Beating swords to ploughshares
The environment is moving from a green issue to a red alert. This was made clear in two interventions this week – Margaret Beckett’s New York lecture in which she set out the security threats arising from crop failure, flooding and water shortages – and the report by a dozen former generals and admirals in the US, saying that climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security.
These warnings need to be taken to their logical conclusion. Security issues demand security responses. And that should mean that the economic – and military - might of the world’s most powerful and wealthy states needs to be harnessed to fight what Greenpeace calls “the weather of mass destruction”.
The world is waking up to the need to invest in low carbon energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, but at the same time there is a need to rebuild damaged environments at ground level as part of an effort to restore the entire global ecosystem to health and stability. For the next hundred years, we need to embark on a large-scale co-ordinated effort to restore the climate’s regulatory services that only healthy ecosystems can provide – this is the great work ahead for coming generations.