New Environmentalism

The awards of Nobel Peace Prizes to Al Gore and Wangari Maathai were initially greeted with the question: What does the environment have to do with peace (or war)? Maathai answers this question with a new view of the relationship between the environment and politics -- one that increasingly recognizes that the character of environmental relations has much to do with peace and war. This relationship is the focus of a new field of study that has emerged in the past dozen years called "environmental security." The "complication" of earlier, simpler understandings of the environment, and of society, is part of the reason Maathai merited, and won, the Nobel Peace Prize.