Sometimes, the tragedy is in words. 

Caroline Lucas’s latest series for “The Rest is Politics” podcast is a case in point: “When Nature becomes a Security Threat.”* 

Perhaps it’s the “genius stereotype” or “brilliance bias” towards the Intelligence Community that is supposed to move people to act. Shock tactics? Why demonise Nature? If we are not moved by science, then threat to Nationhood ought to do it. How very Nationalistic.

The Labour Government’s 13-page DEFRA-commissioned report upon which this series is based was published earlier this year, and apart from the drama of its Downing Street redactions and ultimate public release, researchers from MI5 and MI6 appear to have raised it on previous iterations of standard, modern, and extreme (Western) Anthropocentrism. Nature’s Contributions to People are central, acronym NCP applied (as you might imagine), and include ecosystem “services”, value = growth economy, and externalities to “Nation,” mainly, the Savannah-isation of the Amazon Rainforest and Inter-State competition for “resources.”

Nature is not coming for anyone, and particularly the British. There is no intent. The real threat is human actions towards Nature, making it into the report as a small byline, and with no detailed critique of values and consequent behaviours.

Our entrenched culture of mental separation from Nature deepens.

References include quantitative measurements—taxa and tipping points (Natural History Museum), Natural Capital (The Dasgupta Review), IPBES “ecosystem services” inter-governmental agenda, and various scientific papers on exceeding Rockström’s 9 planetary “boundaries” (hint: they are not particularly separate)!

Emphasis is on uncertainty and risk to the United Kingdom as a nation-state, threats largely “external” ~ food imports forcing dietary change, and, of course, “migration”. Risks generated by collective values and behaviours are absent, and a question largely left literally to “customers” who might use the document for legislative decision-making (but they do find moments to mention pro-growth AI, laboratory-grown meat, and insect proteins)!

This highlights just how devoid of understanding our collective role within nature remains. Mentally separate, we are agents for catastrophic and rapid change of the complex system upon which all life depends, with ignorant cultural and social responses to those rapid changes on top.

Again, serious discussion on values and ethics falls down the deep, deep chasm that still exists between science and politics.    

Ethical framing matters; readers and interpreters should be aware that these conclusions ARE A CHOICE, and bad ones at that. They shape how the report is used, nudging along all the same-old corrupt and Earth-damaging e-motivators without a whiff of critical thought.

I’m not going to critique the paper line by line here. Many of the risks it identifies have been predicted and observed for a very long time, and the geopolitical map of power now shifts too quickly for a fixed security reading to hold for long. As I say, my concern is instead with the report’s ethical foundation: treating ecological collapse chiefly as a “national security” problem, while leaving the deeper ethical questions of value, power, agency, and human separation from Nature largely untouched. Here, read it for yourself.

Recognising barriers of language and value is only the beginning, because those barriers are sustained by power. They determine which harms become visible, which causes remain unnamed, and which responses feel politically possible. The harder question is who holds the power to define values, protect them, and turn them into collective behaviour.

Critically, disproportionate power via capital has accumulated through markets, competition, and institutions that reward extraction. These systems protect values that shape planning laws, trade priorities, food systems, energy choices, land ownership, finance, and the distribution of risk. To remain uncritical is to intensify behaviours across anthropocentric society — extreme competition, expansionism, colonialism, and highly extractive industries among them — a continuity despite the exclamation! An endangering of all Nature, with the greatest harms falling on the most vulnerable lives and communities, locally and globally. The result is not a marginal side-effect but a widening spiral of cause and consequence, with many effects already unfolding and others still unknown.

Recognising root causes means naming the actual structures of power and agency that shape value priorities and behaviours. A national-security frame may generate “flash” public interest, and the risks involved are numerous and serious, but it can also narrow attention towards state protection, territorial interest, and crisis management rather than the hierarchies, core values, and behaviours driving ecological collapse. The fact that evidence has been suppressed or redacted only underlines how central those hierarchies of control remain.

Isn’t this just the expected politics of adversarial opposition? I’m afraid there are no sides, no “heroes”, no “saviours” or “leaders” who are going to singularly turn things around – these cultural ideas, particularly Eurocentric in origin, are also constructions by a minority, like Nationhood itself – a body, decapitated — to separate us from each other and the rest of Nature. 

I’d like to see the full list of the 81 rationalist “experts” who contributed, voting and consulting through various workshops and meetings, because I suspect most of them are men, and none of them is widely versed in the broad canon that is “Environmental Ethics.”  Most of them probably still consider it “religiosity.” Blah!

Answers are deeply interconnected, and in no way final. Human food “security” is more about localism as embodied nature than any intellectualised, separate planetary boundaries, and real change far more about inclusiveness, collective knowledge sharing (causes, effects, imagining outcomes, correcting trajectories), REAL care, and responsibility for ALL life.

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