, audience members, and friends at these events for useful questions and suggestions that have shaped my thinking. My apologies that I can’t name you all but neither my memory nor my notes are up to the task of compiling what would be a very long list indeed.

Thanks to Cara Stewart for tracking so many of the themes of this volume in contemporary online media; her continued affection and support for my academic efforts makes all this much easier. The Balsillie School of International Affairs is an unusually conducive intellectual environment to think about matters of global governance and contemporary innovations. I am indebted to my numerous academic colleagues there, and to Tiffany Bradley, Kelly Brown, Andrew Thomson, and Joanne Weston, the people who keep the whole place running so effectively. Thank you one and all.

My thanks, too, to the staff at the University of Ottawa Press for turning my text into a book so efficiently, and also to Edward Burtynsky and his colleagues for permission to use his iconic image of a California oil field as the cover illustration for this volume. His inspiring visual examinations of the Anthropocene have done so much to interrogate the contemporary transformation of the Earth, and I am honoured to use one of his images here.

Much earlier versions of many parts of this volume have appeared in print in diverse places and I thank all the publishers listed here for granting permission to reuse and update the following material: Parts of chapters 1 and 8 have been revised from “Geopolitics in the Anthropocene” in Al Bergeson and Christian Suter (eds.), The Return of Geopolitics, Zurich: Lit. 2018, 149–166; parts of chapters 2 and 8 have been revised from “Climate Security in the Anthropocene: ‘Scaling up’ the Human Niche” in Paul Wapner and Hilal Elver (eds.), Reimagining Climate Change, New York: Routledge, 2016, 29–48; parts of chapters 3 and 10 have been revised from “Contextual Changes in Earth History: From the Holocene to the Anthropocene: Implications for the Goal of Sustainable Development and for Strategies of Sustainable Transition” in Hans Günter Brauch, Úrsula Oswald Spring, John Grin, and Jürgen Scheffran (eds.):, Sustainability Transition and Sustainable Peace Handbook., Heidelberg – New York – Dordrecht – London: Springer-Verlag, 2016, 67–88; chapter 4 has been revised from “On ‘Not Being Persecuted’: Territory, Security, Climate” in Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (eds.), Life Adrift: Critical Reflections on Climate Change and Migration, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017, 41–57; chapter 5 is revised from a “Bordering Sustainability in the Anthropocene” in Territory Politics Governance; chapter 6 is revised from “Climate Geopolitics: Securing the Global Economy,” International Politics 52(4),2015, 426–44; chapter 7 has been revised from “Anthropocene Formations: Environmental Security, Geopolitics and Disaster,” Theory, Culture and Society (special issue on ‘Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene,’ edited by Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff), 34(2/3)., 2017., 233–52; chapter 9 has been revised from “Anthropocene Discourse: Geopolitics after Environment” in Stanley Brunn and Roland Kehrein (eds.), Changing World Languages Map, Heidelberg: Springer., 2019.

ANTHROPOCENE GEOPOLITICS

ANTHROPOCENE GEOPOLITICS:
Globalization, Security,
Sustainability

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS