Beyond Human Security

The following is abridged and adapted from Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (House of Anansi Press, 2023).

Every four years the US-based National Intelligence Council releases a report called Global Trends that attempts to forecast the threats and uncertainties that will shape the world for the next two decades. Authored by an association of professional spies with a name befitting an indie rock band — the Strategic Futures Group — the report is written to encourage the White House and its advisors to stretch their thinking toward a longer time horizon. As a result, the documents have a speculative quality and are typically declassified without much fanfare. That was certainly the case with the report released in 2017, which was mostly ignored by the public — until, seemingly out of the blue, the plague it envisioned arrived. The “global pandemic of 2023” did indeed halt international travel and wreak economic havoc precisely as predicted — only it did so three years ahead of schedule.

Despite its predecessor’s uncanny prescience, the next instalment in the series garnered little public attention, perhaps because it focused on something both nebulous and omnipresent: rising insecurity. The 2021 edition of Global Trends focuses on the intersecting challenges facing humanity amid conditions of “expanding uncertainty.” One of the report’s main graphics features a box labelled “Eroding Human Security” surrounded by an array of menacing inputs or “drivers”: extreme weather, water misuse, sea-level rise, geoengineering, societal and government change, unequal burdens, instability, conflict and more. Inside that besieged box, the report argues, is the future we will all inhabit unless a miracle occurs.

The report concludes by proffering five imagined scenarios, each envisioning a trajectory our uncertain future might take. The fifth and final scenario strikes a hopeful note. Under the heading “Tragedy and Mobilisation,” it conjures a global revolution in human security. In this possible future, a heating planet has led to extensive famine and strife, sparking bread riots in Philadelphia. Traumatised by their experiences of Covid-19 and hunger, young people launch a rebellious cross-border movement advocating for “bold systemic change,” first for environmental policy and then public health and poverty. Green parties take power across Europe, the United Nations is revitalised, and China joins the alliance — followed by Australia, Canada, and even the United States after environmentalists sweep elections. The result? A new international organisation, the Human Security Council. Under threat of backlash and boycott, wealthy countries and corporations fall in line. By 2038 a growing recognition of the unsustainability of past practices has transformed attitudes about food, health and environmental security. The only disgruntled nations are the few remaining petrostates.

Reading this final scenario, I found myself nodding in agreement with American intelligence officials for the first time in my life — an unsettling experience in its own right. If we want to escape the little box labelled “Eroding Human Security,” a massive and visionary social movement will indeed have to shift our social systems away from the fossil-fuel-guzzling status quo. As the report’s authors rightly acknowledge, international institutions, domestic governments, economies, infrastructure, and incentives all must be remade. It reminded me of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPC), the world’s climate science authority, had concluded three years before: “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are required to stave off catastrophe.

At the same time, I wondered if a Human Security Council is enough to set us on a stable course. If the challenges facing humanity are so enmeshed with a devastated planet, as both the National Intelligence Council and IPCC reports make clear they are, shouldn’t we also be asking what security means for the ecosystems, plants and animals on which our own food, health and environmental security depend?

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One way of understanding our current predicament is that we are hurtling toward a future wrecked by our pursuit of human security alone. Many of the problems detailed in the Global Trends report stem from the fact that our political and social systems rarely, if ever, take other beings’ survival or thriving into account. Instead of recognising the earth as a commons we have a duty to care for and honouring the limits of ecosystems we need to protect, we treat the natural world as an inexhaustible resource we are entitled to exploit. 

But around the world, environmental activists are creatively engaging with the law to defend the rights of children, future generations, and the more-than-human world — all entities that lack the traditional political rights enjoyed by most voting-age adults. In 2015, the Dutch government was ordered to significantly and swiftly curb emissions following youth-led litigation, a then-unprecedented decision that was upheld on appeal. Three years later, Colombia’s Supreme Court of Justice found in favour of a group of youth plaintiffs seeking to halt deforestation. The decision granted the Amazon rainforest legal personhood — designating it as a rights-bearing entity rather than a rightsless thing — and enjoined the Colombian government to protect it, an outcome that isn’t that strange when you remember that in some jurisdictions, corporations have the same status. If Amazon the company can be a “legal person” under the law, then why shouldn’t the real Amazon be one, too?

In 2008, Ecuador broke new ground when the country enshrined the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth, in its newly adopted constitution. Two years later, Bolivia followed suit, inspiring communities around the world to begin to adapt the idea to their own regions and struggles. Soon, laws reflective of the culture of the Maori people granted legal personhood to Te Urewera, an ancestral forest in New Zealand, and later to the Whanganui River, recognising it as a living whole spanning from the mountains to the sea.^[1] Citing those decisions, judges in India declared that the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers and their tributaries would be “legal and living entities having the status of a legal person with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities.” 

