Political Science · Ch 6 — Environment and Natural Resources
Environmental Concerns in Global Politics
Environmental Concerns in Global Politics
Environmental Concerns in Global Politics
Earlier in this book, "world politics" was framed fairly narrowly — as a story of wars, treaties, the rise and fall of state power, and the dealings between governments and the organisations that connect them. The previous chapter, on security, already pushed that boundary outward once, by treating problems like poverty and disease as legitimate concerns of world politics too — a fairly easy case to accept, since most people already assume governments are responsible for tackling them. The environment poses a tougher test: does it really belong in the same category?
Consider the scale of what's actually happening. Cultivable land is barely growing anywhere in the world, and a large share of the farmland already in use is losing its fertility. Grasslands are being overgrazed and fish stocks over-harvested. Water bodies are being depleted and contaminated to the point that food production itself is under threat — the UNDP's 2016 Human Development Report puts the number of people in developing countries without access to safe water at 663 million, with 2.4 billion lacking sanitation altogether, a gap that costs more than three million children their lives every year. Forests that would otherwise help regulate the climate, hold water supplies steady, and shelter most of the planet's land-based species are being cleared, uprooting the people who depended on them. Habitat destruction in species-rich regions keeps driving biodiversity down. The ozone layer keeps thinning (the well-known "ozone hole"), a genuine hazard to both ecosystems and human health. And even though the open ocean stays relatively unpolluted, coastal waters are increasingly fouled by activity on land — a trend that will only worsen as more people settle along the world's coastlines.
It's tempting to file all of this under geography rather than politics. But that misses something: whenever a government decides to act — or not act — against this kind of degradation, that decision carries real political weight. And because almost none of these problems can be solved by one country acting alone, they inevitably spill into the international arena, which is exactly what qualifies them as "world politics."
There's a deeper sense in which environment and resources are political too — they raise direct questions of power. Who is actually responsible for the damage? Who ends up paying its cost? Whose job is it to fix it? And who gets to claim how much of the planet's resources in the first place? None of these are neutral, technical questions.
Environmental concerns are not new, but they only took on a sharply political edge from the 1960s onward. A turning point came in 1972, when the Club of Rome — an international think tank — published Limits to Growth, warning that the world's resources could be exhausted given how fast the global population was growing. International bodies, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) among them, responded by convening conferences and commissioning research aimed at a more coordinated global response, and from that point on the environment became a fixture of global politics in its own right.
That trajectory culminated in the 1992 Earth Summit — formally, the UN Conference on Environment and Development — held in Rio de Janeiro and attended by 170 states along with thousands of NGOs and corporations. Five years earlier, the 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, had already cautioned that the world's existing growth model wasn't sustainable, especially given how much industrial growth the Global South still had ahead of it. Rio exposed a genuine fault line between the two blocs:
| Global North (rich, developed countries) | Global South (poor, developing countries) |
|------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------| …
The cartoon shows a large globe of the Earth, drawn in a pale or washed-out colour — a deliberate choice to suggest that the planet is fading, overheated, or under stress. The globe is not shaded in the usual blues and greens; instead it is made lighter, almost bleached, as if the colour has been drained out by heat or damage. This visual cue immediately signals that something is wrong with the Earth’s health.
Around the globe, a pair of hands is cupped, as if holding or enclosing the planet. But the fingers of these hands are not ordinary human fingers. Each finger is drawn to look like a factory chimney — tall, narrow, and topped with a puff of smoke. The smoke rises from each chimney-finger and drifts upward, surrounding the globe. The message is unmistakable: human industrial activity, symbolised by these chimney-fingers, is literally enveloping the Earth. The hands that should protect or cradle the world are instead the source of its pollution.
The cartoon is titled “Global Warming” and is credited to Ares, Cagle Cartoons Inc. The caption in the NCERT textbook reads: “Around the Aral Sea, thousands of people have had to leave their…”, which connects the cartoon to the real-world environmental disaster of the Aral Sea — a once-large lake that has shrunk dramatically due to irrigation projects, leaving behind a barren, toxic landscape and forcing mass displacement. The cartoon thus links the abstract idea of global warming to a concrete, devastating example of environmental degradation caused by human activity. …
The cartoon shows a large, open hand held up as if to stop something or signal a warning. Each finger is drawn not as a normal human finger but as a factory chimney, with smoke billowing out from the tips. The palm of the hand is the Earth itself — a globe showing the continents. The globe is drawn in a lighter shade, as if it is being bleached or faded by the heat and pollution.
The central idea is that human industrial activity — represented by the chimney-fingers — is directly causing global warming, which is literally burning or lightening the planet. The chimneys are not separate from the hand; they are the hand. This means the destruction is not something external or accidental — it is being done by human action, by the very systems of production and energy use that drive modern economies. The lighter colour of the globe suggests the Earth is being drained of its colour, life, and health, turning pale under the stress of rising temperatures. …