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NATIONAL SECURITY MUST INCLUDE THE HEALTH OF THE LAND

BY MICHAEL DOMBECK

Ever since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, the world has been in a security-induced frenzy. Never before have so many of the planet's people been so keenly focused on security. In the United States, the date "9/11" itself is now used in the American vernacular with "security" overtones. A zealous, "security-infused" patriotism has swept the nation. The U.S. government passed the Homeland Security Act, designed to defend and "secure" its citizens. And across the globe, security matters have pushed to the front in shaping foreign relations, forging alliances, and setting budgets.

Hearing "security" again and again has caused me to think a lot about what the term really means. To be sure, all nations' interests ideally should be assured. We should all feel safe at home and abroad. But when I think of "security," I think beyond war and peace, violence, terrorism, and narrowly defined economic interests. Of course, these issues are important, but I think that the long-term health of Earth's basic life-support systems also must be made secure.

Aldo Leopold referred collectively to the air, water, soils, plants, animals, and the processes that link them and us as the "land." The threats to the land are as real and potentially as damaging to our long-term well being as those posed by dictators and desperation. Moreover, the threats to the land never rest; they march continuously, often silently and invisibly. Sometimes they mount, erupt, and attract attention. Others are pushing ecological thresholds to levels that we cannot foresee and may not be able to live with. Yet, we seem to be increasingly underplaying or even rejecting some of the threats, despite society's generally sympathetic view of environmental needs.

The results of this environmental neglect can be seen in Iraq. Although the live war coverage focused on bombs, missiles, and troops, the stage on which it all played out held testament to our fallibility--a degraded landscape. Iraq is of course home to one of the great cradles of civilization. As part of the Fertile Crescent and centered along the once bountiful Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Iraq was lush agricultural land for millennia. But today the region is anything but fertile or lush, due in large part to the misuse of soils, water, and vegetation over thousands of years. The once great agricultural societies that sprouted from the region's rich floodplains are mere ruins dotting the now-parched landscape.

Unfortunately, the Iraqi saga is repeating itself today as the world faces a multitude of environmental threats--fertile soils are washing away and becoming too salty to support agriculture, precipitation regimes are changing, water tables are falling, lakes and streams are drying up, glaciers are retreating, and grasslands and forests are slowly transforming into deserts.

A modern example is currently unfolding in China, where the Gobi Desert expanded by perhaps more than 50,000 square kilometers during the 1990s. There were five major dust storms in China in the 1950s. The number rose to 23 in the 1990s and to 20 during the last two years. The potential consequences are serious. Some 400 Chinese cities already lack sufficient water to meet basic human needs. As the desert expands, this number will surely increase. The desert has reached to within 250 kilometers of Beijing. The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s pales in comparison.

At the same time, China's food production has fallen to below consumption. The potential ramifications for world food security are mind-numbing--China accounts for a sixth of the world's population.

In response to its challenges, China has embarked on the world's largest ever water diversion project, which will move 40 billion cubic meters of water per year from the humid south to the arid north. By comparison, that amount of water is 3.5 times the volume of Lake Superior. While food production in the north may benefit from the project, the ecological consequences remain unknown, but will surely be great.

Even in the United States, as our government works aggressively to protect Americans from terrorism, we face unprecedented environmental degradation that threatens the long-term health of the land. Acid rain, depleted supplies of clean drinking water, increased mercury and PCB levels in fish, unchecked toxic pollution from the mining industry, the rapid decline of biodiversity, and the dirtying of our air from aged power plants and automobile emissions have become daily facts in the lives of all Americans whether they are aware of it or not.

Despite a rosy report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency citing cleaner air and water, the overall trends are negative. As an example, the gas mileage of the fleet of automobiles that rolled off the assembly lines last year dropped to a 22-year low.

President Franklin Roosevelt, who helped lead the charge against the threats to world security posed by Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito in the 1930s and 1940s, once said, "True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security." An update relevant to today's realities might read, "True individual freedom cannot exist without economic, human, and environmental security."

If we want a future free of threats to global security, we must think seriously about what constitutes security. If security means more than avoiding violence and protecting our immediate economic interests, and includes our quality of life and long-term ecological well being, then we must begin to prioritize what those threats are and how we are going to respond to them all. We also need to ask ourselves if we are making a mistake spending billions of dollars and incalculable hours addressing the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, while ignoring threats to our land, air, food and water--threats that have toppled more civilizations than either of these two men could ever dream of.

Of course we cannot ignore threats from terrorists and dictators. But securing our borders and our citizens from violence and terror ultimately will accomplish little if we continue to degrade the land that supports us. We can look at Germany and see the degree to which our species can recover from the despotism of a Hitler. By the same token, we can look at Iraq to see the enduring nature of environmental mismanagement.

Mike Dombeck is former head of the Bureau of Land Management and Chief of the U.S. Forest Service and currently Professor of Global Environmental Management at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He received a 2003 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology for his leadership in making the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem health the guiding principles for the U.S. government agencies with which he was associated.

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