In the United States, dozens of municipalities have passed local ordinances recognizing the rights of nature, including in Ohio, where voters bestowed legal rights on Lake Erie in an attempt to protect the nearly ten-thousand-square-mile body of water from runoff that causes toxic algae blooms — a move a federal judge struck down. Although the US federal government has yet to grant rights to nature, in 2019, the Ojibwe White Earth Nation in Minnesota legally recognised the rights of manoomin, the wild rice that is a sacred and essential food within Anishinaabe culture, to flourish and exist.

Canada joined this trend in 2021, when the three- hundred-kilometre Magpie River in Côte-Nord, Quebec — known to the Innu as the Muteshekau Shipu, “the river where water flows between square rocky cliffs” — became the country’s first natural entity to be deemed a holder of rights. Members of the Innu Council will serve as the river’s guardians, tasked with protecting the nine rights the river now possesses — including the right to flow, to be free of pollution, to maintain biodiversity, and to sue. Should Canadian ecosystems ever be recognised as legal persons at the federal level, perhaps they will be granted the constitutional right to “security of the person” that their human counterparts possess, too. 

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By placing humans and ecosystems in the same circle, the rights of nature movement poses a profound challenge to the conceptual underpinnings of Western legal systems. Indeed, it challenges one of the foundational tenets of Western thought, namely the elevation of human beings both above and apart from the rest of creation. When rendered into law, the dichotomy is clear. Humans and our proxies, corporations, are designated as legal persons with inalienable rights, while everything else is just that — rightsless things. Endemic to Western thought, this self-aggrandising and self-defeating view transcends eras and economic ideology. While it is a cornerstone of capitalism and colonialism, essential to the security of property and profits, communism has historically been just as capable of treating nature as a rightsless object to be hoarded, moulded, depleted and destroyed.

Long-standing attempts to achieve security by separating and elevating ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom and trying to dominate nature are now backfiring on an unprecedented scale. One peer-reviewed and well-reported study released in 2021 estimated that climate change will cause 83 million cumulative excess human deaths — that is, deaths over and above what would naturally be expected — by the end of the century, a number the authors warned is likely a vast underestimation. Should we stay the current course, nearly one in four children will live in extremely water insecure areas by 2040, and approximately three billion people will live in hot zones, or areas outside of the narrow band of climatic conditions that shaped most of human civilization, by 2070. In the decades ahead, a million animal and insect species are poised to disappear into the void—disrupting food chains and causing cascading consequences we can guess at but cannot accurately predict. The vanishing bugs are, of course, essential food for many birds, including sparrows; without these pollinators, many plants and food crops won’t grow.

Granting legal rights to nature will not stop this doomed spiral, but it might help us slow it down — and speed matters. In an essay on not losing hope, one of the lead authors of the 2022 IPCC report wrote, “Every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system.”^[2] The same goes for every day a fossil-fuel-transporting pipeline is blocked, every acre of natural habitat that is saved, every endangered creature that survives and every gallon of water that remains safe to drink. 

My interest in rights for nature stems, in part, from my conviction that biodiversity has political as well as biological value. Each species we extinguish diminishes what we might call ecological democracy, underscoring the need to devise a political system that can effectively represent and protect the interests of other life forms.^[3] The benefit to animals and insects, as well as the 40 percent of plant species now imperilled by climate change, should be more than enough to jolt us into fighting extinction. But we should also cultivate solidarity with the more-than-human world out of crass self-interest. Biodiversity is essential to our existence: to the security of the ecosystems we are embedded in, the food systems we rely on and our ability to avoid future pandemics. When an ecosystem is healthy, biodiversity buffers the transmission of deadly pathogens; genetic variation dilutes and disrupts pathways of contagion. This means that the same shrinking and fragmenting of wild habitat that decreases biodiversity also increases opportunities for what scientists call “spillover,” or human-animal contact and cross-species infection.^[4]

As a 2020 United Nations report on pandemic prevention explains, infectious diseases typically emerge as the result of human activity.^[5] They are yet another insecurity-producing symptom of human hubris, an outgrowth of long-standing attempts to conquer nature. Land-use changes, above all the clearing of land for intensive animal agriculture, are responsible for one-third of all emerging diseases.^[6] Like the hurricanes and droughts that result from a warming climate, novel and dangerous pathogens are connected to human activity, though not in the straightforwardly conspiratorial way some people like to imagine. Conditions are even more congenial to harmful microbes on modern feed-lots, which crowd huge numbers of genetically similar animals together in cruel and unsanitary conditions. As one medical journal recently put it, intensive animal agriculture gives viruses countless “spins at pandemic roulette.” The American Public Health Association, the largest organisation of public health professionals in the United States, has repeatedly called for a moratorium on factory farming for this reason.

Given these and countless other challenges, we can’t limit our ambitions to the Human Security Council that the Global Trends report envisioned, though that would be an excellent start. Only More-Than-Human Security will suffice. We must work with the natural world rather than against it, co-operating with the sun and wind to harness renewable energy, with the oceans and forests to sequester carbon without choking and acidifying them, with biodiverse plants to cool our cities and feed the world, with animal allies who provide refuges for other species. 

