God and biosphere as superpowers

Voices imploring us to expand our understanding of national and global security concerns to include short‐ and long‐term ecological threats have increased in the last decade. Ecologists Norman Myers and Barry Commoner; Senator and now Vice‐President Al Gore; Yale historian Paul Kennedy; strategic analysts Lester Brown, Thomas F. Homer‐Dixon, and Jessica Tuchman Matthews; and educators like Patricia Mische have been leaders in developing this ecologically based concept of national security. This challenges the conventional approach, which, while acknowledging the importance of ecological problems, nevertheless subordinates them to national security and economic concerns when formulating national policies and spending priorities. Because the language of “national security” has held a privileged place in national policy debates, we can use the same terminology to help people see ecological threats with new eyes. Certainly ecothreats deserve recognition as national and global security threats. But more important, we must begin to recognize and name nature—the planetary ecosystem—rightly as a vast and powerful superpower, whose reaction to human abuse constitutes a retaliatory capability directly analogous to what in nuclear weapons parlance is called a second‐strike capacity

Biology · Biosphere · Geography · Political science · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · History · Philosophy · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Ecology