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In addition to working with nature, we also, of course, need to work with each other. This requires turning our climate anxiety and insecurity into solidarity — solidarity that is strong enough to respond to rising authoritarianism and to overcome the special interests championing the inadequate business-as-usual solutions that make up the standard menu of government climate policies today.

In 1974, Garrett Hardin published an article in Psychology Today in which he scoffed at the idea of returning land or making reparations to Indigenous communities, building on the arguments he put forth in “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Titled “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” it once again invited the reader to picture a scene, this time an ocean instead of an open field. Small vessels full of wealthy passengers float perilously in a sea of drowning people who threaten to capsize the ships. The only way for the privileged few to protect themselves, Hardin argues, is to keep others out — out of the lifeboats, out of the rich countries, out of the commons — by hoarding resources, halting immigration, and ending international food aid to reduce the global population of the poor, who he acknowledges are overwhelmingly non-white. “For the foreseeable future,” he writes, “our survival demands that we govern our actions by the ethics of a lifeboat, harsh though they may be.” 

Hardin’s ideas align with the current of thinking now called “eco-fascist”, based on the narrowest and meanest concept of security, of guarding one’s privilege at the expense of others’ lives. Research by Queen’s University political theorist Will Kymlicka found that faith in species hierarchy is “consistently associated with greater dehumanisation of disadvantaged or marginalised human groups.” Or as the celebrated abolitionist Angela Davis recently told me: “The prioritising of humans also leads to restrictive definitions of who counts as human, and the brutalization of animals is related to the brutalization of human animals.” Here is yet another problem with the Great Chain of Being: its most passionate adherents inevitably believe that certain categories of humans are greater than others.

By contrast, activist and author Naomi Klein has argued that ensuring a baseline of material security for people, especially a green jobs guarantee that could facilitate a just transition away from fossil fuels, is a critical part of coping with climate disruption. As she puts it, “the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change.” Material security, she argues, can help us “address the crisis of empathy in a warming world.”^[7]

But as Klein and others rightly insist, we cannot simply revive the social policies of the New Deal or Covid eras. Instead of looking back nostalgically to the twentieth-century welfare state, which was predicated on assumptions of limitless economic growth and ecological extraction, and marred by racialised and gendered exclusions, we should aspire to a forward-looking vision of a state that provides security for all in a way that is sustainable, a state that is both decarbonised and democratic — what I like to call a solidarity state. Rooted in the collaborative ethos of the commons, a solidarity state aspires to both political and economic equality and a recognition of our fundamental inter-dependence, including our interdependence with the more-than-human world.

We now know where ignoring obligations and limits gets us: climate calamity and spiralling insecurity. But this is hardly a revelation. In the dialogue Critias, Plato laments land destroyed by mismanagement, describing the barren soil, absence of trees, and abandoned shrines where fresh springs used to be as “the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.”^[8] The Sumerians, Romans, Mayans, and other ancient societies pushed past ecological limits, spawning instability and hastening civilizational collapse. To read accounts of the colonial era is to encounter settlers marvelling at their own destructive impact on the environment and sometimes planning the devastation outright. The difference today is that this destruction is now happening on a global scale.

Anthropocentric attempts to conquer the earth are always self-defeating. There is no way to conquer the world if we want to securely exist within it. The myth of the Great Chain of Being needs to be demolished. The image of the natural world as an inclusive circle instead of an exclusive hierarchy is not rose-coloured romanticism; it is a more accurate reflection of the science that describes our reality, where we are embedded in an elaborate sustaining circle of life, non-life, and even semi-life. My father is a medicinal chemist whose research focuses on viruses, including the one that causes Covid-19. Viruses are microscopic sequences of DNA or RNA reliant on hijacking the energy of host cells to replicate; they inhabit a category-defying limbo, a strange grey zone between living and non-living, animate and not. What I see in my father’s work is less a drive for mastery than a sense of mystery. Viruses are hardly lovable, but my father has shown me they deserve our respect and even awe. The fact that our lives depend on biological and physical processes we can barely categorise, and complex dynamics we certainly do not command, should occasion wonder — and a large dose of humility. This humility is the ethos I associate with the good and generative capacities of insecurity, the kind that can help us be curious, connect, evolve and maybe survive in a radically changing world.

I don’t have a blueprint for a society in which all our problems are forever solved — no one does. As Ostrom said, there are no panaceas, only possibilities. I don’t believe in utopia, but I can imagine a more hopeful future where our problems get more interesting and complex — a complexity befitting the tangled and unpredictable world we live in. Instead of the dull and demoralising questions we are faced with today —  should a handful of fossil-fuel executives have licence to incinerate the planet? — we could aim to build a secure and sustainable society that will force us to grapple with far more compelling philosophical and practical riddles. If nature has rights, should invasive species have equal protections? Where does a watershed end if all ecosystems are interconnected? How can we make decisions and exercise sovereignty when our actions have global repercussions? How can we ensure freedom and dignity for everyone while respecting ecological limits? These are the sorts of questions worth pondering, and the answers are not readily apparent. But for all that is uncertain and unsettled, there is one thing I know for sure: the illusion of human security at nature’s expense cannot hold.